Microsoft Project Server Reviews

I am a Project Server Administrator and BI Analyst. I work extensively with Microsoft Project Server. We are currently on the 2013 on-prem version, which is currently two versions back. We are in the process of migrating to Project Online, which will in the Microsoft cloud.

We use Project Server to track enterprise-level projects and implement projects. As a financial institution or credit union service organization, we have over 1,800 member credit unions. We use Project Server to manage our enterprise projects where we're building, modifying, and maintaining products, which are then implemented by our implementations teams. They use Project Server for their checklists and for their project management during implementations. We also use it to track costs in our enterprise projects.

It brings all the information and all the data about our projects into one location. It helps us in providing holistic reporting and trends analysis across projects through the entire enterprise.

Project schedule management is very good. Basically, it sits on SharePoint. So, every time we create a project, a new project site is created within that SharePoint environment, which is a very good document repository. It allows us to create issues and risks lists and additional functionality to keep track of what's going on with projects.

The reporting aspects can be improved, which is one of the reasons why I'm using Qlik Sense. In the older on-prem versions, reporting was lackluster, to say the least. Project Online has a better handle on that. However, we will still be using Qlik Sense as the licensing model for native PowerBI reporting is a bit restrictive and expensive for a small enterprise(under 250 users of the tool). We're also looking at an add-on app from OnePlan that adds additional functionality and thord party app connectors as Microsoft is not as clean in its approach for functions such as portfolio management and some of the trend analysis we need.

At this company, I have been using it for about seven years. I've also used Project Server in different organizations previously. 

It is very stable when it is properly configured. When it is not properly configured, it can be a nightmare, just like many programs. In terms of moving to Project Online, we expect a lot better stability. That's because it is being managed by Microsoft, and it will be under their control. We'll be under their supervision. They're going to make sure that it runs properly because they'll have thousands of clients running the same software at the same time, so they've got to be stable across the board. The current on-prem is reasonably stable. It is just we've outgrown it. It is two versions behind, and we need to get into a better situation for the long term.

The older on-prem versions are not as scalable as we would like. Performance starts to suffer a bit when you get too many projects and too many resources in it, but Project Online is supposed to be much more scalable. In fact, we won't have to really manage that side of the house at all. It is going to be a matter of Microsoft keeping things running well and us just not pushing configurations that are unusual.

Currently, we have about 1,600 users. They are different aspects of the business, such as IT, project management, etc. The usage of the older versions that are on-prem is decreasing simply because Microsoft is pushing everybody to the cloud. The on-prem versions are still out there. There are still a lot of large organizations that like to stay on-prem because they like to have better control over their data. It has a pretty widely used set of applications across the entire spectrum, but the on-prem servers and such are starting to migrate more toward Project Online.

We're primarily working with our vendor, and they've been very good. We've had no real problems with them.

There was a partial implementation of Primavera, which was primarily used by our IT group for timesheets. We were probably only using 5% of the capabilities of the product, but in terms of cost-effectiveness and overall usability within our infrastructure, Project Server became a better option. Prior to that, we had standalone project plans using MS Project, a standalone client, and spreadsheets.

It was complex. It took us months, but that was primarily because we had a very stripped-down version. It was basically a quick standup for us that was not properly configured. When we went really committed to the platform, we had to undo a lot of stuff and do a lot of analysis in order to make sure that we were reconfiguring the product into a usable state for ourselves. So, a good chunk of that month was in terms of analyzing business processes and options.

In terms of maintenance of our on-prem version, our vendor handles 90% of maintenance. I don't think they end up having to do quite a lot. It is mainly keeping the servers active, and currently, that system is out of support. So, it is mainly maintaining the operating systems on the servers and just watching disk drive space, etc. In terms of maintenance within the system, we probably put in four to five hours a week for just maintaining resource profiles, answering questions, and providing general support for the user base.

We use consultants. In fact, our current on-prem solution is hosted by our consulting vendor, and they manage all of the systems on the AWS cloud. Our experience with them was good. In fact, we are using them to help us migrate to Project Online at this point.

I'm not quite sure about the licensing costs. We're probably paying somewhere in the neighborhood of about 80,000 to 90,000 a year for our current on-prem because we handle our own licensing. As far as Project Online is concerned, we're still trying to get a good handle on that. It looks like it is going to be in a neighborhood of about 120,000 to 150,000 a year, but we're getting a lot more capability out of it.

We have an enterprise agreement. We've got a pretty large enterprise using the whole suite of Microsoft products. We have probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,600 to 2,800 people who are using either Microsoft OS, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange, or something along that line.

Planview, ChangePoint, Monday.com

The biggest item of advice would be to really understand your business and what your real needs are and then compare Microsoft Project Server or Project Online to some of the other offerings out there. If you are going to be in a more robust and complicated set of project processes, Project Server is probably a very good fit for you. If you're only into lightweight project management, it may be a little bit overkill.

I'm still trying to get a feel of the overall functionality of Project Online. We are going to be putting an add-on product on top of it to kind of fill in some of the gaps. 

Currently, I'm going to rate it an eight out of 10. 

We use this solution for the management of projects.

Microsoft Project Server is easy to use compared to other similar solutions, such as Primavera. It functions similar to Excel or others Microsoft solutions which makes it simple for most people to be able to use right away.

This solution could improve by adding integration with Primavera schedules to allow the reading and management of them.

In an upcoming release, the loading of larger schedules could be faster when using the wizard and better workload assigning is needed. For example, if work is assigned to someone and they only work at the beginning and the end but not in the middle, it splits the tasks equally over the period.

I have been using this solution for approximately six months.

The solution is stable for small projects but when used for larger projects it can become heavy and slow to load and operate.

We have approximately 900 employees with a license using this solution.

We still use Primavera and it is better at managing large projects than Microsoft Project Server. Additionally, we have used Microsoft Project Desktop and Excel for project management. It was not ideal because we were using Excel for reporting and people were able to cheat on their reports. With this solution, it is more difficult to alter the information to cheat the system.

The full installation with configurations took approximately two months.

We did the implementation ourselves.

There is an annual license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, it does not fit all use cases.

I rate Microsoft Project Server a seven out of ten.

My organization handles IT consulting and services. That's primarily how the organization is managed. The use case for this solution was to set up the resource development unit and manage the investment cost, scheduling, budgeting, and some of those new initiatives that were supposed to happen in the R&D division. That was why we were looking for a portfolio management product. We found that Project Server could be a way to visualize and govern the entire program for the client.

The solution has improved the organization primarily due to the transparency between each individual team. There is a productivity benefit. I've likely seen a 20% to 28% increase in productivity benefit over a year's time. From a cost perspective, I'm less sure of how to comment. That said, productivity and transparency are definitely the two benefits I've witnessed so far.

The most relevant feature is its collaboration capabilities. Users can easily collaborate, for example, on Sharepoint or Microsoft Teams. If there is a lot of heavy usage of Microsoft tools, it's easy to share and collaborate across apps.

The Excel interface is very good. 

The stability of the 2019 version is quite good.

The deployment aspect of the product is a bit tedious. That's something I personally see of my organization. Deploying Project Server from an infrastructure perspective is not an easy thing. It takes a week sometimes to set it up. 

From a features perspective, the insights around the cost and budget could be improved. Competitor products are more robust. Project Server has a very limited feature in terms of reporting. Specifically, the features around the cost control are weak. The built-in reports and the built-in analytics for Project Server are very minimal. The competitors are way ahead than what Project Server is offering us.

The initial setup was complex.

The integration to an employee engagement platform probably would make more sense and integrations with other products like SAP would be useful.

Users of Project Server need to write some amount of custom integrations to the DLP product innovation site. If you wanted to have resource analysis, you want to create invoices based on resources working on a project, that integration is still not there. Integrating with some of those invoice management systems would make more sense now based on the way enterprises are working in terms of automation.

The solution needs multi-language support. The tool primarily supports English as a primary language. If someone wanted to make it Arabic, the Project Server does not work well. The characters sets, the dates, and other things create a lot of mess.

We've been using the solution for around six years or so. We started using it in 2016.

When I was using the Project Server 2016, that was creating a lot of problems in terms of performance, in terms of export, input, the content. However, when we moved to Project Server 2019 three years ago, I would say it was an improved version. It's quite stable now. There have been a lot of technical advancements, and feature announcements. 2019 is a much more stable version.

Primarily the solution has been handled by the PMO team which is comprised of 20 users. They are mostly portfolio managers, program managers, and solution architects as well as an executive who usually uses it from a governance perspective.

Since this has been used by the portfolio managers, so it's basically bread and butter for the PMO team. It's used day in, day out and it's tracking a single source of truth from a program management perspective. In terms of expanding the portfolio, likely, the business will grow, and that's when we may add more users. By 2022, we might add five more users. That is what I foresee.

We go through a CSP partner for Microsoft due to the online nature of the deployment. Our CSP partner is quite helpful. We are pleased with the support quality they provide. I would rate them four out of five stars. 

The initial setup was complex. Any type of guidance or user training or helpful documentation and materials were not available.

The deployment took around seven to ten days. Deployment took really a long time. 

I will not be able to properly quantify what went wrong. I'm not sure if it was the infrastructure or the capacity planning or if the partner just wasn't quite capable. There could have been multiple issues. The general perception was that was supposed to happen within a day, maximum. It took around seven to nine all working days to just set up the environment.

We used partners. They were a Microsoft partner.

Since I was not managing the process, I can't give feedback in terms of how the partner was to work with, or their capabilities. 

The solution offers a subscription-based pay-as-you-go model.

Now that everyone has moved to the online version, it is my understanding that the approximate cost comes to around $350 to $400 USD per month. I see or close to $4,000 to $5,000 USD per annum.

We are simply a customer and an end-user.

Although we began with the on-premises version, we've recently started using the online version of the solution. That is primarily how we access it now.

From an advice perspective, for any enterprise that has an existing investment around Microsoft, it makes more sense in terms of moving to a Project Server to manage in a more structured way. However, if you do not use SharePoint, if you do not use Microsoft Teams or any sort of solution that is the real value of Project Server it's not necessary to use Project Server. This solution is best for those companies planning to have a commitment to Microsoft technology. It brings more value. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's lacking some features around budget cost and portfolio management. There are a few areas that could use improvement still. 

We primarily use the solution based on its mobility. I can use it online or via mobile phones or anywhere I can get internet access.

I'm able to curate the SPI (Schedule Performance Index) and the CPI (Cost Performance Index) that helps us measure the performance in regards to costs and even taxes that projects have.

I can create metrics about costs either project by project or phase by phase.

The permissions are the most valuable aspect of the solution. I can configure groups to access different information. The solution allows us to manage the project baseline very well. I can control the baselines in specific user groups, which is very useful for me.

The solution offers very good availability in that we can access it from anywhere, whenever we need to.

The usability is excellent.

We've found the user experience to be quite simple. The views and filters in particular are very good.

The reports need to be improved. It's complicated. The default views are good. However, we need more. We need to be able to compare milestones, calls, and other variables regarding the projects we are working on. I have to contract developers to make reports, which is where things get complicated. They need to develop personal and custom fields for us. We also need to use Power BI, which needs to connect with Project Server, in order to generate reports.

The scalability capabilities could be improved upon.

There should be an interaction between Microsoft's Planner app and this solution. Their Planner is a good solution. I would like them both to connect directly, with the Planner tasks in the Project plans. It would also be helpful if the solution integrated with Microsoft Teams. My company uses Office 365, and therefore it would be great if everything was integrated.

I've been using the solution for a long time. It's been longer than a decade. I'd say it's around 15 years at this point.

The solution's stability is good. Of course, it depends on the cloud provider. This is important. When you have a good cloud provider or infrastructure provider, stability is good. You have to play with the servers and processors and memory about the solution. When you have a good provider, it's no problem. When you have a bad provider, you have problems.

The scalability could be improved upon. Sometimes I want to create some instance or other Project Servers to create, for example, test environments. We need to create a test to do a pilot to sell the idea. However, it's complicated to establish what is the best instance to manage the project. 

We have about 2,000 users online, however, it depends on the cloud environment. How many users we have depends on the infrastructure provider. They ensure the scalability and stability of the environment.

We do plan to increase usage. We still have to configure new project types in the project server to gain more users. We want to achieve 1,000 users this year. Right now, I have 300 active users. The plan for this year is to include more project types in the project server throughout the environment and at the end to achieve 1,000 users, at a minimum.

I haven't really dealt with technical support. The relationship with Microsoft is in the IT area. I am not personally part of that group. I am the portfolio manager, therefore I don't have a direct relationship with Microsoft. That said, I'd say it's good, as I don't have any problems. When we have made a request to IT they answer it quickly. Therefore, I'd say we're pretty satisfied with the level of support on offer.

I used to use Clarity for our Agile projects, however, this solution is less expensive.

Clarity is good, however, it is complicated to use as it makes it more challenging for the final users to understand the project plans. Also, the templates to manage the project plans are complicated. I like Microsoft Project better than Clarity. 

At the moment, the initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. that's due to the fact that I know the solution very well. I've worked with the 2010 version as well and have ten years of experience and have used it in my everyday work for so long, the setup is not hard for me.

The deployment depends on the company and its culture. I have implemented Project Server in two months, which is pretty fast. However, it depends on the organization's needs. 

The reports, for example, are a viable gain for executive teams. When the executive teams watch good reports to manage the portfolio projects, it's easier to deploy the solution. 

My strategy is to do a pilot. Over two months, I may do ten projects. I'll generate reports and deliver good information and the executive team of the steering committee can easily see the value for the company. Once the pilot shows the value to the steering committee, I usually have the go-ahead to continue the deployment in our organization. 

We had five people for deployment and maintenance. It's a good number. You need one person, that knows the information in regards to users and other people training the other people. There should be another person working on the cost measures such as the reports. 

I handle the implementation myself. I have a good amount of experience and therefore don't need further experience. I don't need the help of integrators, resellers, or consultants.

While the solution is less expensive than Broadcomm's Clarity, it more expensive than Planview.

That said, I'm unsure of the exact pricing or how often we pay licensing.

We've also looked at Planview and Jira. We found that the solution has better technical support on offer than other options. That said, I like Planview as it's even less expensive than Project Server.

We are Microsoft Partners.

Currently, I am using Project Online and Project Server. The 2015 versions.

At the moment, I am in the process of deploying, the solution in more areas. I start with IT projects and telecom projects. Currently, I am working to introduce regular projects, marketing projects, product projects, etc. I am working to introduce more areas in the Project Server environment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at an eight.

We use Microsoft Project Server for project planning, capacity management, baselining, progress reporting, and monitoring.

Capacity management and task baselining are the most valuable features of Microsoft Project Server.

The solution's synchronization with Jira Projects should be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Project Server for more than 20 years.

Microsoft Project Server is a scalable solution. Around 100 users are using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support is good.

Positive

Microsoft Project Server’s initial setup is easy.

Microsoft Project Server is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Project Server a nine out of ten.

I use Microsoft Project Server to create project timelines and task tracking.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is easy to understand and navigate.

Stability of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

I have been using Microsoft Project Server for two months. I only know that I use the solution's web version.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It is a scalable solution.

For project management, I use Asana and Trello.

The initial setup of the product is easy.

The time taken for deployment of the solution depends on the pipelines.

The product's installation phase can be carried out by one of the in-house teams in my company.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

This is a good product but we have struggled with stability from time to time. The service has stopped intermittently and it has been difficult to find a reason why. Rebooting the system has often solved these issues. 

I have been using this solution for 20 years. 

This is a scalable solution. It is easy to set up and to add clusters to your environment. We have many clusters running for our company. 

We have had a mixed experienced with the customer support team. Some agents are technically skilled and have been able to fix our issues quickly. Others have needed to transfer our case back and forth and this has taken a long period of time. 

The deployment is very straightforward.

We deployed it by our own because we have a big team that looks after all server deployments. This same team takes care of all the maintenance support. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We are basically using it for project monitoring, scheduling, and resource utilization. We have some custom reports, in which we have used SQL server reporting services.

Before, we were doing project management and project management activities. However, it was siloed. This provides an enterprise version and a centralized environment. Everybody, every project manager, is contributing. We are getting clear visibility of the projects we are running.

We like the project scheduling and collaboration, as well as the rule optimization.

It's stable and reliable.

We are on the on-prem version. The cloud, however, gives more regular updates that we can take advantage of. On-premises needs more regular updates. 

The Project Server reporting is not very powerful unless you have another tool or other thing integrated with it.

Collaboration potential can be increased. 

It's very expensive to scale out.

We've been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution isn't highly scalable. We do not have plans to scale due to the high cost.

We have 30 to 40 people using the product. It's a mix of project managers and some management or reporting. We also have some general team members.

Support is available. It's a very popular kind of solution so you can get help easily.

Neutral

I may have used a different solution, however, I cannot recall which solution. We're a new department. We didn't switch from something per se. 

It's not straightforward to set up - unless the person knows it. Then they can set it up with ease.

The deployment took about one week.

You only need about two to three people to maintain the solution, however, they do not have to be fully committed. It's only a few hours a week. 

Our team handled the deployment with some IT involvement. 

A different department handled the licensing. I can't speak to exact costs. 

There is expense in the case of maintenance. If you need some person to maintain it, since it's an on-prem solution, that's a cost. You can't measure it, however, it's a cost. It's also expensive to scale. 

I'm a customer.

If you don't want to go to the cloud, this is a good solution. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

We use this solution for project management for the whole company different teams in different locations.

The most valuable features are the gantt charts. It's easy to use for me. 

Project Server could be improved by simplifying how tasks are assigned and reviewed on a daily basis. This solutions integrations could be made more user friendly.

The reporting and visualizations could also be improved. 

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This solution is stable.

I don't think it's very scalable. It's not that easy to navigate or scale up and down according to your needs. It has some limitations.

The initial setup was difficult, especially when it comes to resource assignments. We had issues because we have a lot of other software. 

If one is complex and five is straightforward, but I would rate the initial setup a two out of five.

It was done by in-house.

Microsoft Project Server is more suitable to small, medium size businesses instead of enterprises. I would advise others to work with a project management consultant as it is not that easy to integrate within a company.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten. 

We mainly use this solution for project management planification. I'm an external consultant and manager in enterprise transformation.

Project Server allows us to have a clear visualization of the action plan and the milestone to be reached; to know which resources are dedicated to what.

One of the good features is the easy integration with Excel. It's easy to use. I don't use all the functionalities, but it suits my needs. 

The user interface needs to be improved. It looks quite old and nowhere near as good as the Jira UI. I also think they should allow the delayed monitoring of the task. For now, there's only the planification of the whole program, and it's not possible to do daily monitoring of the task layer which is a natural extension of the planification of the project. The whole solution could be more flexible. 

I've been using this solution for less than a year. 

I believe the solution is stable. All the project managers use it so there would be around 100 users. 

The initial setup is rather complex and not user-friendly.

There are more user-friendly products on the market that I would suggest using in preference to this one. 

I rate this solution six out of 10.