What needs improvement with Microsoft Project Server?

Microsoft Project Server needs improvement in the integration of more tools and syncing of Blockly tools on time. The portfolio management area also has room for improvement in terms of supporting collaboration and providing an end-to-end view. There are also some bugs in the tool that need addressing.

We sometimes need support from the IT department for installing and deploying the Microsoft Project Server. It is not user-friendly, and users cannot install it themselves.

Microsoft is going to integrate the Co-Pilot features into Microsoft Project. The AI feature is an additional feature. It can look at the plan and identify risks early on from any part of your project. Additionally, it can help us understand which issues need highlighting and propose solutions. The reporting could be enhanced and needs to be more visual. We have a summary page for the project template, which appears unorganized. We have attempted to consolidate and standardize the reporting structure, as well as the look and feel, across all projects.

The solution must provide Agile and AI features. It will help users benefit from the latest technologies.

The product's UI is not very user-friendly. From an improvement perspective, I want the tool to offer a user-friendly UI. Microsoft should attempt to match the capabilities offered by the other players in the market. Microsoft Project Server has issues with SharePoint, providing a not-so-user-friendly experience to users. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product. The high cost of the product is an area of concern. The product's price could be made lower.

Remote usage and tracking pose challenges, requiring navigation through numerous technical details and troubleshooting. This inconvenience sometimes leads to abandoning the task on the device and waiting until the next workday to resume operations. Improvements are needed in the technical support process, aiming for a better user experience. The current process, when encountering difficulties, should be more user-friendly, streamlined, and efficient. Quick and accessible customer support is crucial, especially when seeking assistance during work hours.

We want to expand to the local level where we lack strong IT expertise, we are considering making it more user-friendly. We are looking to have a point-and-click interface so that individuals without technical knowledge can easily navigate the system. We want them to use it without the need for programming or making complex changes, simplifying the process for them. Also, the pricing for support needs to be improved.

The solution's desktop version is not compatible with the MacBook.

There are certain shortcomings in the documentation part where improvements are required. Microsoft should release some basic documentation on use cases to the public so that anyone who wants to learn more about the product can learn about it through the documentation available on Microsoft's websites.

The product is difficult to use for complex projects. There could be more planning tools for project management. Sometimes, we encounter issues with paper size while printing the project plan.

Microsoft is undergoing a shift in its approach. They're diverting their investments away from Microsoft Project Server's development and are focusing on a new solution based on Microsoft Power Apps. This new solution is exclusively cloud-based and can't be installed on-premises. While Microsoft Power Apps are technologically sophisticated, the cloud functionality is currently less sophisticated compared to the existing Microsoft Project Server solution on-premise. It appears that Microsoft's primary goal is to migrate as much functionality as possible from the legacy on-premises Microsoft Project Server to the new cloud-based Power Apps solution.

I don't have any specific notes for improvement. I do not require any more functionality. I've had some issues with Project Server from time to time. It is not updated in real-time. Sometimes it, therefore, is not accurate. Technical support could be more efficient.

The solution needs to be much more stable. The project support is missing. We tend to use Primavera as opposed to MS Project when we are doing engineering or large-scale projects.

The solution could improve the ease of access could improve. It can be time-consuming.

The solution should be made more collaborative. Currently, we are using Microsoft Project Server alone, without the involvement of a team. In other words, we are not collaborating with the whole team within the solution and that is a minus. I would also like to see an integration with Amazon's project management solution. As of right now, there is no integration. We have a link only between the Amazon project management solution and the planner activities. This is very basic and we need some advanced cooperation options.

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.

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.

The price of the solution could be reduced.

The initial setup is complex. There need to be more tutorials available to users. It's very robust software with lots of features. If you don't know the shortcuts or the application, it's more difficult. Having training and tutorials would make learning it and accessing features easier.

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Project Server could improve by making the solution more user-friendly.

The cost could be lower.

Collaboration within the tool is lacking when you compare it to online or cloud-based tools. We should be able to notify assignees about the tasks that have been assigned to them. This is something that we don't have, and it could be because of the way it was deployed for us.

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.

The solution could have more compact dashboards, such as one finds with Planview.

Reporting is an area that needs to be worked on. It needs improvement. It should be more agile and more flexible when it comes to customization. The deployment could be easier.

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.

When it comes to integration with other systems Project Server falls short. There used to be out-of-box integration with TFS for example but with Project Server 2016 and forward that integration is deprecated. There is room for improvement here. When it comes to project management itself, I'd like to see some hybrid solutions right now across the on-premises deployments especially. On-premise only has waterfall style project management. On the other hand Project Online has a lot better integration and hybrid (agile-waterfall) project management abilities. This should also be the case for On-premise customers. The check-in, check-out feature, makes Microsoft Project Server pretty slow or cumbersome to use. Users mostly forget when to check-in. We have problems with that. If it's a bit faster to use, or easier to use, like your Planner or other programs, it would be better. You should just be able to type in something and it's updated. The ease of use could be improved.

We noticed that there are some problems or issues working with it. We are finding some workarounds to avoid them. We are not totally satisfied with that solution. It is related to the calculation of project duration, working hours, and so on. We think that calculations are not working correctly, and there is a need to enter data a couple of times in order to give the correct calculations. I'm not sure if there are any missing features. I can't recall feeling as if something is lacking.

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.

It needs to be more collaborative from inside the application. It only does project scheduling for me. It would be good if it could do other things and be more collaborative, such as sharing tasks for users. It is not really incorporated into MS Office, so you can't copy-paste stuff. It is on its own, doing its own thing. It is only used for scheduling, and it doesn't work well with anything else.

I'd like it if we could divide out the project calendars. On one project server, we might follow five projects or more at one time, and we'd like to see all of the items at once so that it becomes a long loop, but one where we can identify different projects in tandem and then focus on which we need to at the time. While I only have visibility into one, I'd like to see several at a time.

For the way we use the solution, it's fine. I can't think of anything specifically that I'd like to have improved now. It would be useful if the solution allowed us to share files or project schedules. You may get that with the cloud version. However, it's not available on the on-premises versions. It would be nice if there was a low cost version of the enterprise version, so something in between what we have now and enterprise. It would be perfect for those that don't want to go enterprise but still want to have the sharing project files capabilities.

OOB reporting is not very robust. We have utilized SSRS, Excel Services and Qlik Sense to expand the OOB reporting capabilities. We use a hosted on-premise version so that we can have better direct access to the SQL server data.

It has to be more user-friendly. For instance, there should be some assistance, like when you go to certain sites, people pop up and say, "Can we help you? What are you looking for?" It's not interactive enough.