Why MS Project 2003?

This is the first in a series of columns about MS Project 2003. This article is on installation and my first look at features that are important to me as I migrate to this new version. Future articles will look at specific features.

My primary motivations for upgrading were file compatibility with clients, the promise of better reporting, and a new print feature where you can choose to have your report print on a single page. Most clients that I work with have teams in the 15 to 30 range, and most of what I needed was included in Project '98. But five year old software is often a problem; it was time to move on.

 I loaded Project on my two year old Dell desktop. I had reformatted its drive a couple of weeks earlier and in anticipation of the upgrade, had not loaded the old version of Project. The computer had Office 2003 and an assortment of other software installed when I loaded Project 2003 Standard.

Installing It

Installation went smoothly. I inserted my old non-upgrade disk (which happened to be Project '98) when asked. I opted for the complete 193 meg install and it only took a few minutes. Almost a non-event.

It wanted to check the web for updates and I said 'sure'. It didn't find an update to Project, but it did find an update to the Outlook 2003 junk email feature. Not being any more fond of junk email than you, I took the Outlook update and it went in fine.

First Run

The first message I received was that it couldn't load the speech recognition files. (I often use speech recognition in Office 2003 and with a 2 GHz Dell and 512 meg of RAM, it works pretty well.) I did what was asked and all was well. Seemed odd that it looked at speech files.

Next, it wanted my FrontPage 2002 CD (I did not update FrontPage to the 2003 version). I thought it odd that it wanted this disk but I put it in and it loaded a couple of files and all was well again, and Project opened. Incidentally, the next time I tried to uploaded this site, I couldn't. It worked again after I reset FrontPage extensions on my server and reloaded the entire site. A coincidence or caused by installing Project? I can't tell.

Activation

I've never been particularly bothered by Microsoft's activation process, so I jumped into it. When activating, I don't provide any personal information, just the minimum they require and that was my strategy until it told me that I must have Microsoft Passport in order to activate. That's new. And that links much more information to the otherwise 'anonymous' activation. I didn't care for that much. It felt intrusive.

Since Microsoft knows where I live anyway and I don't pirate software I thought 'why not'. In moments I was activated and on my way.

The First File

So now on to opening my first file. It's a small project that I use as a demo in a presentation on improving team-project results. About 40 tasks... nothing complicated. It opened fine with no apparent errors or unexpected changes. I also opened a project with over 900 tasks and saw no issues.

One of the features I most looked forward to was the ability to print a project on one page. The 40 task demo project seemed like a great test. I opened it, asked it to print the Network Diagram on one page, and voila! it printed on two pages. Actually the diagram printed on one page and the legend printed on the second. When I asked for a PERT on one page, it printed on one page with no legend. Close enough.

So far, so good. I have some concerns about the interactions with Outlook and FrontPage and the use of Microsoft Passport. These things point to levels of integration that my gut tells me may lead to support headaches.

Look for more about Project 2003 in the coming months. 

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