My experience in the project management world has taken me through dozens of projects, hundreds of team members and an eclectic collection of project customers both large and small. No matter how wide-spread the usage of Microsoft Project is in PM-land, you’re always going to run into the project client who hasn’t jumped on the MS Project bandwagon and you’re going to have team members and collaborators who don’t have access to a MS Project license.
That’s where a product like Seavus’ Project Viewer comes in. There are other tools out there to completely replace MS Project. Web-based tools and desktop tools abound, but if you’re already using MS Project to run your projects like I often do and you have a customer or several team members that you need to collaborate with and you need the workaround, Project Viewer can make your life – and theirs – much easier at a fraction of the cost.
Functionality
Project Viewer doesn’t try to be a replacement for MS Project or any other full-featured project management software tool. This offering is a tool that allows team members and customers who do not have MS Project or a tool that integrates with MS Project to be able to still view and even collaborate with a project manager who does utilize MS Project to manage the engagement.
Team members can report task progress on the tasks they have been working on by entering either % completed or Actual Work. Then, project managers can accept or reject reported task progress using our add-in for MS Project.
Seavus Project viewer is the only viewer for MS Project that provides collaboration between the project manager and team members via Google Apps. This unique integration enables stable and up-to-date communication between the project manager and team members.
One more thing to keep in mind for international users: Project Viewer can be used in English, German, French, Spanish, Czech and Japanese.
Cost
Cost is a no-brainer. A Project Viewer license will cost the user approximately 10% of the price of a regular MS Project license. Depending on the size of your project and team and the number of customer users who need access to the project schedule, that can save a lot of money on the engagement. Certainly, one workaround is just creating and sending out PDF versions of the project schedule to those non-MS Project users. I’ve done that. But when you need collaboration – that just won’t do. If you want your users to give you input and make your job easier, then you need something like Project Viewer.
Free trial