I was on the road a lot in the last few weeks. Clocking up the air miles with flights between Boston, New York (3 visits), St. Louis, Louisville, Seattle and Philly. The thing about air miles is that you say to yourself that the last thing you want to do is use them to fly to another place! But then you drag yourself on that plane and enjoy it once you are in the good company of family.  Back to the road trip!

On the extended road trip over the past few weeks the star of the show was for sure the new link between Project and SharePoint. It is so practical. Customers want to manage across projects (Program Management) in a much better way. Fact! Customers are short on staff and very short on budget, as this economy is not picking up as fast as we all hoped. Fact! So what can you do? Well you can reuse and make better use of what you already have. This is what your grandmother always did - right?!

Organizations in the main now have SharePoint or they can get access to same with the free version. Most organizations have pockets of Microsoft Project in use. I heard one estimate recently that there are 22 million copies of Microsoft Project Desktop out here. So with the new 2010 release of SharePoint and Project, organizations can setup a site in SharePoint that houses all the collaborative elements of the project (docs, issues, goals, etc.) and setup a task list in Microsoft Project and then keep the two in sync.

In other words they can build a plan in Microsoft Project and sync it into SharePoint, so it gets published in SharePoint and then the team can collaborate on same.

Once in SharePoint organizations can then look across many projects in many sites and get status, etc.

So no need to go buying a new very expensive high end tool set. There is always the risk that buying something radically new might not stick. OK there is some expense for most organizations. No such thing as a free lunch! You do need to upgrade your Project and SharePoint to 2010. But cheaper to upgrade what you have and know than to buy brand new and risk it might not work. Invest in what you have and own.

We ran a new set of workshops over the past few weeks where customers got to try this new approach and it was really well received. Inexpensive and yet very functional. An awesome combination for this sluggish economy.  This idea was also the subject of a Gartner Group case study that you might like to read. Yesterday we ran a webcast with Doc Docterman of Microsoft that showed some of these ideas.