The 2013 Microsoft Partner of the Year award winners were announced for all categories across Microsoft Partner competencies, products and regions. We recognize the best of the best Microsoft Project partners with the prestigious Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Partner of the Year award.  This year, we have seen great case studies and stunning solutions that Microsoft Project partners have built, and this underscores the great success and power of Microsoft Project and its partner community.

The Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year Award distinguishes an exceptional partner who has excelled in offering breakthrough solutions that extend or integrate the Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management solution. Please join us in celebrating the success of the PPM partner community and congratulating the winner and finalists!

Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year 2013: UMT

UMT has consistently combined innovative products and consulting excellence to help organizations transform their business and gain even more value from their Microsoft platform investment. UMT has gained unparalleled understanding of customer needs by forming enduring relationships with Global 1000 organizations across a variety of industries.

UMT 360 is UMT’s most ambitious product release to date. Built on Microsoft SharePoint Server and with seamless integration with Project Server, UMT 360 combines leading portfolio, project and financial management best practices to deliver a powerful Integrated Portfolio Management offering. With up-to-date data and metrics at your fingertips, UMT 360 helps you create a dynamic blueprint of your business and technology architecture, drive financial transparency and collaborate to make informed investment decisions across your project, program and asset portfolios. To learn more about UMT 360 visit www.umt.com.

Award finalists

Nintex, the world’s leading SharePoint workflow company, brings the design experience of Nintex Workflow to Project Server. Nintex Workflow for Project Server allows users and IT developers to automate end-to-end workflows with graphical drag/drop UI. For a Project Management Office (PMO), it’s a tool that is easy to use internally and supports the continual changes project management entails, allowing PMOs to be more agile. From demand management and event driven workflows, to workspaces and collaboration workflows, all can be created quickly and easily without the need for complex and costly development cycles.

Campana & Schott’s innovation management solution is applicable for companies with focus on research, engineering and product development. The holistic view of the complete product lifecycle enables organizations to select best innovations and manage all required information such as master data, documents, schedules and costs in one repository. This single source of truth combines data from Microsoft Project, SharePoint and SAP through our renowned Line of Business (LOB) integration product, CS Connect, which is certified by Microsoft and SAP and available for Project and Project Online.

Projility’s innovative software and services solutions and market-driven approach apply directly to the enterprise market, and are in use today by dozens of corporate, public sector, and upper mid-market customers.  In 2012, we found the strongest sales for PPM were in the public sector, healthcare, and manufacturing–areas of high growth, driven by control and regulation ripe for what Microsoft PPM offers.

Honorable mention

 Congratulations!
– Jan Kalis, Product Marketing Manager, Project and Visio

Adobe Exchange panel in Dreamweaver CC and Dreamweaver CS6

We’re very happy to announce that we will be integrating Adobe Exchange into Dreamweaver CC. The new Adobe Exchange is a commercial marketplace for Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud applications enabling distribution of resources and software that enriches a member’s experience and enhances their favorite tools.

You might be asking yourself, why should I be excited about the new Adobe Exchange integration with Dreamweaver CC? Adobe Exchange provides a number of tools and services that let producers/developers share their products publicly or privately, as well as sell, promote and measure them (we provide tracking and analytics).  Here are a few benefits of building products for the new Adobe Exchange:

• Get your products in front of Dreamweaver users from within Dreamweaver CC
• Easily sell your products
• Products shown on the Creative Cloud website (coming soon)
• No exclusivity required – You can still distribute your products on other sites including your own website, we just ask that you do not link directly to any store or checkout Web pages
• Provide a great install and update experience for users
• Get metrics on your product to chart its success

The Adobe Exchange Panel can be found under Window > Extensions > Adobe Exchange and will let you search, discover, install and update new content and capabilities for various Adobe products, like Dreamweaver.

In the previous version of Adobe Exchange – Adobe Exchange Classic – developers were able to publish different extensions, but were not able to easily promote, monetize and track in one place. Below is a comparison of Photoshop Marketplace, Adobe Exchange Classic and the new Adobe Exchange:

Adobe Exchange Capabilities

Adobe Exchange also introduces the Adobe Exchange Packager that let you package your content into a single ZXP file and create certificates without writing any code as well as developer tools like Extension Builder to create your own panels and other content. To get started just follow the steps in this one page PDF and sign up for an account with an Adobe ID here:

http://www.adobeexchange.com/producer

At the recent MAX conference in Los Angeles the Adobe Exchange team provided an overview and demos of Exchange, the tools available as well as a sneak peek at the future. The session is now on Adobe TV:

Please check out our FAQ page for more information:

www.adobeexchange.com/resources/

Click here to learn how to download and install extensions.

We look forward to seeing all the great new extensions you are going to build and excited about the opportunity that the new Adobe Exchange is going to bring for all of you.

We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro sync client is now available for Windows and can be downloaded here. This standalone client allows users of SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online in Office 365 to sync their personal SkyDrive Pro and any SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document libraries to their local machine for access to important content on and offline. The SkyDrive Pro client can be installed standalone and does not require any version of Office to be installed.  It can also be installed side-by-side with previous versions of Office (Office 2010, Office 2007).

Please note if you have one of the following versions of Office 2013 installed, then you already have the SkyDrive Pro sync client and do not need to install it separately:

• Office 365 Pro Plus
• Office 365 Small Business Premium
• Office Professional Plus 2013

Once installed, simply click SYNC in the top right corner of your SkyDrive Pro library, SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document library and you’ll be on your way to keep your files in sync across your machines. Happy syncing with SkyDrive Pro–cloud storage for employees!

For over a decade, Microsoft has delivered flexible software for Project Portfolio Management (PPM) through editions of Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project Professional. Now the proven capabilities in Project Server are available as Project Online, a cloud service which offers increased agility and a smaller IT footprint. Project Online works with the SharePoint platform and enjoys the business benefits of Office 365, which modernizes productivity infrastructure without any compromise.

Like building a house, in project management it’s very important to use the right tool at the right time. Many teams start with lightweight spreadsheets for organizing and tracking tasks. When they want to add collaboration and let team members manage their own reporting, task lists in SharePoint are a great way to organize the team’s work in accessible and inclusive ways. At some point, lists of tasks become too complex for simple spreadsheets. They have dependencies, shared resources, unique constraints, or maybe the list just becomes too long and unwieldy.

That’s when the humble task list can “graduate” into becoming a project, and Project Professional is the perfect tool for the job. Almost inevitably, businesses will accumulate a number of projects, and at some point require another sophisticated tool to manage all these projects in one place. Project Server provides this ability to look across many projects and keep the business running smoothly; and now, Project Online does this as a cloud service.

Like Project Server, Project Online integrates seamlessly with Project Professional, Microsoft’s signature project management software embraced by project managers everywhere. When an organization’s many individual projects are managed in Project Online, everything the Project Management Office (PMO) and business leaders need to manage project portfolios and make key decisions is available in one place, accessible from virtually anywhere on nearly any device.

Trends in hardware virtualization delivered substantial cost reductions for companies across many industries in recent years. As virtualization technology becomes mature and standardized, the leading edge of cost control is moving to cloud services, in which workloads that are not mission critical can be accessed with more flexibility, lower costs, and without investments in unnecessary infrastructure. Many enterprises understand that sustained competitive advantage results from strategically directed operations more so than administration of server farms.

Project Online addresses these realities and unlocks opportunity for teams to boost autonomy and scale. Since it’s a service delivered through Office 365, Project Online is always up to date, accessible from virtually anywhere, and can be trusted with sensitive data and mission-critical workloads.

Office 365 leverages best practices and adds unique innovations to give users the power to mix and match the right set of tools to meet business needs. Project Online brings SharePoint Online capabilities with it, and the experience only gets better when licenses are added for Lync Online communication, Exchange Online email services, and streaming Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to personal computers virtually anywhere. Visio Pro for Office 365 is also available as a subscription, enabling integration of business process modelling, zero-code workflow design for demand management, data-connected dashboards, and traditional diagramming.

Read the Project Online PMO Whitepaper to learn more about cloud benefits and considerations, or take a look at all the benefits and capabilities built into Project Online at the Project website.

–Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Project

Traveling is blogger Brad Corob’s hobby–almost every weekend, he’s flying somewhere new to see the sights, sample the food, visit friends, and explore new places–but travel involves a lot of work and planning.  Read on to learn how he uses OneNote to prepare for upcoming trips and keep himself on track while he’s on the go.

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Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team.

Visio templates make it easy to build compelling diagrams that communicate visually. Organization charts are among the most popular templates, and you can enhance them to create a data-linked diagram that connects to key business indicators in your organization and then link your data from an external source so that the information is always up to date. In this post, we’ll look at how to display this information with data graphics.

Let’s focus on budget attainment and use a color by value data graphic. To do this, click the Data tab, then select Data Graphics, or select the shape, right-click to select Data, then click Edit Data Graphics. We’ll create a new data graphic with color by value as the type.

Now we can apply the value to all the shapes on the page. Highlight the shapes you’d like to associate with your data graphic, then select Apply to All Shapes.

Once that’s done, you’ll have the following organization chart – pretty nifty, for sure.

 We need a legend to indicate what the colors represent, and Visio makes it easy to add one to your diagram. On the Data tab, select Insert Legend, and then you’ll see a key that explains what the colors mean.

You can move the legend around to where you’d like on the page, and you can also delete or modify individual elements in it.

We can quickly see how the team is tracking against budget spending, and sharing your diagram on SharePoint via Visio Services helps you to effectively communicate this simple and intuitive dashboard to others. And the best part is that as the data gets updated in the spreadsheet, we can refresh our Visio diagram. On the Data tab, click Refresh, or you can also set up an automatic refresh with up to 1 minute frequency.

Note: Data-linked diagrams are a feature of Visio Professional 2013 and Visio Pro for Office 365 and are not available in Visio Standard 2013. Although data-linked diagrams may be opened in Visio Standard 2013, they will not be updated, and diagram changes may impact data connections on the page.

–Yana Terukhova, Product Marketing Manager

SkyDrive is not just for your web browser. You also can download a handy desktop app that syncs your SkyDrive files to your PC or Mac. With the app, files you store in SkyDrive will automatically download to your computer, and those same files will sync to SkyDrive when you update them on your desktop. We start our Office 15-Minute Webinar at 9:15 am Pacific Time, with a Q&A to follow. Click the link below or go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

Join online meeting

https://join.microsoft.com/meet/dougt/F274WBQZ

If you are on Windows 7 or Windows 8, you will join via the free Lync Web App. For other computers, you may need to call in for audio: 888.320.3585, Conference ID: 84172528.

A video of the webinar will be posted shortly after the webinar.

What you will learn at Tuesday’s webinar

• How to install the SkyDrive desktop app
• How to sync your SkyDrive…

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This week our intrepid Garage Series hosts take you through your identity options with Office 365 ProPlus and tips and tricks for how to automate provisioning. Watch too as Yoni takes to the water with our latest XStream install while wakeboarding in the backwaters of Sydney, Australia.

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