by David Gage, Microsoft Project MVP
The Project Guide is a new feature in Microsoft Project 2002 Standard and Professional editions. Its purpose is to assist users through the process of building a project plan. In its standard form, the Project Guide steps users through the common tasks that project managers typically execute in creating new projects, including adding tasks, specifying resources, assigning resources to tasks, and tracking and reporting progress. The interface for the Project Guide provides intuitive assistance without being overbearing.
The Project Guide design takes a generic approach in order to be useful to the greatest number of users. It’s meant to work with stand-alone instances of Microsoft Project and enterprise configurations using Project Server. Customizing the Project Guide to follow your organization’s project management standards and methodologies can add a lot of value for your users. Popular customizations include incorporating steps for project initiation, working with enterprise templates, and setting application options. You can also use the Project Guide as a training tool in your project environment.
You can add customizations to the existing Project Guide or you can create a completely new Project Guide. In this chapter, I’ll focus on modifying the current Project Guide. Although you’ll gain the knowledge necessary to create your own Project Guides, I suggest you approach your customizations in incremental steps.
I present examples that touch on many technologies related to Microsoft Project and Project Server, such as the Project Data Service (PDS), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and JavaScript, as well as some Microsoft Project intrinsic functions.