Product Reviews

Project Center is an Entourage module that allows individuals and groups to view and manage all information relating to a project. The Project Center is available to other Office apps from the Toolbox.

Clicking the New Project button in Entourage invokes the Project wizard, which allows you to set up a project easily. Every project has a Watch folder that can be kept wherever you like and stores aliases of all the files allocated to the project.

As well as providing a place to access relevant files, Project Center enables you to create and view appointments, tasks, notes, contacts and scraps of information. You can also set email rules so incoming and outgoing email messages are designated as part of the project and can be viewed from within the project window.

Projects can be personal to the user or shared within a group; in the latter case, projects need a server that can be accessed by all users in order to store the Watch folder. Each file that's designated as part of a shared project is moved from the user's local Mac to the server, so if you want to keep a copy on your own machine, you need to do it manually. What's more, there's no provision to administer a shared project or set privileges or permissions for users. Every member of a shared project has full access to every aspect of the project.

Accessing Project Center from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint allows you to view the schedule, notes, tasks and email from within the Toolbox palette. You can also create new items from within these other applications, but doing so dumps you out of the application you're working in and into the relevant section of Entourage. Worse, when you've finished, you have to manually find your way back to the application you were working in, which is annoying.

It should be noted that while Project Center is

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a useful tool for organising information, it's not a true project management tool - for example, there's no provision for creating Gantt charts or performing critical path analysis.

The overview screen is the central repository for your schedule, email lists and shared folders, and is where you'll spend most of your time. However, it's too inflexible for our liking: by default, the schedule shows only one week, rather than a list of all forthcoming tasks.

Moreover, the file organisation features are a bit too basic. To use them to their fullest you have to switch out of Project Center and revert to Mac OS X's Finder, then create sub-folders within your Project Watch folder and move files into new locations. We would have expected this to be a feature of Project Center itself, and can only hope it will be an incremental update in the near future. An indication of its current inflexibility is that even the Preferences window offers no options for tweaking Project Center.

Project Center needs a lot of attention. You have to spend some time setting it up and maintaining it, organising your email so it filters correctly into the appropriate project folders, and so forth. You should also take care not to be too keen on the delete key; it's surprisingly easy to delete a project with very little warning.

The need for relatively high maintenance reduces the usefulness of Project Center. After all, if you're organised enough to set up a project and keep it up to date, you're probably so well organised already that you have no need for it.

As a tool for helping individuals or small groups keep track of the various elements of a project, Project Center works reasonably well, although there are some rough edges, such as the lack of administration functions in shared projects and using Project Center from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. However, it lacks too many features - most notably, Gantt charting and critical path analysis - to be considered a serious project management system.

Ultimately, Project Center is a useful tool for small projects and for people working on their own. An ideal example is a one-man web design business, where commissions will arrive by email, allowing you to index incoming work and track your time on the schedule. For anything larger than a team of five or six, though, it's underpowered and you would do better looking for a dedicated project management system.