MS Project Professional setting vs. VIP Task Manager setting

Installation and setup

MS Project Professional (or MSP) is a software application aimed at facilitating project managers to design project plans, control teamwork, optimize workloads, analyze tasks, track project progress, etc. To support user collaboration and data sharing, it is required to use MS Project in combination with Windows Project Server. Project Server is a costly solution which requires investments not only in its actual price but also in qualified administering and maintaining. For small and medium organizations, such investments can turn into a burden, and often they are not ready to spend a considerable amount of money on buying, administering and maintaining MS Project Server and purchasing licenses for MS Project software.

Project Server uses Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and acts as the server application that communicates with MS Project which acts as the client application. SharePoint Services become essential to establish user collaboration and data sharing. But this technology is provided for and compatible with Microsoft servers only and it cannot be deployed on other operating systems and servers, so organizations that use non-Microsoft servers (like Linux servers) will be unable to run WSS and use MS Project.

VIP Task Manager is a client-server software solution for project and task management that uses Firebird database management system to establish user collaboration and data exchange. Firebird is a free system that can be deployed on Windows-operated servers as well as on Linux-operated servers, so the server component of VIP Task Manager can be run on both servers. In this context, the software becomes a cost-effective and flexible solution for small and medium organizations.

Setting task workflow for projects/processes

The way to make projects different from one another and to specify statuses for each task within a project is to define and set task workflows. MS Project automatically sets statuses (like ‘Late’, ‘On Schedule’, ‘Future Task’, ‘Cancelled’ etc.) for tasks in accordance with current progress and date&time characteristics of tasks. Such a capability of MS Project allows you always being aware of overdue, incomplete and accomplished tasks. But when you need to specify task statuses and plan custom workflows for projects or processes, you will fail using MS Project as this software has only predefined task statuses.

VIP Task Manager has Workflow Editor that helps you create and customize workflows and plan task statuses for each workflow. The software allows representing a project or process as a sequence of tasks, and each task can obtain specific statuses to describe phases or stages of the project/process. For example, you can create Sales Workflow which contains task statuses to describe the selling process. The workflow may include such task statuses as ‘Ordered’, ‘Paid’, ‘Stocked’, ‘Sold’, ‘Delivered’. Workflow Editor allows defining color for every workflow, so different workflows in the system will differ from each other by color.