By-Ajit Mishra

One of the newest tool that I came across is called Aceicon Project Server. This is not at all a Project Portfolio Management Tool rather to be precise it is an EPM tool. It is specifically designed to make the task of project management and team collaboration easier.

With repeated attempt to register for a demo, I failed several times. Also the parent site of this product doesn’t have complete information’s for instance, links to the screen-shots are not working and so on. Therefore, this review is a fast hand note of the features what the product vendor claims. If you have practical experiences of using this tool, we welcome your comments. We also welcome the product vendor to share further information’s regarding this product so that our users could be encouraged to try it out.

Overview

AceIcon Project Server competes with Microsoft Project Server as it can be used by enterprises for enterprise project management (EPM). Microsoft project professional users can import their plans (mpp files) into AceIcon Project Server and manage their project and team as if they were using Microsoft project server. Team members can access the server using a web interface like the Microsoft Project Web Access for accessing and updating their plans and also to collaborate with their team members. Organizations that are not users of Microsoft software for project management can also use AceIcon Project Server for complete and comprehensive project and resource management enterprise solution.

AceIcon Project Server is a web-based project management software that comes packaged with enterprise project management features. Enterprise project or program management for your organization helps gain visibility, insight, and control across all projects, enhancing decision-making, improving alignment with business strategy, maximizing resource utilization, and increasing operational efficiency.

Enterprise Project Management & Collaboration

With AceIcon Project Server you can do centralized and consolidated monitoring and control of projects across your organization. Not only project teams, but Executives, Program managers and Stakeholders can see the current status of projects. Consolidated view help gain better control across all projects and manage them as programs. Some relevant features:

• Review the status of projects, proposals via the Project Center
• Drill down into project and program details
• Build the team from the resource pool
• Build, edit or review resource plan for a project
• Navigate to a project workspace to review project data like issues, risks etc.
• Effortlessly collaborate and share essential information through team project workspaces

Enterprise resource management
You can review the allocation of resources in the organization to understand not only their current allocation to projects, but also to review trends and requirements for future resource types. You can dig into availability and assignments to analyze and make decisions about how resources are being used in your organization. Some relevant features:

• All enterprise resource kept in Enterprise Resource Pool
• Project Assignment of resources from Enterprise resource pool
• Review groupings of resources by some of the default types
• View resource allocation of one resource or a group of resources to understand availability, capacity, and overall project assignments.
• View detailed assignments for a resource or group of resources

As the vendor clams, this software also comes as hosted service (SaaS) that your organization can register to and start using from day one without any in-house setup. (This author tried to resister for a demo and failed to successfully resister due to some unknown errors. This is something the Product Vendor needs to look first before claiming the benefit of trying this tool!)