As part of my quest to better understand Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) I continued my journey through the software product life cycle and attended a session VSTS and the product life cycle.  As part of this session I came across a product called Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server that I was previous unaware of.

Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server has several functions. Firstly,  it acts as a capture tool for business initiatives and ideas - depending on the level of granularity, these are effectively business and functional requirements. Once entered,  these can then be reviewed against the stated business strategies. Using clever algorithms, Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server then ranks and prioritises ideas and initiatives. High level costings and resources can then be applied. Once recorded decisions can be made to accept to initiate projects.

Make no mistake this is not MS Project with a suggestion box!  This is a tool for senior executives to initiate and assess projects against defined business strategies. These can be any kind of projects not just software projects.

The clever bit here is the integration to other parts of Team Systems. Once a project is accepted the Portfolio server can integrate with Foundation Server and create full blown projects. These can then be structured and expanded by project managers using MS Project. If it's a software project,  software professionals can then do their stuff and interact via Visual Studio.

The other clever part is the ability to feed moderated high level project status data back up through to the senior executives. Whilst all the task completion activities still goes through project managers for approval, using a classic "traffic-light" status approach, senior executives are able to get an instant high level view of how a project is doing at all times.

Even if you just want to use portfolio for capturing business ideas or strategic requirements or even just the output of simple brainstorming MS Office Project Portfolio Server is well worth checking into.  As with the rest of team system depending on the scale of you organisation the price point may be the only issue.

Interested? You can find details of Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server at: MS Office Project Portfolio Server