With Office 2010 upon us, many businesses and their project managers are looking to upgrade from Project 2007. Here's an investigation into the benefits, improvements and changes that are part of the new rollout.

2007 users will be pleased to know that the ribbon - something that changed the way 2003 users thought about Office forever - is here to stay. It retains its user-friendly way of finding your favourite actions and shortcuts in much the same way as it did in the 2007 version. There are some tips linked to the shortcuts and some menus are more graphics than text, so it becomes a little easier to find what you want.

Project 2010 maintains its compatibility tools for this new edition. Of course, as with the change between 2003 and 2007, if you have 2003, you'll still have to have the compatibility tools installed in order to look at project files created in 2010.

Sharing parts of the application among your workplace is easy with the Share point server, but again - bear in mind that the 2010 version of Project, as a result of adding tools to enhance the user experience, will not translate 100% smoothly to 2010. As it's so new, the bugs and issues won't have been worked out yet, but inevitably they will be released as the usual update patches through Microsoft.

A major change for 2010 is a total revamp of the timeline view. The customisation options - especially in colour coding items such as your tasks and milestones - has been increased and tweaked. If you're used to formatting workbooks in Excel, for example, to make certain data stand out - this is more possible now in Project 2010.

In the professional version, there is another addition of "views" - for team planning and also for resources vs. time (and other combinations), that let you see - almost like a pivot chart - relationships between your data that may be an indication of problems down the line. There is also the facility to compare your forecasted budget with your actual one as you go along - so you'll know sooner if your project is meetings its spending targets.

Another addition to the Professional version only (and bear this in mind if you're only getting the basic suite), is that you can look at your inactive tasks. Whether you just forgot them or they have been made redundant by another process, they should stand out rather than sending other parts of your project askew. Another (again, Professional only!) tool is that you can share you projects more easily with task status updates done by other people in the team, not just the Project Manager - via the Share point Foundation (also in a 2010 version). If you're a large business with many project managers, this might be worth the (sometimes hefty) additional cost.

Overall, Project 2010 offers more professional improvements than it does to the basic one - but then again, it's mostly professionals who use it. If you share a lot of data and want high performance, then a 64 bit professional edition is probably what your upgrade should be. If you need less power, less data sharing and not as many tools - you can look beyond the Project suite, or even stick with 2003 as it devalues as now being the third oldest version of the software.