The Solution: User Interface Consolidation with Project 2003

In the past, user interface (UI) consolidation usually did not happen because of infrastructure problems. Management software offered few view components, and those had little or no extensibility. Two new classes of customizable views — Web service views and tools views — help Microsoft® Office Project 2003 solve the problem.

Organizations can extend the functionality of Project 2003 with custom views that don't have to be built from the traditional collection of view components. Custom Web service views can bring services such as views from Project Server 2003 into the Project Professional or the Project Standard user interface, even though the services live outside the Project application. Custom tool views go a step farther, combining HTML and script to put a custom UI on top of object model scripting. Those two new kinds of views provide users an opportunity to turn Project into a one-stop management center.

Anything you can do with the Project application engine, you can do inside the Project UI. Anything you can do online, you can do inside the Project UI. Custom views offer the customer a way to consolidate all their users' management tools into one user interface, slashing the usability cost of coordinating clunky multi-tool desktops. Custom views in Project are not perfect, but they go a long way toward solving the problem of UI consolidation. Take a look at the two kinds of custom views.

Custom view with a Web service

Custom view with a tool component

This section of Project Guide 101 shows you how to create, modify, and maintain your own custom tool and Web service views. It explains the structure of custom views and how to create custom view content, and shows how to load custom views into the Project 2003 user interface. The discussion of custom views assumes that you are familiar with the following:

• Project Guide Architecture and Extensibility, and how custom Web content fits into Project 2003.
• Customizing the Project Guide.
• Extensible Markup Language: see the XML Developer Center.
• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
• Dynamic HTML: see Working with DHTML and the DHTML Object Model.
• Scripting, either Microsoft® JScript or Microsoft Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript): see Microsoft Windows Script Downloads.
• The Project object model: see Microsoft Office Project Visual Basic Help.

To learn more about consolidating the user interface, the difference between custom views and the Project Guide, and what should be in a custom view, see Designing a Custom View.