Collaboration in MS Project

[AndyGagnon]

I work for a small but growing manufacturing company that uses MS Project Professional to manage a few hundred "micro-projects" that all compete for resources, etc., at any one time.  All the micro-projects are managed in one project file.

As the company grows and matures, we are seeing a need to have 3-4 people actively working in the Project file at any one time, as well as an additional 5-6 internal customers that need read-only access to the project data.

Is there a collaboration option in MS Project Professional?  I don't think so, but would be very happy to be corrected.

If not, what are the recommended MS Project versions to allow this level of collaboration?  Are the third-party add-ons that can solve this problem?  If so, which are recommended?

Thank you!

[#2]

Hello @AndyGagnon ,

I would probably look at splitting those up in to individual projects but without knowing the business requirements it is difficult to make a recommendation. You could create multiple projects and used a share resource pool: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-and-share-a-resource-pool-in-project-desktop-64a24... 

There are other Microsoft Project apps out there that will offer the collaboration: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/business/project/ 

Project for the web supports co-authoring which will allow multiple users to edit the project at the same time - this is a web based app: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/project/simple-project-management You could use separate projects here and also use tools like Power BI to easily create reports. Project for the web is web based, users can't edit projects in Microsoft Project Desktop. They can however import projects files from Project Desktop into Project for the web as a new project.

There is also Project Online, this app does allow users to continuing using Microsoft Project Desktop but there is no co-authoring but here you could split out the projects into separate project files and easily create rich Power BI reports to give you the data insights needed: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWpgik 

Paul