You wouldn’t expect a technical team with absolutely no understanding of finance and accounting to successfully select, purchase, build, configure, and deploy an accounting package. There would be no way to understand which modules were necessary and which were not. “Well, the manual said that Accounts Payable was optional, so we didn’t put it into the deployment.”
The same is also true for special purpose packages like Microsoft Project Server 2003. Most of the technical questions I’ve heard are something like “Does Microsoft Project Server 2003 absolutely require ‘xyz,’ or can I get around it?” Questions like this make me cringe. It is like asking “Is it possible to write a term paper without using any of my keyboard’s vowel-keys?” I can show you how to do it, but I’d be a better friend if I asked you why you wanted to do this in the first place. It is possible you are making things more difficult than they need to be.
Here, by the way, is how to write a term paper without using vowel-keys. Write your paper substituting the ‘~’ for ‘a’, the ‘{’ for e, the ‘} ‘for I, the ‘[’ for ‘o’, and the ‘]‘ for ‘u.’ When you are done with the paper, open another document or web page and copy an ‘a’. Then use global replace to replace all the ‘~’ characters with ‘a’. Continue for each vowel. Like so much in the computer industry, it is a clever but useless solution.
If you understand the ‘big picture’ when working with Microsoft Project Server 2003, you can avoid many technical solutions that are clever but ultimately useless.
Coming up next… an explanation of why Microsoft Project Server 2003 uses SharePoint Services.