EPM --> MS Project --> MS Project Server

EPM:

1. Enterprise Project Management (EPM), is the field of organizational development that supports organizations in managing Projects, Resources and the Cost of the projects.
2. EPM provides the proper governance for the projects which are running under the organizations in terms of Schedules, Cost and Resources.
3. Schedules meant for creating tasks related to the project to be completed in a particular timeframe. Cost includes the money and the time spent to the project and Resources stands for the people and resources needed for completing the project.
4. EPM is very useful to make life easier for the managers to manage, monitor, and assess the status of all projects under them.
5. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is also a part of the EPM which is used to create a portfolio (per budget size, per calendar year, per budget year, per business line, etcetera) for projects.
6. Project Portfolio Management also includes the creation of various scenarios to decide which is the most optimal portfolio (for a certain year, business, budget, etcetera)
7. There is already number of tools available for EPM in the market. "Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Sever" are the tools which have been provided By Microsoft for adopting EPM Capabilities.

Microsoft Project:

1. Microsoft Project (or MSP or WinProj) is a project management software program developed and sold by Microsoft which is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads.
2. MSP is a Microsoft Office tool the can be used to create applications that creates critical path schedules, and critical chain and event chain methodology Schedules can be resource leveled, and chains are visualized in a Gantt chart. Additionally, Project can recognize different classes of users. These different classes of users can have differing access levels to projects, views, and other data. Custom objects such as calendars, views, tables, filters, and fields are stored in an enterprise global which is shared by all users.
3. Microsoft Project 2010 features the Ribbon user interface; the current Version for the MSP is 2010.
4. The following diagram shows the basic look of a project which has been created using project sever 2010.
   

1. The above diagram shows the project which has been created by manager which contains all main Phases involved in that project. The Gantt chart shows the Schedules for each phase.
2. This contains Menu with all the capabilities includes task scheduling Resource management.
   
   
   All these above can be done when we have been installed with MS Project Software. These files cannot be useful if we don't have project. This leads Microsoft to Develop Microsoft Office Project server 2010.

Microsoft Office Project Sever 2010
1) Microsoft Office Project Server is a project management server solution made by Microsoft. It uses Windows SharePoint Services as its foundation, and supports both a web interface and Microsoft Project as the client application.
2) Microsoft extends the capabilities of Microsoft Project with Project Server and Project Web Access. Microsoft Project Server stores project information in a central SQL Server database, protected from unauthorized access and corruption. A Project Administrator can control security defining users and access rights.
3) Being it built on Sharepoint, We can extend its capabilities by developing the Webpart programming and can use Sharepoint object model for programming from other applications using SP API's.
4) The following screen shows a project created by the manager in the Project Sever 2010 Web application.

5) We can sync this application with MS Project by creating project service application in Sharepoint.

 

SharePoint 2010 Search

1) Search connects people to the information they need to get their jobs done. General productivity search solutions increase employee efficiency by connecting a broad set of people to a broad set of information.

Microsoft Provides following search Capabilities for Sharepoint Enterprise Search

a) SharePoint Foundation 2010
b) Search Server 2010 Express
b) Search Server 2010
d) SharePoint Server 2010
e) FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

2) Microsoft provides SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Search Server 2010 Express free of charge for you to use on licensed Windows® servers. These entry level products offer the ability to crawl and index content and provide a user interface for executing queries against the catalog of crawled content.

3) SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Search Server 2010 offer improved scalability and options for indexing content from many different sources, while fulfilling the configurability, manageability, and reporting requirements of your organization.

4) SharePoint Server 2010 provides a great platform for creating general productivity search applications.

5) FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is a new product from Microsoft, and it delivers the power of FAST with the simplicity and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of Microsoft products. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint further enhances the crawling, content processing, user interface, and scale
of SharePoint Server 2010.

Feature Comparison

You can use the following table to make quick comparisons of the enterprise search features provided by each product in the SharePoint 2010 Products.

Feature	SharePoint Foundation 2010	Search Server 2010 Express	Search Server 2010	SharePoint Server 2010	FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
Basic site search	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Best Bets		Y	Y	Y	Y
Visual Best Bets					Y
Similar Results					Y
Duplicate Results	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Search Scopes		Y	Y	Y	Y
RSS Feeds for Search Results	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Alerts for Search Results	Y*	Y*	Y*	Y*
Advanced Search Page		Y	Y	Y	Y
Search Enhancement based on User Contexts					Y
Crawled and Managed Properties		Y	Y	Y	Y**
Entity Extraction					Y
Query Federation		Y	Y	Y	Y
Query Suggestions		Y	Y	Y	Y
Sort Results on Managed Properties or Rank Profiles					Y
Relevancy Tuning by Document or Site Promotions		Y	Y	Y	Y**
Shallow Results Refinement		Y	Y	Y	Y
Deep Results Refinement					Y
Document Preview					Y
Windows 7 Federation		Y	Y	Y	Y
People Search				Y	Y
Phonetic Name Search***				Y	Y
Nickname Search***				Y	Y
Self Search				Y	Y
Social Search				Y	Y
Taxonomy Integration				Y	Y
Multi-Tenant Hosting				Y
Rich Web Indexing Support					Y

 
First Steps


There are some general tasks you will need to perform when you are evaluating search products or implementing enterprise search solutions that meet your organization's requirements. The following sections can help you get started.

Identify your content

The first step you need to take before performing any actions is to identify the content in your organization that you want to index. Content from SharePoint sites is automatically included in all of the SharePoint search products, but you can also index content from file shares, Microsoft Exchange public folders, external Web sites, Lotus Notes databases, and your line-of-business applications.

You can also use SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 to create Business Data Catalog applications that enable custom databases, Web services, and other custom solutions to be indexed.

Note: SharePoint Foundation 2010 can only index content in SharePoint sites. All other enterprise search products from Microsoft can index content in the content repositories mentioned above by using the connector framework.

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint also provides enhanced capabilities for indexing business intelligence data. You can obtain the Business Intelligence Indexing Connector to provide enhanced search and analysis for business intelligence assets.

Crawl your content

The next step is to crawl the content in the content repositories that you have identified. You can implement both full and incremental crawl schedules to ensure that indexed data is as fresh as possible.

The new index partitioning capabilities of Search Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint enable you to balance the indexing load (and query load) across servers that are dedicated to provide search for large amounts of content.

Scale your search infrastructure

One of the design goals for Search Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 is to provide sub-second query response times for up to 100 million indexed documents. For FAST Search Server 2010 is designed to provide sub-second query response times for more than 1 billion indexed documents. To achieve sub-second query response times for your organization you may need to scale your server farm to include multiple query servers. Additionally, to ensure that indexed data is as fresh as possible when indexing a large number of documents, you may need to include multiple indexers. The highly componentized architecture of the enterprise search products from Microsoft enables you to do just that; for example, you can implement partitioned indexes on multiple indexers to be able to cope with crawling demands, and you can include multiple query servers to balance the query processing load at search time.

Customize the end-user search experience

Optionally, you may want to provide a customized user interface so that information workers can search for information and manipulate results in the most efficient way for your business. The Enterprise Search Center for SharePoint Server 2010 and the FAST Search Center are highly customizable without requiring developer effort. For example, you can create search scopes, modify properties of search Web Parts, apply XSLT styles, and apply themes to search centers with minimal effort. All of this can be done through the Web browser or by using SharePoint Designer 2010.

If you need to customize the search experience further, then developers can create a completely customized user interface by creating new Web Parts that inherit functionality from the existing search Web Parts. Furthermore, the search API is completely open so developers can create new paradigms and ways of working with search, such as by creating new Web Parts or even Silverlight applications that run searches and render results.

Customize the content processing pipeline

One of the key differentiators between FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint and other search products is the ease with which you can customize content processing at indexing time. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint enables you to create your own metadata extractors that will be used in the content processing pipeline. This enables you to define how managed properties are populated from crawled content, and you can then use that metadata in deep refiners; you can then include these organization-specific vocabularies in the metadata refinement panel which enables you to provide search solutions in the terms and language of your business.