MS Project vs. Primavera

[Dave]

I guess you can visit the Asta wb site and check the case studies. There
are a lot of case studies for big projects such as London Eye, and
Bishopsgate Tower that Asta PowerProject was used at. You can go there
and check the software features. I hate to attack a software without
studying it.

With respect, nobody has attacked the software.

I am perfectly open to the possibility that it is better than any of the
other tools available.

However, it has to be said that making claims about the adoption of the
product which are demonstrably incorrect you will do it a disservice.

The obvious question would be why it has such a small user base if it is
so brilliant (and there may be good answers to that such as newness to
the market).

 

[greatfargo1]

I looked online to verify what Asta Development says. I found th
following link. It is a survey among planners. It says that PowerProjec
has about 43% of the market share in UK ranking the top software and th
third worldwide. You can say any critique about surveys but lots o
things of our life is managed by surveys. If you don't believe that i
is the top used scheduling software in UK, no problem, but at least i
is comparable to Primavera in UK at least.

http://www.planningengineers.org/surveys/software_results.asp

 

[Mike Glen]

Interesting! The survey quotes 65 votes for Project. I've just done a
count of the number of different people creating a new thread in this
newsgroup since 12 Jun 09 - 3 months - and I counted 563. It is possible
but unlikely that any of them are from the same company, and thus represent
the number of different organizations involved. So much for statistics! -
it depends who you ask.

Mike Glen
Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for my free Project Tutorials

 

[greatfargo1]

I contacted them to check the fact that we don't know Asta PowerProject
in the USA. They told me that they do direct marketing. Apparently,
they are not investing in marketing as it should be. It is not known at
the USA because they had no office before but they have one now. Off
course anyone used MS Project knows that it is easy to use but when it
comes to professional use, it gives hard time. I teach MS Project and
Primavera and use them in my consulting. I found Primavera is powerful
but has some issues with advanced users. MS Project is easier to learn
as it is Microsoft product but it has much less capabilities and it gets
me and others frustrated of its performance and controllability. I
found Asta has some advantages over both MS Project and Primavera. If
you don't know it, it is understandable but that doesn't mean it is low
quality. I downloaded the trial version and tested it and got impressed
of some its features that needed in Primavera and Ms Project. It gives
you full control of the schedule, Gantt chart, resources which I really
like. If you do advanced scheduling or claims, you can manipulate the
software the way you want and what you see you get. I checked the new
features in Primavera P6 version 7 that was just released last week.
The big difference in that they are using couple of Asta PowerProject
features. That can tells you a lot. You can download the pdf file that
Primavera has for its new features and get the one that Asta compares
Asta PowerProject to Primavera and see it yourself.

 

[mbelyamani]

I think we should differentiate between small project/basic projec
management requirements and big project/advanced project managemen
requirement. I’m agree with most of points when it consists in small an
basic needs to manage project, but *once we have a lot of projects wit
thousands of activities Primavera should b considered.* Some of th
benefits they published about P3 are:
- Common Data Platform on Oracle / SQL, Client / Server mode.
- All projects data available on a central location, Comparison of dat
of different projects.
- Multi-project planning and control.
- To plan and maintain multi project baselines and examine what-i
alternatives..
- Plan and control large and complex projects efficiently.
- Project ,managers can quickly analyze the impact of changing resourc
limits, activity priorities and constraints on the overall projec
goal.
- File Compression - Send/receive significantly smaller files (5
percent) as a result of new DWG optimized file format.
- Save drawing storage space and increase the speed of file transfe
operations such as emailing drawings or opening and saving drawing
across a network.

Even more than that, there is a significant ecosystem around Primavera
and a lot of tools are developed to support and facilitate a lot o
manual work.

Mohammed,
Emerald Associates
'www.emerald-associates.com' (http://www.emerald-associates.com