standard or Professional

[EUG]

Hi,
My partner and I are working as Real Estate brokers for a firm that develop
new homes subdivision, from the initial track of land down to the last house
sold.
We are also running the marketing side of these subdivisions.
We were thinking of using Microsoft Project to put in place the marketing
plan for each subdivision.
At this point we’re only 2 managing all the marketing campaigns, but our on
site agents have to report to us on lead generation and tasks related to the
marketing campaign.
Also as we grow and manage multiple marketing campaigns (5+) we will add
people to the marketing team.
What do you suggest : Standard vs Professional?……. Project server?
And how you set this up? I can figure out how to get Project professional?
Thanks for your help!

Eugenie

 

[Steve House]

It depends on whether you're planning to eventually deploy Project Server or
not. The only difference between Project Standard and Project Professional
is in its interaction with Server. Essentially Pro does it and Standard
doesn't. In a stand-alone desktop environment you can certainly run Pro if
you want to but you don't gain anything over using Standard - Standard does
everything Pro does when it's not connected to Server. Setup of a Server
environment and getting everyone productive with it is far from trivial and
deserves some serious weighing of its cost versus benefits in your specific
situation before making the decision one way or the other. For some users
it's the only way to fly, for others it's swatting flies with an elephant
gun. Unless you have a strong, formal PM background I'd suggest you bring
some consulting help in to help you with the evaluation and decision
process.