TeamDirection Project for SharePoint brings the SharePoint Document Workspace experience to a basic project management application. SharePoint Document Workspaces are perhaps one of the lesser-known features of Office 2003. When you set up a Document Workspace, you hook up a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document to a dedicated SharePoint sub site. The document gets a special task pane to manage collaborative tasks such as instant messaging with co-authors, task management, link management, and so on, and you can use the sub site for anything that SharePoint itself is capable of - here’s a Microsoft page showing off how it works.

It’s all pretty nicely integrated and spiffy.When you launch TeamDirection Project for SharePoint, you get a Project Organizer window listing all of your active projects and offering options such as creating, deleting, importing, exporting, and synchronizing projects (in addition to SharePoint synchronization, it offers two-way import/export with Microsoft Project files). TeamDirection projects have a task pane that functions pretty much like the one in Office documents, so if you’ve used Document Workspaces before you’ll feel right at home. And of course you can always drop into the SharePoint back end to perform other collaborative work beyond that which the task pane enables if you so desire.The project management application itself is fairly simple, managing tasks, times, resources, and costs, and showing time and cost roll ups.

You won’t find the sort of fancy bells and whistles here that you get from Microsoft Project or other applications aimed at the professional project manager - not even resource leveling. But the ability to round-trip to Project makes up for that to some extent. Where I see this fitting in is to fill a niche in organizations that already manage everything at the departmental level via SharePoint.

If you’re one of them, you’ve probably already experimented with trying to use Excel to maintain a project plan, simply because Excel is a better fit for SharePoint than Project is. In that case, TeamDirection is a much better fit: the SharePoint integration is superb, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to. For a small group focusing on a reasonably-sized project that doesn’t need high-end PM tools, this looks like an excellent fit. You can download a 15-day trial to try it out yourself.

ReadWriteWeb has a nice write up of social businesss applications.