by Kristin Hanley
A hosted deployment is fast, reliable, offers flexibility and scalability and provides immediate business value. Hosting is used by many different types of customers of all different sizes and across varying industries. Referenceable companies currently taking advantage of hosted deployments, range from Fortune 500 to government and small to mid-sized businesses. Microsoft themselves utilize a hosted deployment of Project Server.
Hosting is a deployment option worth exploring for implementing Microsoft Office Project Server (EPM) and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server (PPS).
Fast
A hosted deployment of Microsoft Office Project Server or Microsoft’s newly acquired Project Portfolio Server is a reliable way to deploy one of these applications in a matter of weeks as opposed to months. A hosted deployment allows an organization to realize business advantages sooner than with a traditional deployment. Consulting hours are reduced by eliminating application installation, installation validation and installation issue troubleshooting tasks.
In addition to a faster time to deployment, with hosted implementations, the data center is on an Internet backbone and typically users experience very positive application performance, even when connecting remotely.
Reliable
When hosting your application you are able to leverage industry best practices in the areas of integrating, upgrading, tuning and maintaining your application. Resources monitoring and maintaining your application are skilled in SQL Server, Project and Project Portfolio Server, SharePoint, Terminal Services, Active Directory, OLAP, Active X and Office Web Components.
Many hosting companies maintain industry-leading uptime through redundant CPUs, drives and hot spare servers. Project Solutions Group works closely with Microsoft and our hosting partners to ensure customers receive timely 24x7 application support.
Flexible and Scalable
Hosting provides flexible, scalable solutions that grow with your organization. The EPM and PPS specific data center infrastructures are scalable. Customers have the flexibility to migrate to their own data center at any time. You can start small and then grow your deployment on your timeline. The hosted model is one that works great for deploying an initial pilot or proof of concept. When ready, you can migrate your hosted server behind your firewall as your capacity or other business needs require it. This capability allows divisions of large businesses that need to get started with EPM quickly to do so. To support distributed, larger global deployments hosted instances are available in multiple languages.
Hosting makes managing projects requiring direct customer or vendor collaboration even easier. With hosting you can allow customers, vendors, and partners to access and update project information without letting them inside your corporate firewall.
Hosting is an affordable option with flexible payment terms. Often hosted contracts are offered on a month-to-month and pay by user basis. Microsoft licenses can be purchased upfront or rented depending on what best suits your business model.
Business Value
Hosting offers a way to simplify increasingly complex, costly, high-maintenance internal IT environments. With a hosted deployment, there is no need to invest in on-site IT infrastructure or added capital expenditures to house your application. There is no need to recruit, hire or train additional IT staff and software specialists. Existing IT staff can focus on more strategic efforts as opposed to day-to-day support activities.
Hosting provides a faster Return on Investment than traditional on-site deployments.
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