Project Guide 101: Overview

  • Article

The Project Guide was introduced in Microsoft® Project 2002, to help make Project easier to learn for beginning users. The Project Guide is an additional user interface element that complements the existing, and still familiar, Project interface.

In Microsoft Office Project 2003, the Project Guide has evolved to provide the following benefits:

  • Makes the primary features in Project easier to discover. New users especially may find Project complex at first; the Project Guide orients users to the interface and its functionality.
  • Gives users a clear path to follow through the primary steps involved in the project management process so that they have a deeper knowledge of the project management domain to make Project more useful to them.
  • Integrates project management knowledge and decision-making with an interactive user interface to simplify the user experience.

You can customize and extend the Project Guide for your organization. For example, your organization might want to change particular steps within a project management process, outline their own unique processes, add links to additional information, and display custom Web content in Project.

The Project Guide can also work together with, or independently from, custom views. A custom view is Web-based content that you can integrate within the user interface of Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003 or Project Standard 2003. Custom views can help integrate external applications with Project, or provide views that match an organization's business processes for Project functions and data.

Download   The Project 2003: Project Guide and Custom Views (pj11ProjectGuide101.exe) file includes the default Project Guide files, samples, and templates. This file is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

Important  Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes security patches that break the pgcontent:// and pgmainpage:// custom protocols for the Project Guide. Custom Project Guides that use the custom protocols currently do not work with Windows XP SP2. A fix is in development. You can still create and use custom Project Guides with Windows XP SP2 if you use hard-coded paths for the custom Project Guide files instead of using the custom protocols. For more information about the custom protocols, see Custom Protocols and Localization.

About the Sections of Project Guide 101

Project Guide 101 includes the following sections:

  • What's New in the Project Guide describes new features for Project 2003.
  • Project Guide Architecture and Extensibility describes the Project Guide elements, an overview of how to develop a custom Project Guide, and Project Guide security.
  • Customizing the Project Guide shows how to design Project Guides, build side panes, use main page components and events, and deploy a custom Project Guide.
  • Custom Views and the LoadWebBrowserControl Method describes how to design, develop, and deploy a custom view. This section also explains the difference between a custom view and the Project Guide, and how to use the LoadWebBrowserControl method and related components.
  • References includes a description of the default Project Guide files, a list of samples in the download for custom Project Guides, a custom view, and a discussion of the gbui:// protocol and localization.