MS Outlook project management tool is widely used in small and medium companies all around the world, so we can say that probably it is one of the most popular solutions to cope with business tasks, assignments and working calendars in modern IT-industry (in spite of the fact that the earliest versions of this product were introduced even before 1997 when MS Outlook 97 appeared). So what makes project management in Outlook tool so popular? First of all, this is because of really great popularity of Windows systems and MS Office packages (where Outlook application plays one of the key roles). MS Outlook project management tool is not considered as a professional instrument (this role is taken by powerful MS Project), but its tasks management functionality can work for needs of smaller companies that don’t want to employ complicated and expensive MS Project.

Solutions and alternatives:

While MS Outlook is a project management tool that has a great fundament for driving your time and task management practices, some functionality lacking in this program by default can be added with a help of special project management Outlook plugins. These free or paid MS Outlook project management plugins are additional programs that service the main features of this product to enrich them with extended reporting, tracking, synchronization and other useful functions. Such project management Outlook add ins are produced by independent suppliers that provide different level of quality and service, so if you would like to seriously extend your MS Outlook you will need to deal with a dozen of different companies that design and sell these additions. Instead of working with all these Outlook project management add-ins we can offer you to try out some simpler and sole solution that has some benefits over MS Outlook, such as inbuilt multiuser capability. It is called VIP Task Manager that is a program for realtime tasks planning, assigning and sharing. You can read the detailed comparison on both these tools in this Comparison Review section.