The original announcement is here: http://umtblog.com/2011/04/19/new-umt-project-financial-server-2010-virtual-image-content-demo-pack/

Overview

We are excited to announce the availability of the new UMT Project Financial Server 2010 demonstration environment and presenter’s script. With the enhanced Project Financial Server 2010 demo, you can effectively showcase and evaluate the combined power of Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Project Financial Server 2010.

Project Financial Server 2010 demo simply extends the Microsoft 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine and Project 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation Installation Pack to provide a familiar and integrated experience. Whether you want to just highlight Project Financial Server 2010’s comprehensive cost and benefit management capabilities, or simply demo Project Server 2010; this is the right resource for you.

If you not familiar with Project Financial Server 2010, the presenter’s script doubles as a hands on lab and will walk you through the configuration basics and show you how the solution provides financial management support across the entire project life cycle. The presenter’s script includes the following scenarios:

• Visibility & Insight: Business Intelligence (Part 1)
• Configuration: UMT Project Financial Server 2010 Server Settings
• Create: Capturing Cost & Benefit Estimates in a Project Business Case
• Select: Selecting the Right Project Portfolios
• Plan: Building Detailed Cost & Benefit Estimates
• Manage: Measuring & Tracking Financial Performance
• Visibility & Insight: Business Intelligence (Part 2)
• Financial Management for EPT without Workflow
• Steps to Move a project throughout the Entire Workflow

What Is New?

The following enhancements have been made to the previous versions of Project Financial Server demonstration environment:

• Project Financial Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) included: Project Financial Server SP1 offers support for global deployments, includes French, German and Spanish language packs and provides important customer requested stability and performance improvements. Click here to learn more about Service Pack 1.

The following new features all help to improve the demo environment:

• Custom Field Mapping
• Benefit Data workflow validations
• Financial tracking metrics help

• UMT Project Financial Server 2010 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) included: The main benefit of including CU1 in addition to stability improvements, is that the update ensures you can extend Project Financial Server 2010 reporting cube with Project Server 2010 dimensions and measures to build powerful dashboards and reports. Click here to learn more about Service Pack 1.

• Improved Financial Data Set: The updated demo image has an improved dataset helping to provide realistic and compelling views and reports. Whether you are following the presenter’s script word for word, or demoing off the beaten track, the financial data will always be consistent with the current stage in the project workflow

• New Business Intelligence & Dashboards: With the improvements to the underlying financial data we were able to utilize Project Server 2010’s out-of-the-box Business Intelligence capabilities to build powerful financial reports and dashboards. The new dashboards provide insight into both project and portfolio cost and benefit performance
• Custom Field Mapping: The new Custom Field Mapping feature allows you to map subsets of the financial time-phased data to Custom Fields defined in Project Server 2010. The Custom Fields can then be added to web-part, used to add financial data to Project Center Views or support more robust portfolio optimization analyses (e.g. Optimize portfolio by cost constraints from multiple line of business)
• Workflow Enhancements: Minor changes to the Major Project workflow have been made to better support a full life cycle demonstration. You can now quickly create a project and walk it through the workflow to highlight the specific financial governance controls at each Stage
• Financial Tracking Enhancements: There are new financial metrics displayed in the Cost Tracking and Benefit Tracking web parts. You can also select and display additional metrics from the library by editing the web part. Performance improvements resulting from Service Pack 1 have greatly improved web part load times in the Manage scenario
• Enterprise Project Types without Workflow: The demo includes a scenario highlighting how you can use Global Cost Stages to mimic Workflow Stages for Enterprise Project Types without workflow.

How Do I Access and Download to the Demonstration Environment?

We are releasing the following instances of the UMT Project Financial Server demonstration environment:

• Updated UMT Project Financial Server Demo Content Pack: Click here to request access to the Demo Content Pack. This resource is available to Microsoft Project SSPs & Product Group, Partners and Customers. The Demo Content Pack installation guide will walk you through the required steps to install Project Financial Server 2010 and the updated Demo Content Pack on top of the Microsoft Project 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation Installation Pack. You will be provided with a Project Financial Server 2010 30 Day Trial key to ensure you can fully evaluate the solution

• UMT Project Financial Server 2010 Virtual Machine: Send an email to bchamberlain@umt.com to request access to the fully configured Project Financial Server 2010 Virtual Machine. This download is only available to Microsoft EPM SSPs, Product group, Project MVPs and members of the UMT Global Partner Alliance. Although it will take a few hours to download the Virtual Image the main benefits of this approach are:
  • The image is ready to go! Just provision the image in Hyper-V Server and start demoing
  • The image includes an activated Project Financial Server 2010 license

We hope you take advantage of the UMT Project Financial Server 2010 demonstration environment and please provide feedback to Ben Chamberlain (bchamberlain@umt.com ) so we can continue to evolve this important asset.