Work flow and automation are more difficult to implement in PE than the competition, as they require custom coding to implement. A companion product, ProjectOffice (a competitor to Microsoft Project), provides basic routing and work flow. PO integrates handily into PE, though Microsoft Project can also easily be integrated to provide complete project-management data for PE.
Simple approvals can be used within PE, but out-of-the-box approval and automation capabilities of PE lag behind the competition. We'd like to see more automation without the requirement to code.
Notifications and alerts were also missing from the base PE product. Pacific Edge provides these capabilities as a module rather than integrating this base functionality within the product, as Artemis and Changepoint have done.
PE's method of scoring--that is, prioritizing projects based on how well they meet business objectives in light of the associated risks and benefits--was complex but well-suited to the enterprise environment. Weighted grading of risk, benefit and strategic alignment let the system automatically assist in the prioritization process. The ranking process within PE was more complete out of the box than that of the competition.
PE is completely .Net-based and, like Changepoint's solution, requires IE 5.5+ as its browser. With PE, you can import users from directories (LDAP, ADS); the vendor plans to offer authentication via ADS in Q4 2004. Database support was also limited to SQL Server; Pacific Edge indicated that Oracle support is forthcoming.
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