Microsoft Project 2007

Microsoft Project (or MSP) is a project management software program developed and sold by Microsoft which is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads. The first version of Microsoft Project was released for DOS in 1984 by, a company working for Microsoft. Microsoft bought all rights to the software in 1985 and released version 2. Version 3 for DOS was released in 1986. Version 4 for DOS was the final DOS version, released in 1986. The first Windows version was released in 1990, and was labeled version 1 for Windows. An interesting thing to note is that the first version for DOS introduced the concept of link lines (dependency lines) between tasks in the Gantt chartas mentioned in , and  a well known resource.

Microsoft Project was the company's third Windows-based application, and within a couple of years of its introduction WinProj was the dominant PC-based project management software. Although branded as a member of the Microsoft Office family, it has never been included in any of the Office suites. It is available currently in two editions, Standard and Professional.

A Macintosh version was released in July 1991 and development continued through Project 4.0 for Mac in 1993. In 1994, Microsoft stopped development of most of its Mac applications and did not offer a new version of Office until 1998, after the creation of the new Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit the year prior. The MacBU never released an updated version of Project ,and the prior version from 1993 does not run natively on Mac OS X.