The PlainPPM Feature Kiosk – start simple and extend as needed

Open and extensible – your project management with Microsoft 365

PlainPPM is our platform for shared project management: one standard for everyone involved in your projects, easy to use and fully integrated with Microsoft 365. And you can extend it exactly where you need to – through the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk.

The app is at the heart of it all. Around this core, the solution grows piece by piece, exactly when you need it. What this means in practice is best seen where these extensions live: the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk.

Many organizations rely on extensive software solutions to automate project and project portfolio management. Their scope is fixed before anyone has actually worked with them – and in everyday use, it tends to overwhelm users rather than support them. In the end, only a fraction of it gets used. What an organization really needs only becomes clear once it’s up and running. Extending as needed reverses the order: you start with the standard and add whatever proves necessary.

Step by step to the right solution

PlainPPM comprises three levels that build on each other:

The standard. You start with a complete PPM solution: Ideas, Projects, Tasks, Resources, Reports, MeinPM and the Admin Center – from the first idea to project closure. Not a minimal version, but a solid foundation your organization can work with.

Modular extensions. Anything you need beyond that is added as a self-contained building block – not as a rebuild of the core, but as an addition you can include or leave out.

AI-powered additions. And if something is still missing after the standard and the extensions, we close the gap – AI-powered and tailored to your requirements.

The difference lies in when you decide. You don’t have to determine up front what you’ll need in two years’ time. You decide when you can see it.

The extensions in the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk

The PlainPPM Feature Kiosk is where these extensions live. It’s integrated directly into our trial environment and shows the PlainPPM standard together with all available extensions.

Using it is deliberately straightforward: click a tile, launch the app, try it out. No procurement process, no installation, no up-front decision. You see the extension with sample data and judge on a real screen whether it adds value for you – rather than from a feature description in a proposal.

That’s the real difference. It’s hard to decide based on a feature list. With the actual view right in front of you, you can decide in two minutes.

This short overview (in German) shows what it looks like:

Watch on YouTube

Two examples from the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk

Gantt Visual places all projects on a shared timeline, overlays the baseline on the current plan if you wish and shows delays to the exact day – right in the Projects module.

Scenario Analysis answers the what-if question: play through variants of your portfolio, calculate them against the available capacity and compare them side by side before you decide.

Both are extensions, not part of the standard.

What this means for your implementation

Two things change in practice:

You start sooner. The standard stands on its own and supports the end-to-end project lifecycle.

You evaluate and decide when the time comes. You try an extension before you procure it. This shifts the discussion away from what a module promises and toward whether it actually improves something in your organization.

How a building block from the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk comes to you

The path is always the same: you see the extension in the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk, test it in the trial environment with sample data and decide. If it fits, we build it into your PlainPPM environment. Extensions are not automatically included in your environment – they get there when you want them.

If you need something that doesn’t exist yet, let’s talk about it. Some of today’s extensions came about in exactly this way: from a requirement one customer had that then helped other customers, too.

What it costs – the logic behind it

PlainPPM separates two things that are often lumped together: implementation and usage.

You pay for the implementation once. You decide how extensive it is – from a lean standard configuration to an implementation with workshops, your own processes and connections to your systems.

Usage is covered by an annual package – regardless of how many users you have. There’s no per-user price. Whether ten or two hundred people work with PlainPPM makes no difference to the package, and read-only users cost nothing extra. Among other things, the package includes a test environment, support and access to the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk. The Microsoft licenses themselves are covered by your own Microsoft agreement – just like the rest of your Microsoft 365 environment.

An extension from the Feature Kiosk is charged once, per building block. No fee that keeps growing permanently with every module you add. If you use the Feature Kiosk more intensively, there’s an annual package with a discount on extensions.

Why we mention this here: the Feature Kiosk idea only works if adding features later isn’t penalized. If every extension increased your running costs and every additional user drove up the price, “try first, then decide” would be an empty invitation. We’re happy to tell you the specific amounts in a conversation – they depend on what you implement and which Microsoft licenses you already have.

Conclusion

A solution that can do everything is rarely the one people end up working with. A strong core that you can extend in a targeted way goes live faster and grows with what your organization actually needs.

Take a look at the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk. In the trial environment, you open the extensions with sample data and see within minutes which ones could work for you – without changing anything in your own environment. We’ll gladly set up trial access for you.

PlainPPM is project and project portfolio management built entirely on standard Microsoft 365 – native to Microsoft 365, optimized for Microsoft Teams, built on the Microsoft Power Platform.

Frequently asked questions