If you are working in multi-projects organization and want to share some resources among projects then the only way to do so is to use Resource Pool.

you can use resources from different projects without using the resource pool but the resource availability can not be controlled for both projects as there is no common information about the resource is shared between them

So, adding the resource to the resource pool will help you in

• Assignment information, as well as cost rates and availability for all resources, reside in one central location
• It is also easier to see resource overallocations (overallocation: The result of assigning more tasks to a resource than the resource can accomplish in the working time available.) caused by conflicting assignments across more than one project

MS Project provide Enterprise Resource Pool as a solution for this issue,  to access the ERP you can open MS Project professional 2007 and go to Tools ==> Enterprise Options ==> Open Enterprise Resource Pool

if you want to add more resources to your ERP then go to Toos ==> Enterprise Options ==> Import Resources to  Enterprise

Some notes about ERP

• Using MS Project 2007 professional connected to the server will allow you to see only Enterprise Resource Pool
• If you want to see or use local resources using MS Project 2007 professional then don't connect to the server and just open local project files, but again if you want to save and publish this local project to the server you need to import your local resource into the ERP using the mapping resource tool that will raised up once you start saving the project to the server, you have either to map your local resources to the ERP resources or just import them as new providing that there is no duplication

Best Regards

Bilal Okour