One of the highlights of the 2014 SharePoint conference were the App Awards for the Office and SharePoint apps, well it seems that the Appies are being run again, this time for the upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference in July. There are six categories you can nominate your apps in: Best User Interface – App for Office or App for SharePoint Highest Performing App – App for Office or App for SharePoint Most Business Value – App for Office or App for SharePoint Best International Developer – App for Office & SharePoint Best Office 365 App Best Mobile App The last two are the most interesting as you can now submit Office 365 / Consent Flow apps and Mobile apps that extend and augment Office 365 in any of the mobile ecosystems.

At the Project Conference, Microsoft announced some improvements to the reporting capability of Project Online through the introduction of support for SSIS. However, there is a solution available now that will enable you to create powerful dashboards in Project Online from the guys at Fluent Pro called EPM Pulse for Project Online which you can get going in minutes which is available now in the SharePoint app store. Once installed, EPM Pulse will provision an instance within Fluent Pro’s infrastructure that will be used to render your dashboards, which can take a few moments the first time you install.

One of the most common add-ons to Project Server 2010 environments was the workflow visualization solution starter that provided a graphical overview of where a project was in it’s demand management workflow. In 2013 and Project Online, Microsoft introduced an out of the box workflow visualisation component, which is pretty good at showing the stage transitions, but can be limited if you have more complex processes you want to visualize.

Any organisation that uses Project Server will quickly get to the point where they need to modify or add new custom fields as their organisational process or requirements change. As any Administrator will tell you, adding new custom fields is simple, however updating all the projects to reflect the new custom fields is not. Enter Bulk Edit, a popular 2010 solution starter that has been given the app treatment by a few partners.