I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well. In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).

SharePoint Designer 2013 is another tool that provides a means for building workflows, what is new in the 2013 release is it can now build Demand Management workflows for Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Now I am not going to go into the specifics of the tool, as you probably already know my preference, but irrespective of that, I thought it important to share how to build workflows that leverage the Skip to Stage functionality with SPD.

I try not to mix my day job at Nintex with my community work and the content on this site, but today I want to make an exception and share some news on one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months. I am pleased to announce that we have shipped Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013 (NW4PS), an update to the popular workflow product for Project Server 2013.

You may be aware that Project Server 2013 can now use demand management workflows built in SharePoint Designer and the new Azure based Workflow Manager. But you may not be aware that the old 2010 ‘legacy’ workflow capabilities are also still present and available for you to leverage. This is particularly important for organisations that may be upgrading from Project Server 2010 and have invested in demand management workflows and do not want to redevelop or significantly refactor their workflows for Project Server 2013 and the new Workflow Manager.

A question came up in the Project forums recently around how it was possible to filter the available projects for a portfolio analysis, so I thought I would post a little tip here, which from a majority of the Project Server 2010 implementations I have seen is usually forgotten or managed by business process. When you create a portfolio analysis, Project Server allows you to choose which projects you want to use as part of the analysis, out of the box, this shows you all the projects currently within the PWA instance, irrespective of their status.

At SharePoint Saturday Toronto, I presented one of my favourite sessions on SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management using Project Server 2010, based on Christophe Fiessinger’s and Scott Jamison’s session from TechEd NA 2011. I’ve delivered this session three or four times now, showing how organisations can benefit from using Project Server to collect business requests and guiding them through a process to successfully collect information, objectively determine which project to implement and then assist in the implementation.

I am delighted to announce that I will be speaking at my first international SharePoint Saturday, the sell out SPSToronto on July 7th on one of my favourite topics ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. “You’ve installed SharePoint and now everybody is using it, but how do you handle business requests for new sites, workflows, custom applications, web parts and dashboards? Come along to this session to see how you could implement a powerful request / workflow solution to assist your organization to view, analyze, prioritize and resource requests using the workflow and portfolio analytics capabilities of Project Server 2010.

Over the past week or two, Microsoft have been quietly uploading all the sessions from the recent Project Conference held in Phoenix to the Project channel on Microsoft Showcase. This morning the Project team officially announced the availability, so I am pleased to announce that the video of Mark McDermott’s and my session is now available for your viewing pleasure. I encourage you to watch it and let me know if you have any questions.

A while back I wrote about how you could customise your Project Server instance to incorporate one of the great new features of Internet Explorer 9, Jump Lists. In the post we explored how through a little bit of JavaScript and a content editor web part a Project Server administrator could provide quick access to common links in PWA when a user pins the site. As I had been spending a lot of time around demand management workflows recently, I started to wonder if it would be possible to incorporate workflow approval tasks onto an IE9 jump list.

Today Mark McDermott and myself presented our session on Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The session covered three main areas where organisations can leverage Nintex workflow within their Project Server environments. Demand Management – During the session we looked at some of the more advanced scenarios for building demand management workflows, leveraging some of the Nintex out of the box actions such as state machines and flexi tasks.

Last week I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Dux Raymond Sy about my upcoming session at the Microsoft Project Conference which I will be presenting with Mark McDermott of Nintex. Mark and I have been busy putting the final touches to the presentation and demonstrations and have a really great session planned. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSY_cd1ZcTE&w=448&h=252&hd=1] Our session is on Thursday 22nd March at 10:30am in room North 222 C.

It’s been a little quiet on the blog for the last couple of weeks, the reason is that I am head down preparing for my session at the upcoming Project Conference in Phoenix. I am presenting with the Vice President of Sales for Nintex, Mark McDermott on Building Advanced Project Server Workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The session will go take you through some of the more advanced concepts with Nintex Workflow and how they can be related in your project server workflows, we will also be touching on some of the new components of version 2.

A user in the Project Server forums asked a question this week about whether it was possible to add printing capability to the Project Detail Pages in order to allow the ‘forms’ to be printed out as there is no print button available on the ribbon. Out of the box, the printing capability in the Project Web Application is limited to the grids, including the schedule grids that are visible in a schedule PDP and uses a custom page to render the information as can be seen below.

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post! Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components: Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow; New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database; Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

Recently I have been looking into how far you can integrate a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow into the day to day management of a project. One particular area I have been concentrating on is encoded logic within the workflow to check the status of tasks within the schedule. Imagine the scenario, a project can only move into the close phase if all the deliverables or milestones in the project have been met, or you may want the phase of the project to change following the completion of a specific task.

It’s that time again, after a break over the summer, I am pleased to announce that the next Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG) Melbourne chapter meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 24th May 2011 at Microsoft Melbourne. The topic of this meeting is demand management, covering the theory behind it, how it can benefit your organisation and Project Server 2010’s approach to implementing this exciting new capability. This is a free event, so save the date and make sure you register via EventBrite now!

In the first part of this series, we looked at using Playbooks to move demand management assets from one server to another. Whilst Playbooks is a very useful tool, it does have one limitation in that it moves all the chosen settings over, so if you wish to export a single EPT and its PDPs, you’re out of luck. Luckily Microsoft released another tool as part of its ‘solution starters’ series that allows the selective exporting and importing of demand management assets.

Over the Christmas break there was a question in the Project forums around how to deploy the various demand management assets from Development to Test to Production in a controlled manner, i.e. not manually. When I say demand management assets I mean things like Enterprise Project Types, Workflow Stages, Workflow Phases, Project Detail Pages, Web parts, Project Custom Fields and Workflow Proxy settings, i.e. all the bits that your Demand Management workflow needs to operate correctly, but not the necessarily the workflow itself.

A common request from people that develop workflows within Project Server is how to create a simple approval process for a project to transition a stage gate, so I thought I would write a blog post covering off how you can achieve it with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The stage gate logic I am going to use, is outlined in the flow chart below. The approval will give the user two options, either approve and move into the next stage of the project, or reject the approval and stay in Stage 1.

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

In the previous two posts, we covered off how to extract the workflow data from the Project Server Reporting database, and the basics of how to extend the Backstage view. In this post I will cover off how to merge the two together, and to discuss some of the limitations and problems I ran into. For the proof of concept I wanted the backstage view to render dynamic information about the project workflow in the backstage, checking out MSDN and Technet I found some fantastic resources to assist, including Customizing the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers and it’s associated code .

In this second post covering my proof of concept to expose workflow status information in the Project backstage I will cover off some of the basics on how to extend the backstage. Like all of the Office 2010 clients, Project’s backstage can be customised by defining the various interface elements and their associated behaviours using an XML schema that has been published by Microsoft and is available for download here.

In the first of three posts covering my proof of concept to show the workflow status in the Project backstage, I will be covering off how to access the workflow data itself from within the Project Server. Now as this was a proof of concept, I decided to go with the simple approach of getting the information directly from the Reporting database instead of calling the Project Server PSI. There were a couple of reasons for this, firstly simplicity, accessing the data in the Reporting database via SQL and VBA is much simpler in my opinion than calling the PSI.

One of the significant changes in the Office 2010 client was the introduction of the backstage view. The way it has brought common commands front and centre and combined relevant supporting information has quickly become one of those features I can’t live without and certainly something I notice immediately when I use any 2007 Office client. In Project 2010, this is particularly noticeable, with a number of the Enterprise features that were previously buried away in the jungle of menu’s prominent on the backstage, including items such as Project Publish, Organising the Enterprise Global and accepting Status updates from your team, which is a massive improvement in usability and functionality.