For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

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).

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

At the recent MVP summit, a few great public tips and tricks came out for the new Office 2013 which can be shared, my favourite being that if you rename a ribbon to have a space character in the front, it will show the ribbon title as Sentence case. But there was one gem that the team didn’t share, which a little poking around with a hex editor and procmon has highlighted.

There are a lot of changes under the covers with Project Server 2013 including a consolidation of databases, retirement of BCM, stopping in place upgrade support (nobody really did that did they?) and the underlying changes to SharePoint that means upgrading a PS instance is not as simple as it once was. To address this, the product team have released a fantastic poster outlining how to upgrade from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013.

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Microsoft released a pretty nifty PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint. Whilst it doesn’t look to support Project Server PowerShell commands just yet, it does support SharePoint Server 2010 which as Project Server practitioners we all need to roll our sleeves up and do something to now and again. The tool itself uses a handy drag and drop interface to select what you wish to do and then prompts you to enter the relevant information for the command.

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled: ‘A SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010’ It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two.

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

Overnight Microsoft have released all the current Technet IT Pro content for Project Server in a single convenient compiled help file, making it incredibly easy to reference all those guidance notes and best practice when on a machine not connected to the internet. The file can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb. Remember to unblock the file via a Right click / Properties before viewing or the file may not render.

Project 2010 introduces a new visual indicator that shows when a resource is over-allocated within the Gantt chart view. This is a great feature that ensures resource over-allocations are front and centre when people view the schedule, instead of being buried away on a resource tab. However there are times when you may want to suppress these indicators without hiding the whole indicators column, which may contain other important information.

How many people actually read the help files that come with software? I know I tend not to until I get totally stuck. However, today whilst installing Project Server 2010 I decided to go and have a look around the Office 2010 help site at http://office2010.microsoft.com. The site provides a wealth of helpful information around Project and Project Server, but what really stood out was the video content giving overviews of the a number of key features in Project Server, including the new web app, Portfolio management and workflows, each of which are linked to below:

With the Project 2010 client nearing launch, I thought it would be timely to remind everyone who is going to use this fantastic new release that the file format has changed. As such, schedules you create in Project 2010 need to be saved in a previous file version to share with people using Project 2007 and 2003. Luckily Project 2010 makes it really easy to save your schedules in a previous file format.

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.

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.