With the introduction of Office 2013 and the arrival of Project Online in Office 365 I thought it would be a good time to try and bring some members of the Project and SharePoint community together to launch a new community site. So it is my great pleasure to introduce the365project.net. What is the365project.net? Well it’s a new tips and tricks site for the Project, Project Server and SharePoint, covering the existing versions and the new 2013 wave of products.

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

I ran into this issue at a customer recently and thought I would share it on the blog in case someone else ran into. The customer is a heavy user of the document management solution TRIM and has the program TRIM Context installed on most of their PC’s in order to allow users to store documents directly in TRIM from their desktop applications. During user acceptance testing, one user was unable to save and publish their project schedules into Project Server in one session as the publish button was disabled until the schedule was saved, MS Project closed and the schedule reopened.

A week or so ago, I needed to go through the various Project Server 2007 CU’s to see if a particular issue my customer was experiencing had been fixed or was a new bug. After a bit of searching I was surprised to see that there wasn’t a definitive list of all the Project Server 2007 CU’s out there. There seemed to be a few which went from RTM through to SP2 (http://support.

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

Recently the Project Server 2007 queue at one of my customers stopped working. What made this stranger was that it occurred on the Production, Test and Development environments within days of each other. My first thoughts were to see if the customer’s IT department had made any changes to the environments, like a patch, or hosting configuration change, but after passing my polygraph tests it seems they hadn’t. Restarting the Queue Service didn’t seem to fix the issue, resulting in the error:

I thought I would blog this so I can find it again and in case someone else runs into this issue. Last week whilst performing a health check on a Project Server 2007 installations I came across this error which seemed to be a pretty common occurrence in the event logs. Error loading and running event receiver Microsoft.Office.Project.PWA.WSSEventReceivers.PSDBUpdater in Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.PWA,Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Additional information is below. Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred.

For the past couple of weeks I have been building some financial reports from information stored within the cubes of Project Server 2007. The client has some pretty full on requirements around presenting the information, so I chose to implement the reports using Microsoft Excel which I can apply a bit of logic and formatting to instead of the out of the box PS2007 data analysis views. One problem I ran into was that the Fiscal Time dimension in the cubes was showing as ‘Not Set’ when trying to set it as a filter.

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.

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

Last week a question came up as to whether it is possible to have multiple cost rates for a resource within the same project. The answer of course is yes, and this is how you do it. Navigate to the Resource Sheet and double click on the resource you want to have multiple rates. Navigate to the Costs tab of the Resource Information dialog

I ran into this issue whilst visiting a client this week, which I haven’t seen before. When the user tried to manually associate a project schedule with the workspace via Server Settings > Operational Policies > Project Workspaces , they would get this error: After verifying the workspace was not linked to an existing project, I turned my attention to the the project workspace template that we were trying to associate.

As noted over on Christophe’s blog, Microsoft have now made available free of charge online EPMU training courses covering: Microsoft EPMU – Admin Professional – Functional Implementation & Configuration of Project Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – IT Professional – Technical Implementation & Configuration of Project Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – Office Project Server 2007 Developer Training (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – Deploying Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Certainly an excellent way of spending some downtime if you want to skill up on all things EPM.

All too often when you are working on a project, the schedule can evolve from what you originally thought the schedule would be when you built it, to what the reality is. For example, in the schedule below there are three tasks, it turns out that Task 2 is no longer required. In Project 2007 there are two options to remove the task… Leave the task on the plan and set the remaining work to 0