At the Project Conference I was chatting to someone who was convinced that it wasn’t possible to have different tasks highlighted on different timelines in the Project client, so I thought I would post this walk through to confirm how it can be done. To start, we need to create another timeline. I covered this a while back in this blog post, but for the sake of completeness will go through it again.

Earlier in the week I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the MS Project Podcast by Prasanna Adavi and David Fletcher. The interview was a little about Nintex Workflow for Project Server, some Office 365 and a fair dose of my love of all things Project Server. The episode is available at ttp://www.msprojectpodcast.com/post/65349292852/ep-2-nintex-workflows-project-server-2013-and or you can subscribe to the ongoing podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/msprojectpodcast This is a great initiative by Prasanna and David and I encourage you all to get subscribing and sharing your Project stories with them

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.

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.

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.

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

Project Server 2013 introduced a number of changes to where key settings are located throughout the product. Andrew Lavinsky wrote about it earlier this week and stole some of my thunder for this little tool I was putting together.. introducing the Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison spread sheet. The tool maps the various server settings for Project Server 2010, Project Server 2013 On Premise and Project Online all in a handy filtered Excel spread sheet.

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.

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 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.

Last week Microsoft released the latest preview of Windows 8, the release preview which you can grab from preview.windows.com. Being a fan of the bleeding edge, I downloaded and installed it onto my slate and have been loving it. However, a number of my colleagues reported that they were having issues using Project Server 2010 with the inbuilt desktop version of IE 10, running into ‘**This Project Server 2010 feature requires at least Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

In this second post looking at some of the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 and how they can be leveraged in your Project Server farm, we are going to look at PowerView. PowerView was originally announced as Project Crescent and has wowed pretty much anyone that has seen it. In essence, PowerView allows you to build visualisations of your data using a simple drag and drop interface that are ‘Presentation Ready’ meaning there is no nasty wiring up of data, simply drag your data onto the surface and being analyzing it.

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.

Project Server has a fantastic reporting story, with a dedicated reporting database containing pretty much every piece of data you put in, and a myriad of ways to retrieve, tabulate and visualize that data for the end user. With a little customization or configuration it is possible to build reports that will show the status of the project portfolio, risk and issues and just about anything you want to see. With such powerful reporting it can quickly become difficult for a Project or Portfolio manager to identify the projects or information they are interested in seeing.

Back in 2011 I sat in a session at TechEd Australia where Carolyn Chau showed off a number of the reporting enhancements coming in SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 is a massive release, providing a stack of new features across all aspects of the server . Some of my favourites include things like Availability groups, support for Server core, a new Visual Studio based management to name but a few.

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.

A while back I posted about how you can change the format of dates in Project. The post showed how easily you could change the format of the dates within the main data entry window of Project. One of my readers pointed out that this was not reflected in the Gantt chart bat text automatically, as you can see below. Changing the format of these dates is just as simple as changing the other date formats.

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.

It’s always sound advice to try and keep your Project Server 2010 environment patched to the latest cumulative update, typically these include bug fixes or small enhancements to keep your environment running smoothly. Back in December, Microsoft released the December Project Server 2011 CU, which included a number of fixes and changes to timesheets amongst other things. As Project Server runs on top of your SharePoint environment, it’s also necessary to patch SharePoint at the same time.

In the last post, we covered a few things you will need to know when hiding or disabling ribbon buttons in PWA. In this post we will look at how to actually hide the buttons. Where to start? Irrespective of whether you wish to hide or disable a button in the ribbon, you will need to follow the same basic process by building a solution in Visual Studio that will deploy your ribbon customisation.

Recently I have been working on a number of projects where the requirement to disable ribbon commands in Project Server has come up again and again. There are a couple of posts out there around modifying the ribbon, but they tend to focus on adding new items, not removing or disabling them, so I thought I would post something covering it. Of course, before you look at disabling the ribbon item through a customisation, you should look to see if the item can be disabled using the Project Server security model first.

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.

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

Recently I have seen this problem manifest itself at two customers, so I thought I would post about it to save anyone else running into it, or scratching their heads. When you customise project workspaces, or SharePoint workspaces in general, you have two options to remove the web parts from the page: Close the web part – this stops the web part being rendered on the page, but still being created on each page load Delete the web part – this removes the web part from the page completely.

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner. Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on.

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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.

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

It’s less than two weeks until TechEd Australia, and I have been hard at work with Brian Farnhill putting the finishing touches to the presentation and demonstrations. For those of you coming along, I will be taking part in two sessions: OFS310 The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010 Friday 2nd September – 9:45am – 11:00am It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why.

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010. To complicate matters on the same day, the June 2011 CU was also released and recommended to be installed at the same time. A full list of the fixes and changes in SP1 can be seen here, and the June CU here. At the time of writing, the June CU has a number of known issues that must be understood prior to patching as they may impact your underlying SharePoint farm.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

Recently on the Project forums, a user asked if it was possible to add a target attribute to a menu item in the quick links of Project Server, i.e. the target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window. This capability can be pretty useful, especially when you want to provide links to non project server content that supports the use of the tool such as a PMO help site, or perhaps even your favourite EPM blog Unfortunately the Project Server quick link functionality doesn’t give you an option to set a target and no way to decorate a html anchor statement to insert one.

If you look closely in your SharePoint farm, you will see references to Office.com in some of the ribbons and dialogs…. When you click on the link or button, instead of opening up a window into thousands of SharePoint apps from Microsoft and Community, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show anything Someone asked recently if it was possible to turn these off as they can be confusing for users.

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

A common request for previous versions of Project Server was the ability to extend the security timeout of pages within the tool. Why this was requested was users typically started an action, got called away, or popped out for a coffee, then came back to the page they were editing, pressed save only to be told that the page had timed out and all their edits had been lost. Now this was not across the whole of tool, but only certain pages like editing views, SharePoint team sites etc.

One of the coolest features of Internet Explorer 9, other than the standards compliance and in the case of the Release Candidate, the general speed and stability improvements, is the ability to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar allowing you to launch your favourite websites with one click. With a little more effort, it is possible to define a number of task specific entry points into your site through a jump list that is available when the user right clicks on a pinned site.

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

One of the great new features in Project Professional 2010 was the ability to synchronise a Project schedule with a SharePoint task list. Through this capability and a SharePoint 2010 environment, simple team level project statusing can be achieved with ease. In every demonstration I have seen, and in fact given, I have always assumed that the person updating the tasks would log into SharePoint and update the task through the web interface.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

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.

Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

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.

Every now and again, I check the epmsource logs to see what people have been searching for on the site. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to see that people were searching for Correlation ID’s that are raised when an error occurs in Project Server or SharePoint. As a result, I thought a blog post might be appropriate to restate what Correlation ID’s are and how you can leverage them to gain insights into what is really going wrong.

Earlier today I was lucky enough to present at Melbourne’s 2nd SharePoint Saturday event, with a session entitled ‘Ten reasons why your organisation should consider Project Server 2010’. The audience was a good mix of seasoned Project Server users and people just interested in the general capabilities. In a attempt to leverage some of the excellent social media tools out there, the presentation was linked to Twitter with automatic tweets of further information being sent out at the same time on my twitter account with the #spsmelbourne-proj hash tag.

Back in March I wrote about how you could enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install. I noticed this morning that Microsoft have released a set of clean Project Server 2007 databases for the specific purpose of creating a fresh Project Server 2010 instance in backwards compatibility mode. From the download page… Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM) is a feature in Project Server 2010 that assists in the upgrade of your Enterprise Project Management environment.

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

Melbourne’s second SharePoint Saturday is coming up on the 30th October and looks to be the best one yet. As well as a stack of great content on SharePoint from Australian presenters such as Chris O’Connor, Mark Rhodes and Nalaka Withanage. I will be presenting a fantastic session on Project Server entitled ‘Ten reasons why you should consider Project Server 2010 for your organisation’ Project Server 2010 is a landmark release, providing a wealth of functionality that can be leveraged to execute projects more effectively.

I’m not sure how long this has been advertised, but I noticed this little titbit on the official Microsoft Project site this morning. It seems Microsoft is offering the opportunity to take the Project 2010 beta exam for free to MPUG members, starting this November. To register you need to be an MPUG member and fill out the form located here. I have been an MPUG member for a while now and heartily recommend it.

I usually try and stay away from reposting other content, but there has been so much good stuff released in the past week or two that I wanted to make sure you hadn’t missed any and I didn’t forget it! First off, Brian Smith posted a fantastic article outlining common Project Server 2010 Business Intelligence Center errors here. The Project Team posted an overview of where to look to find the most up to date Project documentation for Developers IT Pro’s and end users.

A couple of users on the Project forums have run into issues getting the Project Server Demo Pack to install onto the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue. But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

Today I was doing some work in my Project Server 2010 demo image around resources and their associated availability. One thing that kept on getting me was I couldn’t find an obvious way of selecting all of my Enterprise Resources other than clicking on each of the checkboxes individually. Well after what felt like ten minutes of clicking around, I found how to do a ‘Select All’ on the Resources.

Today whilst looking around the Project site I noticed some new videos covering a number of new features of Project 2010. I was so impressed with them, I thought I would post them here so you can watch them too. The video’s cover off the following topics: User Controlled Scheduling Team Planner SharePoint Synchronisation. As well as the excellent instruction the presenter provides, there are also a number of step-by-step walkthroughs which take you through each of the features in more detail.

Since the release of Project 2010, a few people have been asking in the forums on how to restrict or configure functionality of Project administratively. The Office 2010 Group Policy Administrative templates outline the various settings of Office that can be configured via Group Policy so organisations can centrally ‘configure’ aspects of Office 2010 for their users. Given some of the new features in Project 2010 such as manually scheduled and inactive tasks could be quite confusing until a user has had a chance to undergo training, this is a valuable tool in ensuring some of those new features can be turned off until the user has been trained to use them.

A common problem I see again and again on projects is the drama involved in getting a project document reviewed and approved. Typically signing off a document confirms that the document contents is correct and has been accepted, this can have commercial implications or be a formal stage gate in the project management process. Many organisations use a manual approval process, sending copies of the document around by email, or worse a printed copy that jumps from in-tray to in-tray which is incredibly inefficient and is nearly impossible to track the progress of.

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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.

Recently a user asked on the forums about how to customise the date format of Project 2010 as it was not reflecting his localised regional settings by default. Project comes with a large set of predefined date formats that can be used throughout the application and will do its best to match one of these to the settings you have in your locale, but it can’t match all of them.

Since the Project 2010 demonstration image was first released in beta form there have been a few questions in the forums and around the office about how the Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Project Detail Pages (PDPs) were implemented. Both of these PDP’s give a glimpse of how the PDP infrastructure can be leveraged to collect information about a project using the most appropriate mechanism. In the case of the the Cost Benefit PDP, an custom Excel based web part is used to collect financial information which is stored in the document library of the relevant project site.

Just a reminder for those Australian readers, tickets are still available for the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference, which is less than six weeks away. The conference has something for everyone, covering both technical and business topics, with: 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance, insurance, legal and engineering 20 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products.

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.

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:

Following on from some of the posts I have been doing about Project 2010, I noticed this spreadsheet from Microsoft this morning that provides a mapping between Project 2007 menu items and where they are in the new Project 2010 fluent interface. Whilst the new 2010 interface makes it easier to find stuff IMHO, for people that have been using Project 2007 heavily, it may take some getting used to and this spreadsheet will help.

A couple of people have asked me in the last few days about where the ‘Copy Picture’ icon that used to be front and centre in the Project 2007 had gone in 2010? I know it’s been posted before on other sites and in the newsgroups, but I thought I would repost it again. To find it, choose the Task tab and then click on the downward arrow next to Copy.

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.

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

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.

The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two related presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

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

With Project Server 2010 on it’s way out of the door, Microsoft are no doubt starting the planning for the next version, Project 15. Whilst Project 2010 is a fantastic product, there are still a few niggly things that I think should be improved, and no doubt you have some ideas too. So, in the vein of Long Zheng’s excellent Taskforce site, where users registered and voted on features they thought could be improved I am starting a wish list and you are free to add things you would like to see.

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 am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

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.

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

To fully understand the functionality of Project Server 2010, it’s important to have a good grasp of it’s underlying platform, SharePoint Server 2010. Back in October, Microsoft hosted the SharePoint Developers Conference in Las Vegas where pretty much every detail of the upcoming release of SharePoint was made public. I noticed today that Microsoft have released a number of the presentation decks from the conference, covering topics like: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services by Using Visual Studio 2010 Deep Dive into Open XML 2.

A while back I posted about getting the Project Server 2010 beta to run on Windows 7. Whilst this wasn’t an officially supported scenario, it was possible. Fast forward to the Release Candidate and it seems that MS have introduced a check that will stop the install happening on any Windows client 🙁 Thanks to a comment by Aric, I tried installing both the SharePoint and Project Server release candidates on a Windows 7 x64 virtual machine.

During a recent presentation, a member of the audience asked if it was possible to have more than one timeline per Project 2010 schedule. Each timeline would be customised to show different levels of information for a different audience, such as the executives, or more details for a steering committee or team members. At the time the general consensus was that it wasn’t possible on the client, but you could achieve the same result if you created a number of server based timelines using the excellent post by Andrew Lavinsky and Visio Services.

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Project Server 2010 Ignite training in Sydney. The training was delivered by Christophe Fiessenger and Jan Kalis and covered all aspects of the upcoming Project 2010 release. The quality of the training was great, providing insights into all the features of the 2010 products, highlighting changes and where there are opportunities for partners to innovate on the platform. Jan and Christophe presented a heap of sessions covering each of the new feature areas, both with slide and demonstration based content.

One of the most obvious features of the Project 2010 client is the introduction of the ribbon. The ribbon first appeared in Office 2007 and made it into most of the client application except Project. The idea behind the ribbon is that it surfaced commands and features that had previously been nested away under several menu options. In Project 2010, the ribbon has finally made it into the product. It consists of four main tabs (Task, Resource, Project and View) and a couple of contextual tabs that are shown depending on what tab you select.

Whilst reading through the search terms people use to find this site, one search keeps turning up again and again – ‘change logo in project server 2010’. So I thought I would write a short post covering how to change the logo, but also highlight a few other ‘out of the box’ ways you can change the look and feel of your Project 2010 instance. Changing the logo To change the logo, first make sure you have a logo of the correct size available.

In a departure from the usual content on this blog, I thought I would try something a bit different, a screen cast. To start of, I have picked one of my favourite features of Project 2010, Sync to SharePoint, a fantastic little feature that allows you project schedule to be synchronised directly with a SharePoint Foundation team site list. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/8944252] This screen cast is very much a toe in the water , so if you like them, please let me know and I will do some more.

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010? Microsoft EPM Specialists Darren Deason and Alex Burton will take you on a journey around the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up. Some of the topics discussed will be as follows: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Project to WSS Synchronisation · Integrated Portfolio Management · Enterprise Project Templates

Project Server 2010’s reporting and business intelligence story is phenomenal. One of the most noticeable changes is that the Data Analysis views of previous versions have been deprecated in favour of using Excel Services based reports that interface directly with the cubes. As part of a default Project Server installation in the beta, a library of templates and sample reports are created within Project Server for use, however they won’t work until you have configured the server correctly.

I will be presenting along with my colleague Darren Deason at the February 2010 MPUG Melbourne Chapter Meeting. The topic of the meeting is Are you ready for Project 2010 and will take a tour of the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up, including: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Integrated Portfolio Management · User Delegation · Enterprise Project Templates · Improved Timesheets · And many more exciting new features …

Update : Links changed. I just stumbled upon this list of known issues for the 2010 Server products at http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/microsoft-office-servers-beta-2-known-issuesreadme-HA101267292.aspx. Listed is the known issue around the provisioning of project workspaces, plus a few others I hadn’t run into around timesheets and deliverables.

One of the features of Project Server 2010 I was really keen to try out was that of delegates. In Project Server 2007, when a Project Manager goes on leave, it is necessary to go through and manually reassign each task in the schedule to a new status manager so they can see the tasks, their updates and manage the schedule effectively. When that user returns from holiday, you then have to repeat the process and reassign each task back.

Update: Check out http://epmsource.com/2010/02/22/project-server-2010-on-windows-7-an-update/ for an update on this post. A while back I heard that there would be an improved developer story for the next version of SharePoint. For those that have never tried developing for the platform, you typically have to have a virtual machine and dev against that. Given the change to 64bit only and the large resource overhead running SharePoint and Project Server in a VM is a bit more of a challenge.

The Project Team wrote a while back about the Sync to SharePoint feature of Project 2010. This past week, the beta of Project 2010 has been released to TAP and MSDN / Technet and I have had a chance to play around with it. Since hearing Microsoft’s positioning of the Sync to SharePoint feature, I have been keen to try it out and see how useful it really will be. So here are 9 things you may not know about this awesome feature:

One of the core features of Project Server that integrates the tool into an organisation are Enterprise Custom Fields or ECF’s. ECF’s allow the recording of business specific metadata which is used to classify the various aspects of an organisation across a project, resource and task level. During the planning stages of a Project Server implementation a significant amount of time is spent understanding the custom fields that need to be configured in order for the tool to meet the requirements of the business.

Update****: It appears that this feature isn’t new, but rather something that was in the previous version of Project but buried deep on a right click toolbar menu. So instead of a new feature, this is the perfect example of an old feature that has been surfaced due to the introduction of the ribbon. As a project manager at a consulting company one of the jobs that I frequently had was running bids for new pieces of work.

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