I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming inaugural Project Virtual Conference, a free global online conference that is dedicated to Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online that will be running for 24 hours. For those of you that may have missed it, the Project Virtual Conference is a completely free, virtual conference that has been organised by members of the Project community (Prasanna, Cindy, Treb, Ben, Rod, Paul, Julie and Vadim) in their spare time.

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.

Just a quick post to highlight a couple of exciting new capabilities for Project Online that have appeared in the Office roadmap, that you may have missed.  The following two items have been added under the launched category. The first Bulk updates in Project Online Workflow creators in Project Online can bulk update project custom fields with a single service request. Previously, each custom field update required a separate service request.

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.

Whilst looking into a workflow issue today on my Office 365 tenant, I noticed a new feature that appears to be quietly rolling out into Office 365, the Workflow Health screen. Dee over at DDLS also noticed it a few weeks back and blogged about it, but I thought I would dig in a little more. From the surface it looks like the feature addresses some of the issues in Office 365 when the Workflow Manager instance your tenant is attached to is down or unavailable or you want to see aggregated status of workflows in a site or list without clicking into each workflow instance.

A little late, but I thought I would post information about this great resource from Brian Smith. If you’ve ever had to hunt for details of which CU contained a fix for an issue and had to sit there in Google and Bing aggregating results, hunt no more, Brian has created a single page that contains details of all the Cumulative Updates for Project and Project Server 2013 on-premises in a single location over at the Project Support blog.

A while back Microsoft announced the release of the App Launcher in Office 365, also lovingly christened the Waffle by many due to it’s resemblance to the popular food. In the last few weeks the Waffle has started to appear across Office 365 tenants providing a much cleaner way of navigating to the various bits of Office 365 you care about. However, even with this cool new capability, I miss the old Projects and OneDrive links that used to be on the Navigation Bar and often find myself cursing having to go over to the top left and clicking on what I want.

One of the big things to happen in Office 365 whilst I was ‘offline’ was a quiet announcement about the removal of the My Tasks capability on your My Site. In case you hadn’t seen it, the My Tasks capability rolls up all tasks that have been assigned to you across SharePoint sites into a single view in your My Site. I’ve posted on it a few times before with the work management tag and it’s a great capability.

Running an online service is a massive undertaking, especially when you consider something of the size of Office 365. Not only do you need to keep adding new capabilities to the service, but you need to balance this with maintaining the lowest possible Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and ensuring the service is efficient and performant. The Project engineering team have been hard at work over the last few months performance changes across the service including the Project Center, Creating and Publishing a project, Submitting a timesheet as well as general tweaks etc.

Wow… I didn’t realise that I hadn’t posted for so long. Things have been a little crazy in my day job over the past few months with me moving into a new role but I’ve been keeping my finger on the Project pulse and have some great posts coming up in the next few months. PS. For those not sure of the picture, it’s a service card that used to be shown on UK TV when the service was down.

Project Online has been available for a little over a year now, the first real SaaS version of Project Server operated by Microsoft and available in Office 365. The online service provides all the capabilities of Project Server you would expect, the centralised view of Projects, Resource Management, Task & Timesheet management, Portfolio Analysis and Prioritisation, Reporting and powerful collaboration for a monthly per user fee. Is some cases, organisations don’t need access to all this functionality for all users, specifically team members only really need access to the Task & Timesheet functionality, collaboration sites and the ability to see their project schedules.

I’m a little late to the party with this, but Microsoft have released a number of excellent Quick Start Guides taking users through key concepts in Project Server and Project Online which I thought I would share with the readers of this blog. The quick start guides cover a number of topics and can be obtained from the links below: Get started with Project Online Create Projects in Project Online

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.

Last night at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the winners of the ‘Appies’, recognising the best apps in the Microsoft Office and SharePoint stores. The awards highlighted a number of great apps covering SharePoint, Office and Project, including: Campagna and Schott for their CS Task Board app, a runner up in the Best UI award; CPS’s Project Task Auditor, winning the Most Business Value award for Project client apps; and Sensei’s Project Dashboard, winning the Most Interesting Scenario, Project category.

Hot off the press this morning, the session video’s for the Project Conference are now available to watch via Channel 9. Here are a couple of my favourites so far (and I may be biased).. Future of Business Productivity Keynote – Check out the great demo with the Nintex Workflow for Office 365 app. My session Implementing your organizational process in SharePoint, Project Server and Office 365 with Nintex

The Project Support blog today published a post about a pretty nasty bug that has been found in Project Server 2013 and until very recently in Project Online that could cause you to lose resources across schedules. Full details of the bug and the actions you can take to address the issue if you have encountered it can be seen at http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2014/02/06/project-server-2013-and-project-online-what-happened-to-my-resources.aspx. If you have encountered any issues with lost resources including resource names turning into numbers, or mysterious material resources appearing, I would highly encourage you to read the above blog.

In the past few days an update has been pushed out to Project Online to improve some of the navigation elements of the Project Center. If you look closely above you will see after each Project Name a new context menu elipsis (…) has been added which when you click on it will open up a notification giving you key pieces of data about the project.   From the screenshot above you can see the Project Name, %age complete, the project start date and end date as well as the Owner and Last Published date.

I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

In case you had missed the news, Microsoft have announced The Appies, a competition around creating an awesome app for SharePoint, Office 2013 or our favorites, Project Server, Project Online or the Project client (Jeremy had the scoop a few weeks ago and coined the Appies name which I think is pretty apt). To qualify for the Appies, all you need to do is submit a new app or update an existing app between November 25th 2013 and January 31 2014 to be automatically entered.

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

Thanks to Jeremy Thake for the heads up, but I thought I would repost this here to alert some of the Project Server community that build apps for SharePoint and Project Server and read this blog. Microsoft have launched a public UserVoice community to collaborate on feedback for the SharePoint app model moving forward. If you’re not familiar with UserVoice, it allows you to submit ideas and vote & comment on other user ideas.

Tech Ed Australia is being held on the Gold Coast between the 3rd and 6th September this year. I am happy to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia this year with my partner in crime, Mr Brian Farnhill with an awesome session entitled…. The SharePoint 2013 App Playbook – Your Guide to Building and Publishing a Great App Office 2013 has brought an amazing new platform for developers to take advantage of, in the format of apps and the online app store.

A common requirement from customers is to be able to hide / disable buttons within their Project Server instance and of course, this requirement will not go away with Project Online. I wrote a a while back about how you could disable or hide ribbon buttons using a simple sandboxed solution. Well the good news is that this approach is still valid for Project Online. Given all the focus on the app model and the flexibility and restrictions it introduces, it is sometimes forgotten that you can still deploy sandboxed solutions to your Project Online environment.

One of the most obvious differences between Project Server 2013 and 2010 is the look and feel, specifically the new modern UI style tiles to help you perform tasks / find options quickly and easily called ‘The Carousel’. On a un-customised PWA site you will see two rows of these tiles, the ‘Getting Started’ and the ‘Track your work’ options. For a while I have been thinking about how powerful one of these carousels would be within your own organisation, perhaps providing a direct link to view the queue, a link to that report everyone uses, a central lessons learned register, a PMO site, or even your favourite EPM / PPM blog.

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013. With SharePoint 2013, your organisation has access to a task management solution that can start simply and scale up to the enterprise level at the click of a button.

After a month long holiday, it’s time to resume normal blog service and share some EPM goodness. I I have a couple of posts that I am working on at the moment, but in the meantime here are few gems that you should find useful Developing Project Server apps walkthrough Following on from my series covering the building the Publish All Enterprise Project app, Microsoft have released an official walk through to build a Project Server app over at http://msdn.

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.

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

One of the many exciting additions to Office 2013 was the introduction of apps, through these apps it is possible to add, extend and enhance the functionality available to users, for example you could have an app to help track election results, add Facebook social to your sites or build workflows. The apps themselves are available for a number of the desktop clients, as well as SharePoint 2013 and Project Server 2013.

Project workspaces are awesome. There I have said it. But one thing that has always frustrated me and other users is how hard it is to determine what project the workspace is linked to. The only reliable way of determining the ProjectUID is to look in the Property Bag of the site where Project Server stores the association. There are a couple of tricks that will let you find out the ProjectUID, one of them being developing a custom web part like I did a while back, or using the CSOM in 2013 as Giles Hamson posted a while ago,

At SharePoint Saturday Sydney, I presented a session on the great new Work Management capabilities in SharePoint 2013 with a little bit of Project 2013, Project Server 2013 and some Project Online thrown in for good measure. As part of the session we gave away a few Project USB sticks for the best questions, a big thank you to the Project Marketing team at Microsoft Sydney for donating them. The deck from the session is available below for your reference.

Nearly three years ago I wrote about the excellent Project 2010 Ignite training that was delivered in Sydney. This week Christophe & Jan made the trek down to Australia again to deliver the 2013 version of the training, Project 2013 Ignite. Just like before, the training offers a deep dive into the delta between the 2010 and 2013 products and is chock full of information, demonstrations and most importantly, interaction with other PPM partners from around the region, customers and the Microsoft field.

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.

As a long time Project Server consultant, each implementation usually ended up with some changes to the Enterprise Global to push a standardised configuration out to the users of Project Server. By habit, I have always updated the Enterprise Global by navigating to Server Settings in and clicking on the Enterprise Global link which would open up Project Professional to allow the file to be edited. Fast forward to Project Online, the Enterprise Global link in Server Settings is no more, which caused me some head scratching for a couple of minutes.

First let me get this off my chest. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Ok, now to continue. Over the past couple of days I have been exploring the new capabilities of Project Online, specifically I have been looking into the experience for new users to the service, things like how quickly they can provision the service and then start to use it in anger. One of the things I was drawn to was the ability for new users to download the relevant client software from the cloud to their local PC.

With the release of Office 2013, Microsoft rolled out a significant update to Project Server. In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the new features and more importantly what has changed. I am going to assume you are all readers of my blog and across the capabilities of Project Server 2010, so the post will dig into the deltas…. Look and feel The first thing you notice when opening up a PWA site is the look and feel, with Project Server 2013 sitting on top of SharePoint 2013, it automatically inherits a number of the changes included in SharePoint, including the new ‘friendlier’ messages, ribbons that are hidden by default and animate smoothly, the ability to hide the chrome in the page and the simpler left hand navigation.

This morning, Microsoft announced the availability of the first public preview of Office 2013 which you can download from office.com/preview. Office 2013 is a massive release, encompassing nearly every product in the Office suite, including my favourites, Project, Project server and of course SharePoint. Over the next few weeks I will drill into each of the products and highlight some of the new capabilities, changes and favourite features. The Microsoft team have released an absolute stack of content today to compliment and support the release, including: