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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.