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.

I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

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.

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.

You couldn’t have helped but notice the blog has been a bit quiet recently. The reason is that I have been pretty busy in my day job at Nintex. Well, I am pleased to say I can finally reveal what I have been working on. This week we released Nintex Workflow for Office 365, a new product in the Nintex family that brings the power of Nintex Workflow to the Office 365 platform.

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.

As promised a while back here are the three demonstrations from my Work Management in SharePoint 2013, What it is and why you’ll love it sessions at SPS and the Aussie SharePoint Conference. As I hate my voice on video, I have captioned them so you’ll miss out on some of the pearls of wisdom, but hopefully you will get the jist. And don’t worry, I am still alive, just a little busy in my day job, but normal service will resume shortly.

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 am excited to announce that I will once again be speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference this time in Melbourne on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. Hopefully this time the demo gods will be on my side and Project’ Sync to SharePoint will work. 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.

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

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

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

SharePoint Designer 2013 is another tool that provides a means for building workflows, what is new in the 2013 release is it can now build Demand Management workflows for Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Now I am not going to go into the specifics of the tool, as you probably already know my preference, but irrespective of that, I thought it important to share how to build workflows that leverage the Skip to Stage functionality with SPD.

I try not to mix my day job at Nintex with my community work and the content on this site, but today I want to make an exception and share some news on one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months. I am pleased to announce that we have shipped Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013 (NW4PS), an update to the popular workflow product for Project Server 2013.

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.

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 all the excitement of the Office 2013 announcement this week, its hard to think how it can be topped, well it can. Saturday 4th August, just two weeks away is SharePoint Saturday Melbourne, the first Australian SharePoint Saturday since the Office 2013 preview was announced and therefore the first to include SharePoint 2013 content. This year in a departure from the norm, I will be taking part in the keynote giving an insight into some of the killer new features and capabilities of the platform.