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.

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

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.

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Microsoft released a pretty nifty PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint. Whilst it doesn’t look to support Project Server PowerShell commands just yet, it does support SharePoint Server 2010 which as Project Server practitioners we all need to roll our sleeves up and do something to now and again. The tool itself uses a handy drag and drop interface to select what you wish to do and then prompts you to enter the relevant information for the command.