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.

Recently the Project Server 2007 queue at one of my customers stopped working. What made this stranger was that it occurred on the Production, Test and Development environments within days of each other. My first thoughts were to see if the customer’s IT department had made any changes to the environments, like a patch, or hosting configuration change, but after passing my polygraph tests it seems they hadn’t. Restarting the Queue Service didn’t seem to fix the issue, resulting in the error:

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.