Twenty ten has been a massive year. With the release of Project 2010, the interest it has generated amongst customers & the community and the 20,000+ visitors we have received on this blog it feels more like it’s been two years! Next year looks set to be an even bigger year, with the continued growth of the Project 2010 and a bumper crop of new posts ideas I have been working on.

Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

I thought I would blog this so I can find it again and in case someone else runs into this issue. Last week whilst performing a health check on a Project Server 2007 installations I came across this error which seemed to be a pretty common occurrence in the event logs. Error loading and running event receiver Microsoft.Office.Project.PWA.WSSEventReceivers.PSDBUpdater in Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.PWA,Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Additional information is below. Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred.

A common request from people that develop workflows within Project Server is how to create a simple approval process for a project to transition a stage gate, so I thought I would write a blog post covering off how you can achieve it with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The stage gate logic I am going to use, is outlined in the flow chart below. The approval will give the user two options, either approve and move into the next stage of the project, or reject the approval and stay in Stage 1.

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

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.

Back in March I wrote about how you could enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install. I noticed this morning that Microsoft have released a set of clean Project Server 2007 databases for the specific purpose of creating a fresh Project Server 2010 instance in backwards compatibility mode. From the download page… Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM) is a feature in Project Server 2010 that assists in the upgrade of your Enterprise Project Management environment.

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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: