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.

I’m not sure how long this has been advertised, but I noticed this little titbit on the official Microsoft Project site this morning. It seems Microsoft is offering the opportunity to take the Project 2010 beta exam for free to MPUG members, starting this November. To register you need to be an MPUG member and fill out the form located here. I have been an MPUG member for a while now and heartily recommend it.

I usually try and stay away from reposting other content, but there has been so much good stuff released in the past week or two that I wanted to make sure you hadn’t missed any and I didn’t forget it! First off, Brian Smith posted a fantastic article outlining common Project Server 2010 Business Intelligence Center errors here. The Project Team posted an overview of where to look to find the most up to date Project documentation for Developers IT Pro’s and end users.

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.

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

Today I was doing some work in my Project Server 2010 demo image around resources and their associated availability. One thing that kept on getting me was I couldn’t find an obvious way of selecting all of my Enterprise Resources other than clicking on each of the checkboxes individually. Well after what felt like ten minutes of clicking around, I found how to do a ‘Select All’ on the Resources.

Today whilst looking around the Project site I noticed some new videos covering a number of new features of Project 2010. I was so impressed with them, I thought I would post them here so you can watch them too. The video’s cover off the following topics: User Controlled Scheduling Team Planner SharePoint Synchronisation. As well as the excellent instruction the presenter provides, there are also a number of step-by-step walkthroughs which take you through each of the features in more detail.

Just a reminder, a while back I posted about a Project 15 Wish List, and I invited you to post any wishes you may have to the list. With Project 2010 out the door, MS are no doubt turning their attention to P15 so I thought I would post a short reminder for all those regular readers out there, and the newer ones we have picked up in recent months.

Since the release of Project 2010, a few people have been asking in the forums on how to restrict or configure functionality of Project administratively. The Office 2010 Group Policy Administrative templates outline the various settings of Office that can be configured via Group Policy so organisations can centrally ‘configure’ aspects of Office 2010 for their users. Given some of the new features in Project 2010 such as manually scheduled and inactive tasks could be quite confusing until a user has had a chance to undergo training, this is a valuable tool in ensuring some of those new features can be turned off until the user has been trained to use them.

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.