A common problem I see again and again on projects is the drama involved in getting a project document reviewed and approved. Typically signing off a document confirms that the document contents is correct and has been accepted, this can have commercial implications or be a formal stage gate in the project management process. Many organisations use a manual approval process, sending copies of the document around by email, or worse a printed copy that jumps from in-tray to in-tray which is incredibly inefficient and is nearly impossible to track the progress of.

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier. The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

Overnight Microsoft have released all the current Technet IT Pro content for Project Server in a single convenient compiled help file, making it incredibly easy to reference all those guidance notes and best practice when on a machine not connected to the internet. The file can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb. Remember to unblock the file via a Right click / Properties before viewing or the file may not render.

Recently a user asked on the forums about how to customise the date format of Project 2010 as it was not reflecting his localised regional settings by default. Project comes with a large set of predefined date formats that can be used throughout the application and will do its best to match one of these to the settings you have in your locale, but it can’t match all of them.

Since the Project 2010 demonstration image was first released in beta form there have been a few questions in the forums and around the office about how the Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Project Detail Pages (PDPs) were implemented. Both of these PDP’s give a glimpse of how the PDP infrastructure can be leveraged to collect information about a project using the most appropriate mechanism. In the case of the the Cost Benefit PDP, an custom Excel based web part is used to collect financial information which is stored in the document library of the relevant project site.

For the past couple of weeks I have been building some financial reports from information stored within the cubes of Project Server 2007. The client has some pretty full on requirements around presenting the information, so I chose to implement the reports using Microsoft Excel which I can apply a bit of logic and formatting to instead of the out of the box PS2007 data analysis views. One problem I ran into was that the Fiscal Time dimension in the cubes was showing as ‘Not Set’ when trying to set it as a filter.

Just a reminder for those Australian readers, tickets are still available for the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference, which is less than six weeks away. The conference has something for everyone, covering both technical and business topics, with: 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance, insurance, legal and engineering 20 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products.

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.