Today I was lucky enough to receive the 2010 MVP award for Project from Microsoft. For those of you that are unaware, Microsoft definition of an MVP is as follows: MVPs make exceptional contributions to technical communities, sharing their passion, knowledge, and know-how. Meanwhile, because MVPs hear the opinions and needs of many others in the technical community, they are well-placed to share highly focused feedback with Microsoft. MVPs are independent experts who are offered a close connection with people at Microsoft.

The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two related presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

With Project Server 2010 on it’s way out of the door, Microsoft are no doubt starting the planning for the next version, Project 15. Whilst Project 2010 is a fantastic product, there are still a few niggly things that I think should be improved, and no doubt you have some ideas too. So, in the vein of Long Zheng’s excellent Taskforce site, where users registered and voted on features they thought could be improved I am starting a wish list and you are free to add things you would like to see.

Last week a question came up as to whether it is possible to have multiple cost rates for a resource within the same project. The answer of course is yes, and this is how you do it. Navigate to the Resource Sheet and double click on the resource you want to have multiple rates. Navigate to the Costs tab of the Resource Information dialog

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

To fully understand the functionality of Project Server 2010, it’s important to have a good grasp of it’s underlying platform, SharePoint Server 2010. Back in October, Microsoft hosted the SharePoint Developers Conference in Las Vegas where pretty much every detail of the upcoming release of SharePoint was made public. I noticed today that Microsoft have released a number of the presentation decks from the conference, covering topics like: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services by Using Visual Studio 2010 Deep Dive into Open XML 2.