A while back I posted about getting the Project Server 2010 beta to run on Windows 7. Whilst this wasn’t an officially supported scenario, it was possible. Fast forward to the Release Candidate and it seems that MS have introduced a check that will stop the install happening on any Windows client 🙁 Thanks to a comment by Aric, I tried installing both the SharePoint and Project Server release candidates on a Windows 7 x64 virtual machine.

During a recent presentation, a member of the audience asked if it was possible to have more than one timeline per Project 2010 schedule. Each timeline would be customised to show different levels of information for a different audience, such as the executives, or more details for a steering committee or team members. At the time the general consensus was that it wasn’t possible on the client, but you could achieve the same result if you created a number of server based timelines using the excellent post by Andrew Lavinsky and Visio Services.

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Project Server 2010 Ignite training in Sydney. The training was delivered by Christophe Fiessenger and Jan Kalis and covered all aspects of the upcoming Project 2010 release. The quality of the training was great, providing insights into all the features of the 2010 products, highlighting changes and where there are opportunities for partners to innovate on the platform. Jan and Christophe presented a heap of sessions covering each of the new feature areas, both with slide and demonstration based content.

One of the most obvious features of the Project 2010 client is the introduction of the ribbon. The ribbon first appeared in Office 2007 and made it into most of the client application except Project. The idea behind the ribbon is that it surfaced commands and features that had previously been nested away under several menu options. In Project 2010, the ribbon has finally made it into the product. It consists of four main tabs (Task, Resource, Project and View) and a couple of contextual tabs that are shown depending on what tab you select.

Whilst reading through the search terms people use to find this site, one search keeps turning up again and again – ‘change logo in project server 2010’. So I thought I would write a short post covering how to change the logo, but also highlight a few other ‘out of the box’ ways you can change the look and feel of your Project 2010 instance. Changing the logo To change the logo, first make sure you have a logo of the correct size available.

In a departure from the usual content on this blog, I thought I would try something a bit different, a screen cast. To start of, I have picked one of my favourite features of Project 2010, Sync to SharePoint, a fantastic little feature that allows you project schedule to be synchronised directly with a SharePoint Foundation team site list. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/8944252] This screen cast is very much a toe in the water , so if you like them, please let me know and I will do some more.

In the final post of this series, I am going to cover off how to track your projects using Microsoft Project. Over the course of my career I am constantly amazed at the number of organisations that say they have a mature project management process, but don’t track their projects. Tracking of projects is extremely important, if you don’t track a project, how are you going to know… How much it’s cost to date?

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010? Microsoft EPM Specialists Darren Deason and Alex Burton will take you on a journey around the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up. Some of the topics discussed will be as follows: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Project to WSS Synchronisation · Integrated Portfolio Management · Enterprise Project Templates

In previous posts we have covered how to handle holidays, contingency and overallocations, in this post we will look at another common area where errors can creep in, estimation. When developing a project schedule, it is essential that the amount of effort required to complete the project is estimated diligently. When scheduling the project, the estimates will be used as the basis for determining the resource levels so it’s important they are correct.

Another potential area where errors can creep into project schedules impacting the delivery of a project is that of overallocation of resources. An overallocation is where a resource is assigned more work than they have capacity to complete it. For example, a resource works an eight hour day and is assigned two tasks, each of eight hours effort, both scheduled to occur on the same day as shown below.