Project Server 2010’s reporting and business intelligence story is phenomenal. One of the most noticeable changes is that the Data Analysis views of previous versions have been deprecated in favour of using Excel Services based reports that interface directly with the cubes. As part of a default Project Server installation in the beta, a library of templates and sample reports are created within Project Server for use, however they won’t work until you have configured the server correctly.

Even the best crafted project plan can be derailed by something unexpected happening, like your main developer becoming sick or losing network connectivity for a day. Such unexpected events can disrupt your project schedule, making you miss your delivery dates which is never good. To try and mitigate this, it is possible to plan for the unexpected, making provisions in your schedule should something out of the blue happen. This is achieved by adding something called contingency.

When developing a project schedule, you can spend days making sure the schedule includes the correct tasks and realistic estimates, but ultimately if the schedule is unrealistic, then the project is going to be in trouble. If the project manager has resources working through weekends and public holidays, when in reality they don’t, there is no way the project will be completed by the expected end date. By communicating a delivery date that is too early and then missing that date can lead to bad perceptions of the team and project as a whole, ultimately the project is labelled as a failure.

For many years I have managed projects for professional services companies, where I was responsible for the development and execution of projects. More recently I have changed direction slightly, using my knowledge of project management in partnership with the Microsoft EPM suite to help customers deliver projects more effectively, but still keep an active interest in project management. So why am I telling you this? Well I want to start sharing some of the tips and tricks I have picked up along the way which will hopefully help you plan and execute your projects more effectively, all with a nice MS Project slant.

I will be presenting along with my colleague Darren Deason at the February 2010 MPUG Melbourne Chapter Meeting. The topic of the meeting is Are you ready for Project 2010 and will take a tour of the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up, including: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Integrated Portfolio Management · User Delegation · Enterprise Project Templates · Improved Timesheets · And many more exciting new features …

Update : Links changed. I just stumbled upon this list of known issues for the 2010 Server products at http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/microsoft-office-servers-beta-2-known-issuesreadme-HA101267292.aspx. Listed is the known issue around the provisioning of project workspaces, plus a few others I hadn’t run into around timesheets and deliverables.

One of the features of Project Server 2010 I was really keen to try out was that of delegates. In Project Server 2007, when a Project Manager goes on leave, it is necessary to go through and manually reassign each task in the schedule to a new status manager so they can see the tasks, their updates and manage the schedule effectively. When that user returns from holiday, you then have to repeat the process and reassign each task back.

Update: Check out http://epmsource.com/2010/02/22/project-server-2010-on-windows-7-an-update/ for an update on this post. A while back I heard that there would be an improved developer story for the next version of SharePoint. For those that have never tried developing for the platform, you typically have to have a virtual machine and dev against that. Given the change to 64bit only and the large resource overhead running SharePoint and Project Server in a VM is a bit more of a challenge.

The Project Team wrote a while back about the Sync to SharePoint feature of Project 2010. This past week, the beta of Project 2010 has been released to TAP and MSDN / Technet and I have had a chance to play around with it. Since hearing Microsoft’s positioning of the Sync to SharePoint feature, I have been keen to try it out and see how useful it really will be. So here are 9 things you may not know about this awesome feature:

I ran into this issue whilst visiting a client this week, which I haven’t seen before. When the user tried to manually associate a project schedule with the workspace via Server Settings > Operational Policies > Project Workspaces , they would get this error: After verifying the workspace was not linked to an existing project, I turned my attention to the the project workspace template that we were trying to associate.