One of the many exciting additions to Office 2013 was the introduction of apps, through these apps it is possible to add, extend and enhance the functionality available to users, for example you could have an app to help track election results, add Facebook social to your sites or build workflows. The apps themselves are available for a number of the desktop clients, as well as SharePoint 2013 and Project Server 2013.

Project workspaces are awesome. There I have said it. But one thing that has always frustrated me and other users is how hard it is to determine what project the workspace is linked to. The only reliable way of determining the ProjectUID is to look in the Property Bag of the site where Project Server stores the association. There are a couple of tricks that will let you find out the ProjectUID, one of them being developing a custom web part like I did a while back, or using the CSOM in 2013 as Giles Hamson posted a while ago,

Close Task to update was an interesting feature that was used by the Project Manager to stop the selected tasks from showing up in resource task and timesheet views, therefore stopping users from recording time against those tasks. In Project Server 2013, the close task to update capability has changed, to leverage a new ‘Locked’ capability which behaves in a similar manner, basically you can choose to lock a task through PWA and once locked and published, the task will no longer show up in the Task and Timesheets views.

At SharePoint Saturday Sydney, I presented a session on the great new Work Management capabilities in SharePoint 2013 with a little bit of Project 2013, Project Server 2013 and some Project Online thrown in for good measure. As part of the session we gave away a few Project USB sticks for the best questions, a big thank you to the Project Marketing team at Microsoft Sydney for donating them. The deck from the session is available below for your reference.

SharePoint Saturday Sydney has come around again and I am pleased to announce that I have been given the opportunity to present on one of my favourite new features of 2013, Work Management. The session title and abstract are as follows: Work Management in SharePoint 2013: What it is and why you will love it If you have ever tried to track tasks in SharePoint, lists or pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013.

Nearly three years ago I wrote about the excellent Project 2010 Ignite training that was delivered in Sydney. This week Christophe & Jan made the trek down to Australia again to deliver the 2013 version of the training, Project 2013 Ignite. Just like before, the training offers a deep dive into the delta between the 2010 and 2013 products and is chock full of information, demonstrations and most importantly, interaction with other PPM partners from around the region, customers and the Microsoft field.

Project Server 2013 introduced a number of changes to where key settings are located throughout the product. Andrew Lavinsky wrote about it earlier this week and stole some of my thunder for this little tool I was putting together.. introducing the Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison spread sheet. The tool maps the various server settings for Project Server 2010, Project Server 2013 On Premise and Project Online all in a handy filtered Excel spread sheet.

A question came up in the Project forums recently around how it was possible to filter the available projects for a portfolio analysis, so I thought I would post a little tip here, which from a majority of the Project Server 2010 implementations I have seen is usually forgotten or managed by business process. When you create a portfolio analysis, Project Server allows you to choose which projects you want to use as part of the analysis, out of the box, this shows you all the projects currently within the PWA instance, irrespective of their status.

There are a lot of changes under the covers with Project Server 2013 including a consolidation of databases, retirement of BCM, stopping in place upgrade support (nobody really did that did they?) and the underlying changes to SharePoint that means upgrading a PS instance is not as simple as it once was. To address this, the product team have released a fantastic poster outlining how to upgrade from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013.

As a long time Project Server consultant, each implementation usually ended up with some changes to the Enterprise Global to push a standardised configuration out to the users of Project Server. By habit, I have always updated the Enterprise Global by navigating to Server Settings in and clicking on the Enterprise Global link which would open up Project Professional to allow the file to be edited. Fast forward to Project Online, the Enterprise Global link in Server Settings is no more, which caused me some head scratching for a couple of minutes.