First let me get this off my chest. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Ok, now to continue. Over the past couple of days I have been exploring the new capabilities of Project Online, specifically I have been looking into the experience for new users to the service, things like how quickly they can provision the service and then start to use it in anger. One of the things I was drawn to was the ability for new users to download the relevant client software from the cloud to their local PC.

With the release of Office 2013, Microsoft rolled out a significant update to Project Server. In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the new features and more importantly what has changed. I am going to assume you are all readers of my blog and across the capabilities of Project Server 2010, so the post will dig into the deltas…. Look and feel The first thing you notice when opening up a PWA site is the look and feel, with Project Server 2013 sitting on top of SharePoint 2013, it automatically inherits a number of the changes included in SharePoint, including the new ‘friendlier’ messages, ribbons that are hidden by default and animate smoothly, the ability to hide the chrome in the page and the simpler left hand navigation.

With all the excitement of the Office 2013 announcement this week, its hard to think how it can be topped, well it can. Saturday 4th August, just two weeks away is SharePoint Saturday Melbourne, the first Australian SharePoint Saturday since the Office 2013 preview was announced and therefore the first to include SharePoint 2013 content. This year in a departure from the norm, I will be taking part in the keynote giving an insight into some of the killer new features and capabilities of the platform.

With the release of Project 2013, Microsoft have made a number of enhancements and improvements to our favourite project scheduling software. The first thing you will notice are the changes to the look and feel, not as radical as the introduction of the ribbon, but a gentle evolution to provide a flatter, minimalistic look and feel that is common across the rest of the Office 2013 platform. Project 2013 also allows users to sign in, ensuring their preferences and cloud based services such as SkyDrive, Office 365, SharePoint are configured and roam between applications.

This morning, Microsoft announced the availability of the first public preview of Office 2013 which you can download from office.com/preview. Office 2013 is a massive release, encompassing nearly every product in the Office suite, including my favourites, Project, Project server and of course SharePoint. Over the next few weeks I will drill into each of the products and highlight some of the new capabilities, changes and favourite features. The Microsoft team have released an absolute stack of content today to compliment and support the release, including:

At SharePoint Saturday Toronto, I presented one of my favourite sessions on SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management using Project Server 2010, based on Christophe Fiessinger’s and Scott Jamison’s session from TechEd NA 2011. I’ve delivered this session three or four times now, showing how organisations can benefit from using Project Server to collect business requests and guiding them through a process to successfully collect information, objectively determine which project to implement and then assist in the implementation.

I am delighted to announce that I will be speaking at my first international SharePoint Saturday, the sell out SPSToronto on July 7th on one of my favourite topics ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. “You’ve installed SharePoint and now everybody is using it, but how do you handle business requests for new sites, workflows, custom applications, web parts and dashboards? Come along to this session to see how you could implement a powerful request / workflow solution to assist your organization to view, analyze, prioritize and resource requests using the workflow and portfolio analytics capabilities of Project Server 2010.

Last week Microsoft released the latest preview of Windows 8, the release preview which you can grab from preview.windows.com. Being a fan of the bleeding edge, I downloaded and installed it onto my slate and have been loving it. However, a number of my colleagues reported that they were having issues using Project Server 2010 with the inbuilt desktop version of IE 10, running into ‘**This Project Server 2010 feature requires at least Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

In this second post looking at some of the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 and how they can be leveraged in your Project Server farm, we are going to look at PowerView. PowerView was originally announced as Project Crescent and has wowed pretty much anyone that has seen it. In essence, PowerView allows you to build visualisations of your data using a simple drag and drop interface that are ‘Presentation Ready’ meaning there is no nasty wiring up of data, simply drag your data onto the surface and being analyzing it.

Over the past week or two, Microsoft have been quietly uploading all the sessions from the recent Project Conference held in Phoenix to the Project channel on Microsoft Showcase. This morning the Project team officially announced the availability, so I am pleased to announce that the video of Mark McDermott’s and my session is now available for your viewing pleasure. I encourage you to watch it and let me know if you have any questions.