Project Server has a fantastic reporting story, with a dedicated reporting database containing pretty much every piece of data you put in, and a myriad of ways to retrieve, tabulate and visualize that data for the end user. With a little customization or configuration it is possible to build reports that will show the status of the project portfolio, risk and issues and just about anything you want to see. With such powerful reporting it can quickly become difficult for a Project or Portfolio manager to identify the projects or information they are interested in seeing.

Back in 2011 I sat in a session at TechEd Australia where Carolyn Chau showed off a number of the reporting enhancements coming in SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 is a massive release, providing a stack of new features across all aspects of the server . Some of my favourites include things like Availability groups, support for Server core, a new Visual Studio based management to name but a few.

A while back I wrote about how you could customise your Project Server instance to incorporate one of the great new features of Internet Explorer 9, Jump Lists. In the post we explored how through a little bit of JavaScript and a content editor web part a Project Server administrator could provide quick access to common links in PWA when a user pins the site. As I had been spending a lot of time around demand management workflows recently, I started to wonder if it would be possible to incorporate workflow approval tasks onto an IE9 jump list.

Today Mark McDermott and myself presented our session on Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The session covered three main areas where organisations can leverage Nintex workflow within their Project Server environments. Demand Management – During the session we looked at some of the more advanced scenarios for building demand management workflows, leveraging some of the Nintex out of the box actions such as state machines and flexi tasks.

A while back I posted about how you can change the format of dates in Project. The post showed how easily you could change the format of the dates within the main data entry window of Project. One of my readers pointed out that this was not reflected in the Gantt chart bat text automatically, as you can see below. Changing the format of these dates is just as simple as changing the other date formats.

Last week I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Dux Raymond Sy about my upcoming session at the Microsoft Project Conference which I will be presenting with Mark McDermott of Nintex. Mark and I have been busy putting the final touches to the presentation and demonstrations and have a really great session planned. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSY_cd1ZcTE&w=448&h=252&hd=1] Our session is on Thursday 22nd March at 10:30am in room North 222 C.

It’s been a little quiet on the blog for the last couple of weeks, the reason is that I am head down preparing for my session at the upcoming Project Conference in Phoenix. I am presenting with the Vice President of Sales for Nintex, Mark McDermott on Building Advanced Project Server Workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The session will go take you through some of the more advanced concepts with Nintex Workflow and how they can be related in your project server workflows, we will also be touching on some of the new components of version 2.

A user in the Project Server forums asked a question this week about whether it was possible to add printing capability to the Project Detail Pages in order to allow the ‘forms’ to be printed out as there is no print button available on the ribbon. Out of the box, the printing capability in the Project Web Application is limited to the grids, including the schedule grids that are visible in a schedule PDP and uses a custom page to render the information as can be seen below.

It’s always sound advice to try and keep your Project Server 2010 environment patched to the latest cumulative update, typically these include bug fixes or small enhancements to keep your environment running smoothly. Back in December, Microsoft released the December Project Server 2011 CU, which included a number of fixes and changes to timesheets amongst other things. As Project Server runs on top of your SharePoint environment, it’s also necessary to patch SharePoint at the same time.

In case you have been living under a rock, you may have missed some of the blog posts and buzz that is starting to build about the forthcoming Microsoft Project Conference, being held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA on the 19th through to the 22nd March 2012. The full conference agenda has not been published yet, but at a high level covers: 15 customer-led sessions (representing 6 verticals) where customers share personal success stories using Microsoft Project and Portfolio