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Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

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Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

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Less than a month until the Project Conference..

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.

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Project Conference Session Wrap Up

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.

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Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

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Less than a month until the Project Conference..

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.

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Happy New Year

2013 was certainly a massive year both personally, professionally and in the world of Project. With the Project & SharePoint Conferences just around the corner, I am sure 2014 is shaping up to be bigger! To all my readers, thank you for your support in 2013 and I wish you a happy and prosperous 2014 (and a few more blog posts).

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Tracking your project

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?

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App Review–Fluent Pro’s EPM Pulse for Project Online

At the Project Conference, Microsoft announced some improvements to the reporting capability of Project Online through the introduction of support for SSIS. However, there is a solution available now that will enable you to create powerful dashboards in Project Online from the guys at Fluent Pro called EPM Pulse for Project Online which you can get going in minutes which is available now in the SharePoint app store. Once installed, EPM Pulse will provision an instance within Fluent Pro’s infrastructure that will be used to render your dashboards, which can take a few moments the first time you install.

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App Review–UMT 360 Workflow Visualization

One of the most common add-ons to Project Server 2010 environments was the workflow visualization solution starter that provided a graphical overview of where a project was in it’s demand management workflow. In 2013 and Project Online, Microsoft introduced an out of the box workflow visualisation component, which is pretty good at showing the stage transitions, but can be limited if you have more complex processes you want to visualize.

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App Review–Nearbaseline’s Bulk Edit

Any organisation that uses Project Server will quickly get to the point where they need to modify or add new custom fields as their organisational process or requirements change. As any Administrator will tell you, adding new custom fields is simple, however updating all the projects to reflect the new custom fields is not. Enter Bulk Edit, a popular 2010 solution starter that has been given the app treatment by a few partners.

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Have your say.. SharePoint & Project Server App Development

Thanks to Jeremy Thake for the heads up, but I thought I would repost this here to alert some of the Project Server community that build apps for SharePoint and Project Server and read this blog. Microsoft have launched a public UserVoice community to collaborate on feedback for the SharePoint app model moving forward. If you’re not familiar with UserVoice, it allows you to submit ideas and vote & comment on other user ideas.

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Have your say.. SharePoint & Project Server App Development

Thanks to Jeremy Thake for the heads up, but I thought I would repost this here to alert some of the Project Server community that build apps for SharePoint and Project Server and read this blog. Microsoft have launched a public UserVoice community to collaborate on feedback for the SharePoint app model moving forward. If you’re not familiar with UserVoice, it allows you to submit ideas and vote & comment on other user ideas.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2013

Tech Ed Australia is being held on the Gold Coast between the 3rd and 6th September this year. I am happy to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia this year with my partner in crime, Mr Brian Farnhill with an awesome session entitled…. The SharePoint 2013 App Playbook – Your Guide to Building and Publishing a Great App Office 2013 has brought an amazing new platform for developers to take advantage of, in the format of apps and the online app store.

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Time to resume service with a few quick links…

After a month long holiday, it’s time to resume normal blog service and share some EPM goodness. I I have a couple of posts that I am working on at the moment, but in the meantime here are few gems that you should find useful Developing Project Server apps walkthrough Following on from my series covering the building the Publish All Enterprise Project app, Microsoft have released an official walk through to build a Project Server app over at http://msdn.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 3 – Taking the app to the next level

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 2 – Getting the basic app up and running

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 1 – Getting Started – Setting up a development environment

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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Customising the App Launcher– Part Two–Custom Tiles.

Back in December I wrote about the ability to customise the App Launcher, or Waffle as it lovingly known. The options were relatively limited unless you built your own app in Azure and deployed it to the organisation. However one request came up again and again, the ability to create a shortcut tile to a specific site or location inside the Office 365 tenant. Imagine being able to have a dedicated waffle link for the Marketing site, or perhaps a dedicated link through to a specific PWA instance.

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Customising the Nav Bar & App Launcher in Office 365

A while back Microsoft announced the release of the App Launcher in Office 365, also lovingly christened the Waffle by many due to it’s resemblance to the popular food. In the last few weeks the Waffle has started to appear across Office 365 tenants providing a much cleaner way of navigating to the various bits of Office 365 you care about. However, even with this cool new capability, I miss the old Projects and OneDrive links that used to be on the Navigation Bar and often find myself cursing having to go over to the top left and clicking on what I want.

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The Appies are coming again..

One of the highlights of the 2014 SharePoint conference were the App Awards for the Office and SharePoint apps, well it seems that the Appies are being run again, this time for the upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference in July. There are six categories you can nominate your apps in: Best User Interface – App for Office or App for SharePoint Highest Performing App – App for Office or App for SharePoint Most Business Value – App for Office or App for SharePoint Best International Developer – App for Office & SharePoint Best Office 365 App Best Mobile App The last two are the most interesting as you can now submit Office 365 / Consent Flow apps and Mobile apps that extend and augment Office 365 in any of the mobile ecosystems.

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The Appie Awards…

Last night at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the winners of the ‘Appies’, recognising the best apps in the Microsoft Office and SharePoint stores. The awards highlighted a number of great apps covering SharePoint, Office and Project, including: Campagna and Schott for their CS Task Board app, a runner up in the Best UI award; CPS’s Project Task Auditor, winning the Most Business Value award for Project client apps; and Sensei’s Project Dashboard, winning the Most Interesting Scenario, Project category.

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The Appies are coming…

In case you had missed the news, Microsoft have announced The Appies, a competition around creating an awesome app for SharePoint, Office 2013 or our favorites, Project Server, Project Online or the Project client (Jeremy had the scoop a few weeks ago and coined the Appies name which I think is pretty apt). To qualify for the Appies, all you need to do is submit a new app or update an existing app between November 25th 2013 and January 31 2014 to be automatically entered.

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Work Management Videos from SharePoint Saturday and the Aussie SharePoint Conferences

As promised a while back here are the three demonstrations from my Work Management in SharePoint 2013, What it is and why you’ll love it sessions at SPS and the Aussie SharePoint Conference. As I hate my voice on video, I have captioned them so you’ll miss out on some of the pearls of wisdom, but hopefully you will get the jist. And don’t worry, I am still alive, just a little busy in my day job, but normal service will resume shortly.

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Work Management in SharePoint 2013–Slides and Links

Thanks to all those people that attended my session on Work Management in SharePoint 2013 at the two Australian SharePoint Conferences. As I mentioned in the sessions, I have uploaded the slides to SlideShare where you can download them. I will also publish the three demonstration videos in the coming weeks to take you through each of the demo’s in the session. [slideshare id=22854189&doc=auspc-mel-workmanagementinsharepoint2013-whatitisandwhyyoullloveit-130612044656-phpapp01] Also as mentioned in the session, here is the link to the excellent White Paper outlining the Work Management capabilities and Synchronisation with Exchange.

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Speaking at the Aussie SharePoint Conference Part 2 in Melbourne

I am excited to announce that I will once again be speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference this time in Melbourne on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. Hopefully this time the demo gods will be on my side and Project’ Sync to SharePoint will work. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013.

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Speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference Sydney

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013. With SharePoint 2013, your organisation has access to a task management solution that can start simply and scale up to the enterprise level at the click of a button.

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Another great feature of SharePoint 2010 – Visio Services

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

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SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A match made in heaven

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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Speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2013

Tech Ed Australia is being held on the Gold Coast between the 3rd and 6th September this year. I am happy to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia this year with my partner in crime, Mr Brian Farnhill with an awesome session entitled…. The SharePoint 2013 App Playbook – Your Guide to Building and Publishing a Great App Office 2013 has brought an amazing new platform for developers to take advantage of, in the format of apps and the online app store.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2010

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

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Less than two weeks to go…

It’s less than two weeks until TechEd Australia, and I have been hard at work with Brian Farnhill putting the finishing touches to the presentation and demonstrations. For those of you coming along, I will be taking part in two sessions: OFS310 The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010 Friday 2nd September – 9:45am – 11:00am It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why.

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Extending the backstage… Integrating data and the UI

In the previous two posts, we covered off how to extract the workflow data from the Project Server Reporting database, and the basics of how to extend the Backstage view. In this post I will cover off how to merge the two together, and to discuss some of the limitations and problems I ran into. For the proof of concept I wanted the backstage view to render dynamic information about the project workflow in the backstage, checking out MSDN and Technet I found some fantastic resources to assist, including Customizing the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers and it’s associated code .

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Extending the Project backstage… Extending the GUI

In this second post covering my proof of concept to expose workflow status information in the Project backstage I will cover off some of the basics on how to extend the backstage. Like all of the Office 2010 clients, Project’s backstage can be customised by defining the various interface elements and their associated behaviours using an XML schema that has been published by Microsoft and is available for download here.

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Extending the Project Backstage… Getting the data

In the first of three posts covering my proof of concept to show the workflow status in the Project backstage, I will be covering off how to access the workflow data itself from within the Project Server. Now as this was a proof of concept, I decided to go with the simple approach of getting the information directly from the Reporting database instead of calling the Project Server PSI. There were a couple of reasons for this, firstly simplicity, accessing the data in the Reporting database via SQL and VBA is much simpler in my opinion than calling the PSI.

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Restoring a deleted Project Workspace from SQL Backups

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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Backwards Compatibility Mode–Project Server 2007 Fresh Databases available from Microsoft Download Center

Back in March I wrote about how you could enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install. I noticed this morning that Microsoft have released a set of clean Project Server 2007 databases for the specific purpose of creating a fresh Project Server 2010 instance in backwards compatibility mode. From the download page… Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM) is a feature in Project Server 2010 that assists in the upgrade of your Enterprise Project Management environment.

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Enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Tracking your project

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?

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Project Server 2010 known issues

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.

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So much great information!

I usually try and stay away from reposting other content, but there has been so much good stuff released in the past week or two that I wanted to make sure you hadn’t missed any and I didn’t forget it! First off, Brian Smith posted a fantastic article outlining common Project Server 2010 Business Intelligence Center errors here. The Project Team posted an overview of where to look to find the most up to date Project documentation for Developers IT Pro’s and end users.

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Mobile Project Server Business Intelligence with Windows Phone 7

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

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Using Project Server 2013 / Project Online–make sure you read this…

The Project Support blog today published a post about a pretty nasty bug that has been found in Project Server 2013 and until very recently in Project Online that could cause you to lose resources across schedules. Full details of the bug and the actions you can take to address the issue if you have encountered it can be seen at http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2014/02/06/project-server-2013-and-project-online-what-happened-to-my-resources.aspx. If you have encountered any issues with lost resources including resource names turning into numbers, or mysterious material resources appearing, I would highly encourage you to read the above blog.

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App Review–Nearbaseline’s Bulk Edit

Any organisation that uses Project Server will quickly get to the point where they need to modify or add new custom fields as their organisational process or requirements change. As any Administrator will tell you, adding new custom fields is simple, however updating all the projects to reflect the new custom fields is not. Enter Bulk Edit, a popular 2010 solution starter that has been given the app treatment by a few partners.

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Project Demo Image–Excel Services problem after SP1 upgrade

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

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Common errors when a PWA site is deleted ‘incorrectly’

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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Changing the default security timeout for PWA and SP2010

A common request for previous versions of Project Server was the ability to extend the security timeout of pages within the tool. Why this was requested was users typically started an action, got called away, or popped out for a coffee, then came back to the page they were editing, pressed save only to be told that the page had timed out and all their edits had been lost. Now this was not across the whole of tool, but only certain pages like editing views, SharePoint team sites etc.

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Changing the look and feel of Project 2010 – Out of the box

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.

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Project Conference Session videos now available on Channel 9

Hot off the press this morning, the session video’s for the Project Conference are now available to watch via Channel 9. Here are a couple of my favourites so far (and I may be biased).. Future of Business Productivity Keynote – Check out the great demo with the Nintex Workflow for Office 365 app. My session Implementing your organizational process in SharePoint, Project Server and Office 365 with Nintex

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Setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013

I’ve had a few comments through the blog on setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013, so I thought I would post something to take you through how to configure this. The Workflow Proxy in Project Server 2013 is important if you intend to use the classic workflow engine (not Workflow Manager ) and will be the account that makes the PSI calls associated with the workflow. The account should be set up as part of your Project Server installation and is specified in the Plan for administrative and service accounts in Project Server 2013 documentation.

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Project Online’ hidden Gem… Click to Run

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.

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Where has Close tasks to update gone in Project Server 2013?

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.

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Removing closed web parts before saving a project workspace template

Recently I have seen this problem manifest itself at two customers, so I thought I would post about it to save anyone else running into it, or scratching their heads. When you customise project workspaces, or SharePoint workspaces in general, you have two options to remove the web parts from the page: Close the web part – this stops the web part being rendered on the page, but still being created on each page load Delete the web part – this removes the web part from the page completely.

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On cloud nine.. again

This morning I was once again lucky enough to receive confirmation that I had been re-awarded as an MVP for Project. I am still humbled by the whole experience and would like to continue to thank the readers of this blog, the community and Microsoft for your support and recognition.

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On cloud nine….

Today I was lucky enough to receive the 2010 MVP award for Project from Microsoft. For those of you that are unaware, Microsoft definition of an MVP is as follows: MVPs make exceptional contributions to technical communities, sharing their passion, knowledge, and know-how. Meanwhile, because MVPs hear the opinions and needs of many others in the technical community, they are well-placed to share highly focused feedback with Microsoft. MVPs are independent experts who are offered a close connection with people at Microsoft.

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Tech Ed 2011–Wrap up and resources

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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Some common errors when upgrading / migrating to Project Server 2013

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

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Compare projects report in Project 2010

Update****: It appears that this feature isn’t new, but rather something that was in the previous version of Project but buried deep on a right click toolbar menu. So instead of a new feature, this is the perfect example of an old feature that has been surfaced due to the introduction of the ribbon. As a project manager at a consulting company one of the jobs that I frequently had was running bids for new pieces of work.

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The Appies are coming…

In case you had missed the news, Microsoft have announced The Appies, a competition around creating an awesome app for SharePoint, Office 2013 or our favorites, Project Server, Project Online or the Project client (Jeremy had the scoop a few weeks ago and coined the Appies name which I think is pretty apt). To qualify for the Appies, all you need to do is submit a new app or update an existing app between November 25th 2013 and January 31 2014 to be automatically entered.

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Less than six weeks until the Australian SharePoint Conference

Just a reminder for those Australian readers, tickets are still available for the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference, which is less than six weeks away. The conference has something for everyone, covering both technical and business topics, with: 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance, insurance, legal and engineering 20 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products.

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SharePoint 2010 Developer Conference Presentations

To fully understand the functionality of Project Server 2010, it’s important to have a good grasp of it’s underlying platform, SharePoint Server 2010. Back in October, Microsoft hosted the SharePoint Developers Conference in Las Vegas where pretty much every detail of the upcoming release of SharePoint was made public. I noticed today that Microsoft have released a number of the presentation decks from the conference, covering topics like: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services by Using Visual Studio 2010 Deep Dive into Open XML 2.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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File not found error when viewing risks or issues

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

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Where did those dots come from in Project Online?

In the past few days an update has been pushed out to Project Online to improve some of the navigation elements of the Project Center. If you look closely above you will see after each Project Name a new context menu elipsis (…) has been added which when you click on it will open up a notification giving you key pieces of data about the project. From the screenshot above you can see the Project Name, %age complete, the project start date and end date as well as the Owner and Last Published date.

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Where did Copy Picture go?

A couple of people have asked me in the last few days about where the ‘Copy Picture’ icon that used to be front and centre in the Project 2007 had gone in 2010? I know it’s been posted before on other sites and in the newsgroups, but I thought I would repost it again. To find it, choose the Task tab and then click on the downward arrow next to Copy.

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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What is a Project Server Correlation ID and how can I leverage it?

Every now and again, I check the epmsource logs to see what people have been searching for on the site. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to see that people were searching for Correlation ID’s that are raised when an error occurs in Project Server or SharePoint. As a result, I thought a blog post might be appropriate to restate what Correlation ID’s are and how you can leverage them to gain insights into what is really going wrong.

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Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Demo Source Code available

Since the Project 2010 demonstration image was first released in beta form there have been a few questions in the forums and around the office about how the Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Project Detail Pages (PDPs) were implemented. Both of these PDP’s give a glimpse of how the PDP infrastructure can be leveraged to collect information about a project using the most appropriate mechanism. In the case of the the Cost Benefit PDP, an custom Excel based web part is used to collect financial information which is stored in the document library of the relevant project site.

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Multiple cost rates for a resource in the same project

Last week a question came up as to whether it is possible to have multiple cost rates for a resource within the same project. The answer of course is yes, and this is how you do it. Navigate to the Resource Sheet and double click on the resource you want to have multiple rates. Navigate to the Costs tab of the Resource Information dialog

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Fiscal Time Dimension Not Set

For the past couple of weeks I have been building some financial reports from information stored within the cubes of Project Server 2007. The client has some pretty full on requirements around presenting the information, so I chose to implement the reports using Microsoft Excel which I can apply a bit of logic and formatting to instead of the out of the box PS2007 data analysis views. One problem I ran into was that the Fiscal Time dimension in the cubes was showing as ‘Not Set’ when trying to set it as a filter.

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Some useful links for the new year

A little late, but I thought I would post information about this great resource from Brian Smith. If you’ve ever had to hunt for details of which CU contained a fix for an issue and had to sit there in Google and Bing aggregating results, hunt no more, Brian has created a single page that contains details of all the Cumulative Updates for Project and Project Server 2013 on-premises in a single location over at the Project Support blog.

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Project Server 2007 CU Links

A week or so ago, I needed to go through the various Project Server 2007 CU’s to see if a particular issue my customer was experiencing had been fixed or was a new bug. After a bit of searching I was surprised to see that there wasn’t a definitive list of all the Project Server 2007 CU’s out there. There seemed to be a few which went from RTM through to SP2 (http://support.

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Hiding buttons in Project Online

A common requirement from customers is to be able to hide / disable buttons within their Project Server instance and of course, this requirement will not go away with Project Online. I wrote a a while back about how you could disable or hide ribbon buttons using a simple sandboxed solution. Well the good news is that this approach is still valid for Project Online. Given all the focus on the app model and the flexibility and restrictions it introduces, it is sometimes forgotten that you can still deploy sandboxed solutions to your Project Online environment.

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Adding Print capabilities to Project Detail Pages

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.

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Hiding the Today indicator from the Project 2010 Timeline

Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

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Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

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SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 1 – Reporting Services Data Alerts

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.

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Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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Changing the date format on Gantt chart bars

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.

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How to change the Project Date Format

Recently a user asked on the forums about how to customise the date format of Project 2010 as it was not reflecting his localised regional settings by default. Project comes with a large set of predefined date formats that can be used throughout the application and will do its best to match one of these to the settings you have in your locale, but it can’t match all of them.

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Time to resume service with a few quick links…

After a month long holiday, it’s time to resume normal blog service and share some EPM goodness. I I have a couple of posts that I am working on at the moment, but in the meantime here are few gems that you should find useful Developing Project Server apps walkthrough Following on from my series covering the building the Publish All Enterprise Project app, Microsoft have released an official walk through to build a Project Server app over at http://msdn.

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Love Business Intelligence on Project Server, install the December 2011 CU now!

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.

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Unexpected error customising the Cost, Cost Exposure and Exposure columns in a Project Server 2010 Risk list

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

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Project Server Delegates

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.

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Common errors when a PWA site is deleted ‘incorrectly’

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

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Restoring a deleted Project Workspace from SQL Backups

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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Removing closed web parts before saving a project workspace template

Recently I have seen this problem manifest itself at two customers, so I thought I would post about it to save anyone else running into it, or scratching their heads. When you customise project workspaces, or SharePoint workspaces in general, you have two options to remove the web parts from the page: Close the web part – this stops the web part being rendered on the page, but still being created on each page load Delete the web part – this removes the web part from the page completely.

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Project 2010 Demo and Evaluation Pack–An Unexpected Error has occurred

A couple of users on the Project forums have run into issues getting the Project Server Demo Pack to install onto the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue. But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

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Migrating Project Server 2013 database between environments

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

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An introduction to Document Sets…

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier. The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.

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Office 2013 Preview has arrived

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:

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ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Planning for the Unexpected

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.

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Enterprise custom field improvements in Project Server 2010

One of the core features of Project Server that integrates the tool into an organisation are Enterprise Custom Fields or ECF’s. ECF’s allow the recording of business specific metadata which is used to classify the various aspects of an organisation across a project, resource and task level. During the planning stages of a Project Server implementation a significant amount of time is spent understanding the custom fields that need to be configured in order for the tool to meet the requirements of the business.

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Editing the Enterprise Global in Project Online

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.

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Migrating Project Server 2013 database between environments

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Twenty ten has been a massive year. With the release of Project 2010, the interest it has generated amongst customers & the community and the 20,000+ visitors we have received on this blog it feels more like it’s been two years! Next year looks set to be an even bigger year, with the continued growth of the Project 2010 and a bumper crop of new posts ideas I have been working on.

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Changing the look and feel of Project 2010 – Out of the box

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.

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Free EPMU Training

As noted over on Christophe’s blog, Microsoft have now made available free of charge online EPMU training courses covering: Microsoft EPMU – Admin Professional – Functional Implementation & Configuration of Project Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – IT Professional – Technical Implementation & Configuration of Project Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – Office Project Server 2007 Developer Training (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – Deploying Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Certainly an excellent way of spending some downtime if you want to skill up on all things EPM.

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What is a Project Server Correlation ID and how can I leverage it?

Every now and again, I check the epmsource logs to see what people have been searching for on the site. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to see that people were searching for Correlation ID’s that are raised when an error occurs in Project Server or SharePoint. As a result, I thought a blog post might be appropriate to restate what Correlation ID’s are and how you can leverage them to gain insights into what is really going wrong.

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Error 1053 : The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion error event.

Recently the Project Server 2007 queue at one of my customers stopped working. What made this stranger was that it occurred on the Production, Test and Development environments within days of each other. My first thoughts were to see if the customer’s IT department had made any changes to the environments, like a patch, or hosting configuration change, but after passing my polygraph tests it seems they hadn’t. Restarting the Queue Service didn’t seem to fix the issue, resulting in the error:

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Estimation

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.

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Project Conference 2014 Wrap Up

It’s been a little over a week since the Project Conference in Anaheim finished up and what a conference it was. It’s always great to meet up with the Project Community and catch up on what’s happening, it’s also the only place I know that you can wax lyrical about Project Server without people looking at you as if you’re strange Anyway, I thought I would share some of the highlights with you.

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Common errors when a PWA site is deleted ‘incorrectly’

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

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Nintex Workflow for Project Server V2.0 Beta First look

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post! Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components: Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow; New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database; Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

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Nintex Workflow for Project Server V2.0 Beta First look

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post! Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components: Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow; New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database; Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

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Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison

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.

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Project Demo Image–Excel Services problem after SP1 upgrade

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

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Setting up Excel Services in Project Server 2010

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.

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Using schedule data within a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow

Recently I have been looking into how far you can integrate a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow into the day to day management of a project. One particular area I have been concentrating on is encoded logic within the workflow to check the status of tasks within the schedule. Imagine the scenario, a project can only move into the close phase if all the deliverables or milestones in the project have been met, or you may want the phase of the project to change following the completion of a specific task.

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How to remove the Office.com references from your Project Server & SharePoint 2010 farm

If you look closely in your SharePoint farm, you will see references to Office.com in some of the ribbons and dialogs…. When you click on the link or button, instead of opening up a window into thousands of SharePoint apps from Microsoft and Community, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show anything Someone asked recently if it was possible to turn these off as they can be confusing for users.

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Project 15 Feature Wish list

With Project Server 2010 on it’s way out of the door, Microsoft are no doubt starting the planning for the next version, Project 15. Whilst Project 2010 is a fantastic product, there are still a few niggly things that I think should be improved, and no doubt you have some ideas too. So, in the vein of Long Zheng’s excellent Taskforce site, where users registered and voted on features they thought could be improved I am starting a wish list and you are free to add things you would like to see.

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File not found error when viewing risks or issues

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

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ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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Fiscal Time Dimension Not Set

For the past couple of weeks I have been building some financial reports from information stored within the cubes of Project Server 2007. The client has some pretty full on requirements around presenting the information, so I chose to implement the reports using Microsoft Excel which I can apply a bit of logic and formatting to instead of the out of the box PS2007 data analysis views. One problem I ran into was that the Fiscal Time dimension in the cubes was showing as ‘Not Set’ when trying to set it as a filter.

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Using Nintex for Project Management Nirvana – Speaking at the Project Virtual Conference

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming inaugural Project Virtual Conference, a free global online conference that is dedicated to Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online that will be running for 24 hours. For those of you that may have missed it, the Project Virtual Conference is a completely free, virtual conference that has been organised by members of the Project community (Prasanna, Cindy, Treb, Ben, Rod, Paul, Julie and Vadim) in their spare time.

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Removing the progress line from a Gantt chart

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

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Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–22nd October 2011

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney–Saturday 6th August 2011

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

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Managed metadata, Wikis and Graph web parts..

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.

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Project 2010 Group Policy

Since the release of Project 2010, a few people have been asking in the forums on how to restrict or configure functionality of Project administratively. The Office 2010 Group Policy Administrative templates outline the various settings of Office that can be configured via Group Policy so organisations can centrally ‘configure’ aspects of Office 2010 for their users. Given some of the new features in Project 2010 such as manually scheduled and inactive tasks could be quite confusing until a user has had a chance to undergo training, this is a valuable tool in ensuring some of those new features can be turned off until the user has been trained to use them.

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Happy Holidays

This past year has been massive for epmsource.com, with record numbers of readers and traffic. Next year looks to become an even bigger year with the release of Project, SharePoint and Project Server 2013. To get ready for this, I am taking a blogging holiday for a couple of weeks to spend some time with my family and will be back in late January. To all of our readers, thank you for your continued support and happy holidays.

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Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part I

Recently I have been working on a number of projects where the requirement to disable ribbon commands in Project Server has come up again and again. There are a couple of posts out there around modifying the ribbon, but they tend to focus on adding new items, not removing or disabling them, so I thought I would post something covering it. Of course, before you look at disabling the ribbon item through a customisation, you should look to see if the item can be disabled using the Project Server security model first.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Planning for holidays

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.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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Windows 8 Release Preview and 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.

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Project Server IE9 Jump Lists Revisited

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.

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Ignite 2015 Wrap up

For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

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Help shape Microsoft’s Ignite Conference

I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

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I’m Project 2010 Ready, are you?

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.

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Help shape Microsoft’s Ignite Conference

I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

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Inactive Tasks in Project 2010

All too often when you are working on a project, the schedule can evolve from what you originally thought the schedule would be when you built it, to what the reality is. For example, in the schedule below there are three tasks, it turns out that Task 2 is no longer required. In Project 2007 there are two options to remove the task… Leave the task on the plan and set the remaining work to 0

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Creating a Internet Explorer 9 Jump List for Project Server

One of the coolest features of Internet Explorer 9, other than the standards compliance and in the case of the Release Candidate, the general speed and stability improvements, is the ability to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar allowing you to launch your favourite websites with one click. With a little more effort, it is possible to define a number of task specific entry points into your site through a jump list that is available when the user right clicks on a pinned site.

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Creating a Internet Explorer 9 Jump List for Project Server

One of the coolest features of Internet Explorer 9, other than the standards compliance and in the case of the Release Candidate, the general speed and stability improvements, is the ability to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar allowing you to launch your favourite websites with one click. With a little more effort, it is possible to define a number of task specific entry points into your site through a jump list that is available when the user right clicks on a pinned site.

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Love Business Intelligence on Project Server, install the December 2011 CU now!

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.

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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Downloadable Project Server Technet IT Pro Content

Overnight Microsoft have released all the current Technet IT Pro content for Project Server in a single convenient compiled help file, making it incredibly easy to reference all those guidance notes and best practice when on a machine not connected to the internet. The file can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb. Remember to unblock the file via a Right click / Properties before viewing or the file may not render.

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Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 3 – Taking the app to the next level

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 2 – Getting the basic app up and running

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 1 – Getting Started – Setting up a development environment

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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Project Server IE9 Jump Lists Revisited

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.

Posts

Creating a Internet Explorer 9 Jump List for Project Server

One of the coolest features of Internet Explorer 9, other than the standards compliance and in the case of the Release Candidate, the general speed and stability improvements, is the ability to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar allowing you to launch your favourite websites with one click. With a little more effort, it is possible to define a number of task specific entry points into your site through a jump list that is available when the user right clicks on a pinned site.

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Project Server 2007 CU Links

A week or so ago, I needed to go through the various Project Server 2007 CU’s to see if a particular issue my customer was experiencing had been fixed or was a new bug. After a bit of searching I was surprised to see that there wasn’t a definitive list of all the Project Server 2007 CU’s out there. There seemed to be a few which went from RTM through to SP2 (http://support.

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Project Server 2010 known issues

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Resource overallocations

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.

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Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–22nd October 2011

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney–Saturday 6th August 2011

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

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Managed metadata, Wikis and Graph web parts..

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.

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An introduction to Document Sets…

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier. The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.

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A potential gotcha with manually scheduled tasks…

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

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Encoding a Risk Matrix in Project Server

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

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MPUG Melbourne–Tuesday 6th December

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

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Save the date: MPUG Melbourne Tuesday 24th May 2011

It’s that time again, after a break over the summer, I am pleased to announce that the next Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG) Melbourne chapter meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 24th May 2011 at Microsoft Melbourne. The topic of this meeting is demand management, covering the theory behind it, how it can benefit your organisation and Project Server 2010’s approach to implementing this exciting new capability. This is a free event, so save the date and make sure you register via EventBrite now!

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Reminder : Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010 MPUG Melbourne

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

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Are you ready for Project 2010?

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 …

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Project Server 2010 to 2013 Migration Reference Sheet

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

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Some common errors when upgrading / migrating to Project Server 2013

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

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Migrating Project Server 2013 database between environments

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

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Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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Mobile Timesheets on Windows Phone 7

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner. Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on.

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

Posts

MPUG Melbourne–Tuesday 6th December

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

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Save the date: MPUG Melbourne Tuesday 24th May 2011

It’s that time again, after a break over the summer, I am pleased to announce that the next Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG) Melbourne chapter meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 24th May 2011 at Microsoft Melbourne. The topic of this meeting is demand management, covering the theory behind it, how it can benefit your organisation and Project Server 2010’s approach to implementing this exciting new capability. This is a free event, so save the date and make sure you register via EventBrite now!

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MPUG Members register for the Project 2010 Beta Exam for free

I’m not sure how long this has been advertised, but I noticed this little titbit on the official Microsoft Project site this morning. It seems Microsoft is offering the opportunity to take the Project 2010 beta exam for free to MPUG members, starting this November. To register you need to be an MPUG member and fill out the form located here. I have been an MPUG member for a while now and heartily recommend it.

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Reminder : Next MPUG Melbourne Meeting on 27th April 2010

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

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Announcing April’s MPUG Melbourne : Resource Management, The Holy Grail

The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two related presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

Posts

Reminder : Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010 MPUG Melbourne

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

Posts

Are you ready for Project 2010?

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 …

Posts

Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

Posts

Building your first Project Server app : Part 2 – Getting the basic app up and running

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

Posts

Building your first Project Server app : Part 1 – Getting Started – Setting up a development environment

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

Posts

Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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Customising the Nav Bar & App Launcher in Office 365

A while back Microsoft announced the release of the App Launcher in Office 365, also lovingly christened the Waffle by many due to it’s resemblance to the popular food. In the last few weeks the Waffle has started to appear across Office 365 tenants providing a much cleaner way of navigating to the various bits of Office 365 you care about. However, even with this cool new capability, I miss the old Projects and OneDrive links that used to be on the Navigation Bar and often find myself cursing having to go over to the top left and clicking on what I want.

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The Appie Awards…

Last night at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the winners of the ‘Appies’, recognising the best apps in the Microsoft Office and SharePoint stores. The awards highlighted a number of great apps covering SharePoint, Office and Project, including: Campagna and Schott for their CS Task Board app, a runner up in the Best UI award; CPS’s Project Task Auditor, winning the Most Business Value award for Project client apps; and Sensei’s Project Dashboard, winning the Most Interesting Scenario, Project category.

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Project Conference Session videos now available on Channel 9

Hot off the press this morning, the session video’s for the Project Conference are now available to watch via Channel 9. Here are a couple of my favourites so far (and I may be biased).. Future of Business Productivity Keynote – Check out the great demo with the Nintex Workflow for Office 365 app. My session Implementing your organizational process in SharePoint, Project Server and Office 365 with Nintex

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Check out the MS Project Podcast

Earlier in the week I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the MS Project Podcast by Prasanna Adavi and David Fletcher. The interview was a little about Nintex Workflow for Project Server, some Office 365 and a fair dose of my love of all things Project Server. The episode is available at ttp://www.msprojectpodcast.com/post/65349292852/ep-2-nintex-workflows-project-server-2013-and or you can subscribe to the ongoing podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/msprojectpodcast This is a great initiative by Prasanna and David and I encourage you all to get subscribing and sharing your Project stories with them

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Office 365

You couldn’t have helped but notice the blog has been a bit quiet recently. The reason is that I have been pretty busy in my day job at Nintex. Well, I am pleased to say I can finally reveal what I have been working on. This week we released Nintex Workflow for Office 365, a new product in the Nintex family that brings the power of Nintex Workflow to the Office 365 platform.

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013

I try not to mix my day job at Nintex with my community work and the content on this site, but today I want to make an exception and share some news on one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months. I am pleased to announce that we have shipped Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013 (NW4PS), an update to the popular workflow product for Project Server 2013.

Posts

Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

Posts

Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

Posts

Project Conference Session Wrap Up

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.

Posts

Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

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Are you going to the Project Conference?

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

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Nintex Workflow for Project Server V2.0 Beta First look

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post! Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components: Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow; New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database; Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

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Using Skip to Stage with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

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Using schedule data within a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow

Recently I have been looking into how far you can integrate a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow into the day to day management of a project. One particular area I have been concentrating on is encoded logic within the workflow to check the status of tasks within the schedule. Imagine the scenario, a project can only move into the close phase if all the deliverables or milestones in the project have been met, or you may want the phase of the project to change following the completion of a specific task.

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First look at Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2010

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

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Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

Posts

Project Conference Session Wrap Up

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.

Posts

Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

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Less than a month until the Project Conference..

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.

Posts

Are you going to the Project Conference?

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

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Nintex Workflow for Project Server V2.0 Beta First look

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post! Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components: Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow; New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database; Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

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Using Skip to Stage with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

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Using schedule data within a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow

Recently I have been looking into how far you can integrate a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow into the day to day management of a project. One particular area I have been concentrating on is encoded logic within the workflow to check the status of tasks within the schedule. Imagine the scenario, a project can only move into the close phase if all the deliverables or milestones in the project have been met, or you may want the phase of the project to change following the completion of a specific task.

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Stage gate approvals with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

A common request from people that develop workflows within Project Server is how to create a simple approval process for a project to transition a stage gate, so I thought I would write a blog post covering off how you can achieve it with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The stage gate logic I am going to use, is outlined in the flow chart below. The approval will give the user two options, either approve and move into the next stage of the project, or reject the approval and stay in Stage 1.

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First look at Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2010

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

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The Appie Awards…

Last night at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the winners of the ‘Appies’, recognising the best apps in the Microsoft Office and SharePoint stores. The awards highlighted a number of great apps covering SharePoint, Office and Project, including: Campagna and Schott for their CS Task Board app, a runner up in the Best UI award; CPS’s Project Task Auditor, winning the Most Business Value award for Project client apps; and Sensei’s Project Dashboard, winning the Most Interesting Scenario, Project category.

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Office 365

You couldn’t have helped but notice the blog has been a bit quiet recently. The reason is that I have been pretty busy in my day job at Nintex. Well, I am pleased to say I can finally reveal what I have been working on. This week we released Nintex Workflow for Office 365, a new product in the Nintex family that brings the power of Nintex Workflow to the Office 365 platform.

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Setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013

I’ve had a few comments through the blog on setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013, so I thought I would post something to take you through how to configure this. The Workflow Proxy in Project Server 2013 is important if you intend to use the classic workflow engine (not Workflow Manager ) and will be the account that makes the PSI calls associated with the workflow. The account should be set up as part of your Project Server installation and is specified in the Plan for administrative and service accounts in Project Server 2013 documentation.

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013

I try not to mix my day job at Nintex with my community work and the content on this site, but today I want to make an exception and share some news on one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months. I am pleased to announce that we have shipped Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013 (NW4PS), an update to the popular workflow product for Project Server 2013.

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013

I try not to mix my day job at Nintex with my community work and the content on this site, but today I want to make an exception and share some news on one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months. I am pleased to announce that we have shipped Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013 (NW4PS), an update to the popular workflow product for Project Server 2013.

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Mobile Project Server Business Intelligence with Windows Phone 7

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

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SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A match made in heaven

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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Project Server Help Videos

How many people actually read the help files that come with software? I know I tend not to until I get totally stuck. However, today whilst installing Project Server 2010 I decided to go and have a look around the Office 2010 help site at http://office2010.microsoft.com. The site provides a wealth of helpful information around Project and Project Server, but what really stood out was the video content giving overviews of the a number of key features in Project Server, including the new web app, Portfolio management and workflows, each of which are linked to below:

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Project 2013 Quick Start Guide Now Available

Microsoft have just published a number of Quick Start Guides for Office 2013, amongst them is this gem for Project 2013. The guides themselves are pretty comprehensive and cover not only the feature areas of Project, but also Project Online and the new Reporting and Task path capabilities. You can grab the the Office 2013 Quick Starts at Download other Office 2013 Quick Start Guides and the Project 2013 specifically at http://office.

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Project Server 2013 – What’s new and what’s changed?

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.

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Customising the Nav Bar & App Launcher in Office 365

A while back Microsoft announced the release of the App Launcher in Office 365, also lovingly christened the Waffle by many due to it’s resemblance to the popular food. In the last few weeks the Waffle has started to appear across Office 365 tenants providing a much cleaner way of navigating to the various bits of Office 365 you care about. However, even with this cool new capability, I miss the old Projects and OneDrive links that used to be on the Navigation Bar and often find myself cursing having to go over to the top left and clicking on what I want.

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Help shape Microsoft’s Ignite Conference

I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

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The quiet removal of My Tasks

One of the big things to happen in Office 365 whilst I was ‘offline’ was a quiet announcement about the removal of the My Tasks capability on your My Site. In case you hadn’t seen it, the My Tasks capability rolls up all tasks that have been assigned to you across SharePoint sites into a single view in your My Site. I’ve posted on it a few times before with the work management tag and it’s a great capability.

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Project Online Improvements

Running an online service is a massive undertaking, especially when you consider something of the size of Office 365. Not only do you need to keep adding new capabilities to the service, but you need to balance this with maintaining the lowest possible Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and ensuring the service is efficient and performant. The Project engineering team have been hard at work over the last few months performance changes across the service including the Project Center, Creating and Publishing a project, Submitting a timesheet as well as general tweaks etc.

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Sessions announced for the Microsoft Project Conference

In case you missed the announcement, the sessions for the Microsoft Project Conference have been released with some stellar speakers and sessions planned. If you’ve not registered yet, head on over to msprojectconference.com now and do so immediately. 😉 Join over 1,200 Project Managers, Executives and Technology Professionals from different industries to learn about the powerful capabilities included in Microsoft Project and our project and portfolio management (PPM) solution, available on premises and in the cloud.

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Have your say.. SharePoint & Project Server App Development

Thanks to Jeremy Thake for the heads up, but I thought I would repost this here to alert some of the Project Server community that build apps for SharePoint and Project Server and read this blog. Microsoft have launched a public UserVoice community to collaborate on feedback for the SharePoint app model moving forward. If you’re not familiar with UserVoice, it allows you to submit ideas and vote & comment on other user ideas.

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Office 365

You couldn’t have helped but notice the blog has been a bit quiet recently. The reason is that I have been pretty busy in my day job at Nintex. Well, I am pleased to say I can finally reveal what I have been working on. This week we released Nintex Workflow for Office 365, a new product in the Nintex family that brings the power of Nintex Workflow to the Office 365 platform.

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Work Management in SharePoint 2013–Slides and Links

Thanks to all those people that attended my session on Work Management in SharePoint 2013 at the two Australian SharePoint Conferences. As I mentioned in the sessions, I have uploaded the slides to SlideShare where you can download them. I will also publish the three demonstration videos in the coming weeks to take you through each of the demo’s in the session. [slideshare id=22854189&doc=auspc-mel-workmanagementinsharepoint2013-whatitisandwhyyoullloveit-130612044656-phpapp01] Also as mentioned in the session, here is the link to the excellent White Paper outlining the Work Management capabilities and Synchronisation with Exchange.

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Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

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How to remove the Office.com references from your Project Server & SharePoint 2010 farm

If you look closely in your SharePoint farm, you will see references to Office.com in some of the ribbons and dialogs…. When you click on the link or button, instead of opening up a window into thousands of SharePoint apps from Microsoft and Community, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show anything Someone asked recently if it was possible to turn these off as they can be confusing for users.

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Sync Project Tasks to Outlook, without Exchange

One of the great new features in Project Professional 2010 was the ability to synchronise a Project schedule with a SharePoint task list. Through this capability and a SharePoint 2010 environment, simple team level project statusing can be achieved with ease. In every demonstration I have seen, and in fact given, I have always assumed that the person updating the tasks would log into SharePoint and update the task through the web interface.

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Are you going to the Project Conference?

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

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Speaking at the Project Conference

I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

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Sessions announced for the Microsoft Project Conference

In case you missed the announcement, the sessions for the Microsoft Project Conference have been released with some stellar speakers and sessions planned. If you’ve not registered yet, head on over to msprojectconference.com now and do so immediately. 😉 Join over 1,200 Project Managers, Executives and Technology Professionals from different industries to learn about the powerful capabilities included in Microsoft Project and our project and portfolio management (PPM) solution, available on premises and in the cloud.

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Adding Print capabilities to Project Detail Pages

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.

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Turning off Personalisation in Project Server

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

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Turning off Personalisation in Project Server

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

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Turning off Personalisation in Project Server

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Estimation

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.

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Planning for holidays

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.

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Moving Demand Management Assets from A to B, Part 1

Over the Christmas break there was a question in the Project forums around how to deploy the various demand management assets from Development to Test to Production in a controlled manner, i.e. not manually. When I say demand management assets I mean things like Enterprise Project Types, Workflow Stages, Workflow Phases, Project Detail Pages, Web parts, Project Custom Fields and Workflow Proxy settings, i.e. all the bits that your Demand Management workflow needs to operate correctly, but not the necessarily the workflow itself.

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Check out the MS Project Podcast

Earlier in the week I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the MS Project Podcast by Prasanna Adavi and David Fletcher. The interview was a little about Nintex Workflow for Project Server, some Office 365 and a fair dose of my love of all things Project Server. The episode is available at ttp://www.msprojectpodcast.com/post/65349292852/ep-2-nintex-workflows-project-server-2013-and or you can subscribe to the ongoing podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/msprojectpodcast This is a great initiative by Prasanna and David and I encourage you all to get subscribing and sharing your Project stories with them

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Filtering Projects for Portfolio Selection

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.

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Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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Activating hidden features in Office 2013

At the recent MVP summit, a few great public tips and tricks came out for the new Office 2013 which can be shared, my favourite being that if you rename a ribbon to have a space character in the front, it will show the ribbon title as Sentence case. But there was one gem that the team didn’t share, which a little poking around with a hex editor and procmon has highlighted.

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Microsoft PowerShell Command Builder

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Microsoft released a pretty nifty PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint. Whilst it doesn’t look to support Project Server PowerShell commands just yet, it does support SharePoint Server 2010 which as Project Server practitioners we all need to roll our sleeves up and do something to now and again. The tool itself uses a handy drag and drop interface to select what you wish to do and then prompts you to enter the relevant information for the command.

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Microsoft PowerShell Command Builder

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Microsoft released a pretty nifty PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint. Whilst it doesn’t look to support Project Server PowerShell commands just yet, it does support SharePoint Server 2010 which as Project Server practitioners we all need to roll our sleeves up and do something to now and again. The tool itself uses a handy drag and drop interface to select what you wish to do and then prompts you to enter the relevant information for the command.

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SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 2– Business data visualisation with PowerView

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.

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SharePoint Sydney Wrap Up

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.

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Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.

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SharePoint 2010 Developer Conference Presentations

To fully understand the functionality of Project Server 2010, it’s important to have a good grasp of it’s underlying platform, SharePoint Server 2010. Back in October, Microsoft hosted the SharePoint Developers Conference in Las Vegas where pretty much every detail of the upcoming release of SharePoint was made public. I noticed today that Microsoft have released a number of the presentation decks from the conference, covering topics like: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services by Using Visual Studio 2010 Deep Dive into Open XML 2.

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Try the Project 2016 Preview today

At Ignite a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced the public preview of the Office 2016 clients for you to download and start testing some of the great new capabilities these products include. At the time I was a little disappointed as the preview did not include Project ( or Visio) Today however Microsoft have finally added Project and Visio to the public preview for you to try out Now you can not only try the new versions of Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Word which have already replaced Office 2013 on my daily driver laptop, but now you can also start to use the new version of Project including cool new features such as:

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Project Server 2013 Upgrade Process

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.

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Office 2013 Preview has arrived

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:

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Save the date… The Project Conference is coming again

Yep it’s true, the Project Conference is coming again, this time in early February in sunny California. It’s still over 200 days away, but it never hurts to reserve the date in your diary You can register for updates at www.msprojectconference.com or keep an eye on Jan’s blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jkalis/)

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Adding Print capabilities to Project Detail Pages

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.

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Another great feature of SharePoint 2010 – Visio Services

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

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Migrating Project Server 2013 database between environments

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

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Removing the progress line from a Gantt chart

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

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Project 2013 Ignite

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.

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Happy New Year

2013 was certainly a massive year both personally, professionally and in the world of Project. With the Project & SharePoint Conferences just around the corner, I am sure 2014 is shaping up to be bigger! To all my readers, thank you for your support in 2013 and I wish you a happy and prosperous 2014 (and a few more blog posts).

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Happy Holidays

This past year has been massive for epmsource.com, with record numbers of readers and traffic. Next year looks to become an even bigger year with the release of Project, SharePoint and Project Server 2013. To get ready for this, I am taking a blogging holiday for a couple of weeks to spend some time with my family and will be back in late January. To all of our readers, thank you for your continued support and happy holidays.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

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On cloud nine.. again

This morning I was once again lucky enough to receive confirmation that I had been re-awarded as an MVP for Project. I am still humbled by the whole experience and would like to continue to thank the readers of this blog, the community and Microsoft for your support and recognition.

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On cloud nine….

Today I was lucky enough to receive the 2010 MVP award for Project from Microsoft. For those of you that are unaware, Microsoft definition of an MVP is as follows: MVPs make exceptional contributions to technical communities, sharing their passion, knowledge, and know-how. Meanwhile, because MVPs hear the opinions and needs of many others in the technical community, they are well-placed to share highly focused feedback with Microsoft. MVPs are independent experts who are offered a close connection with people at Microsoft.

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P15 Wish List–A reminder

Just a reminder, a while back I posted about a Project 15 Wish List, and I invited you to post any wishes you may have to the list. With Project 2010 out the door, MS are no doubt turning their attention to P15 so I thought I would post a short reminder for all those regular readers out there, and the newer ones we have picked up in recent months.

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Make finding Project 2007 commands in 2010 easy

Following on from some of the posts I have been doing about Project 2010, I noticed this spreadsheet from Microsoft this morning that provides a mapping between Project 2007 menu items and where they are in the new Project 2010 fluent interface. Whilst the new 2010 interface makes it easier to find stuff IMHO, for people that have been using Project 2007 heavily, it may take some getting used to and this spreadsheet will help.

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Project 2010 New File Format

With the Project 2010 client nearing launch, I thought it would be timely to remind everyone who is going to use this fantastic new release that the file format has changed. As such, schedules you create in Project 2010 need to be saved in a previous file version to share with people using Project 2007 and 2003. Luckily Project 2010 makes it really easy to save your schedules in a previous file format.

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Enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

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Removing the progress line from a Gantt chart

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Tracking your project

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?

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Estimation

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Resource overallocations

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Planning for the Unexpected

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Planning for holidays

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project

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.

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Backwards Compatibility Mode–Project Server 2007 Fresh Databases available from Microsoft Download Center

Back in March I wrote about how you could enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install. I noticed this morning that Microsoft have released a set of clean Project Server 2007 databases for the specific purpose of creating a fresh Project Server 2010 instance in backwards compatibility mode. From the download page… Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM) is a feature in Project Server 2010 that assists in the upgrade of your Enterprise Project Management environment.

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Hiding the Today indicator from the Project 2010 Timeline

Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2010

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

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Three new Project 2010 demo videos

Today whilst looking around the Project site I noticed some new videos covering a number of new features of Project 2010. I was so impressed with them, I thought I would post them here so you can watch them too. The video’s cover off the following topics: User Controlled Scheduling Team Planner SharePoint Synchronisation. As well as the excellent instruction the presenter provides, there are also a number of step-by-step walkthroughs which take you through each of the features in more detail.

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Project 2010 Group Policy

Since the release of Project 2010, a few people have been asking in the forums on how to restrict or configure functionality of Project administratively. The Office 2010 Group Policy Administrative templates outline the various settings of Office that can be configured via Group Policy so organisations can centrally ‘configure’ aspects of Office 2010 for their users. Given some of the new features in Project 2010 such as manually scheduled and inactive tasks could be quite confusing until a user has had a chance to undergo training, this is a valuable tool in ensuring some of those new features can be turned off until the user has been trained to use them.

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SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A match made in heaven

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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How to change the Project Date Format

Recently a user asked on the forums about how to customise the date format of Project 2010 as it was not reflecting his localised regional settings by default. Project comes with a large set of predefined date formats that can be used throughout the application and will do its best to match one of these to the settings you have in your locale, but it can’t match all of them.

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Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.

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Three ways to toggle resource over-allocation indicators in Project 2010

Project 2010 introduces a new visual indicator that shows when a resource is over-allocated within the Gantt chart view. This is a great feature that ensures resource over-allocations are front and centre when people view the schedule, instead of being buried away on a resource tab. However there are times when you may want to suppress these indicators without hiding the whole indicators column, which may contain other important information.

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Make finding Project 2007 commands in 2010 easy

Following on from some of the posts I have been doing about Project 2010, I noticed this spreadsheet from Microsoft this morning that provides a mapping between Project 2007 menu items and where they are in the new Project 2010 fluent interface. Whilst the new 2010 interface makes it easier to find stuff IMHO, for people that have been using Project 2007 heavily, it may take some getting used to and this spreadsheet will help.

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Where did Copy Picture go?

A couple of people have asked me in the last few days about where the ‘Copy Picture’ icon that used to be front and centre in the Project 2007 had gone in 2010? I know it’s been posted before on other sites and in the newsgroups, but I thought I would repost it again. To find it, choose the Task tab and then click on the downward arrow next to Copy.

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Project 2010 New File Format

With the Project 2010 client nearing launch, I thought it would be timely to remind everyone who is going to use this fantastic new release that the file format has changed. As such, schedules you create in Project 2010 need to be saved in a previous file version to share with people using Project 2007 and 2003. Luckily Project 2010 makes it really easy to save your schedules in a previous file format.

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Reminder : Next MPUG Melbourne Meeting on 27th April 2010

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

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Extending the backstage… Integrating data and the UI

In the previous two posts, we covered off how to extract the workflow data from the Project Server Reporting database, and the basics of how to extend the Backstage view. In this post I will cover off how to merge the two together, and to discuss some of the limitations and problems I ran into. For the proof of concept I wanted the backstage view to render dynamic information about the project workflow in the backstage, checking out MSDN and Technet I found some fantastic resources to assist, including Customizing the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers and it’s associated code .

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Extending the Project backstage… Extending the GUI

In this second post covering my proof of concept to expose workflow status information in the Project backstage I will cover off some of the basics on how to extend the backstage. Like all of the Office 2010 clients, Project’s backstage can be customised by defining the various interface elements and their associated behaviours using an XML schema that has been published by Microsoft and is available for download here.

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Extending the Project Backstage… Getting the data

In the first of three posts covering my proof of concept to show the workflow status in the Project backstage, I will be covering off how to access the workflow data itself from within the Project Server. Now as this was a proof of concept, I decided to go with the simple approach of getting the information directly from the Reporting database instead of calling the Project Server PSI. There were a couple of reasons for this, firstly simplicity, accessing the data in the Reporting database via SQL and VBA is much simpler in my opinion than calling the PSI.

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Extending the Project Backspace…

One of the significant changes in the Office 2010 client was the introduction of the backstage view. The way it has brought common commands front and centre and combined relevant supporting information has quickly become one of those features I can’t live without and certainly something I notice immediately when I use any 2007 Office client. In Project 2010, this is particularly noticeable, with a number of the Enterprise features that were previously buried away in the jungle of menu’s prominent on the backstage, including items such as Project Publish, Organising the Enterprise Global and accepting Status updates from your team, which is a massive improvement in usability and functionality.

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Removing the progress line from a Gantt chart

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

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Speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

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Entering different User Credentials with Project 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.

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A potential gotcha with manually scheduled tasks…

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

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How to create multiple timelines

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.

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I’m Project 2010 Ready, are you?

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.

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Confused by the Project 2010 tabs? QAT to the rescue!

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.

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Sync to SharePoint Screencast

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Tracking your project

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?

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Estimation

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Resource overallocations

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Planning for the Unexpected

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Planning for holidays

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.

Posts

Effective Project Management with MS Project

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.

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Are you ready for Project 2010?

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 …

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9 things you may not know about Sync to SharePoint

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:

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Compare projects report in Project 2010

Update****: It appears that this feature isn’t new, but rather something that was in the previous version of Project but buried deep on a right click toolbar menu. So instead of a new feature, this is the perfect example of an old feature that has been surfaced due to the introduction of the ribbon. As a project manager at a consulting company one of the jobs that I frequently had was running bids for new pieces of work.

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Inactive Tasks in Project 2010

All too often when you are working on a project, the schedule can evolve from what you originally thought the schedule would be when you built it, to what the reality is. For example, in the schedule below there are three tasks, it turns out that Task 2 is no longer required. In Project 2007 there are two options to remove the task… Leave the task on the plan and set the remaining work to 0

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Adding Print capabilities to Project Detail Pages

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.

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Backwards Compatibility Mode–Project Server 2007 Fresh Databases available from Microsoft Download Center

Back in March I wrote about how you could enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install. I noticed this morning that Microsoft have released a set of clean Project Server 2007 databases for the specific purpose of creating a fresh Project Server 2010 instance in backwards compatibility mode. From the download page… Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM) is a feature in Project Server 2010 that assists in the upgrade of your Enterprise Project Management environment.

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How to ‘Select All’ in the Resource Center

Today I was doing some work in my Project Server 2010 demo image around resources and their associated availability. One thing that kept on getting me was I couldn’t find an obvious way of selecting all of my Enterprise Resources other than clicking on each of the checkboxes individually. Well after what felt like ten minutes of clicking around, I found how to do a ‘Select All’ on the Resources.

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SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A match made in heaven

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Demo Source Code available

Since the Project 2010 demonstration image was first released in beta form there have been a few questions in the forums and around the office about how the Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Project Detail Pages (PDPs) were implemented. Both of these PDP’s give a glimpse of how the PDP infrastructure can be leveraged to collect information about a project using the most appropriate mechanism. In the case of the the Cost Benefit PDP, an custom Excel based web part is used to collect financial information which is stored in the document library of the relevant project site.

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Reminder : Next MPUG Melbourne Meeting on 27th April 2010

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

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Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

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Speaking at the Project Conference

I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

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Project Conference 2014 Wrap Up

It’s been a little over a week since the Project Conference in Anaheim finished up and what a conference it was. It’s always great to meet up with the Project Community and catch up on what’s happening, it’s also the only place I know that you can wax lyrical about Project Server without people looking at you as if you’re strange Anyway, I thought I would share some of the highlights with you.

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Happy New Year

2013 was certainly a massive year both personally, professionally and in the world of Project. With the Project & SharePoint Conferences just around the corner, I am sure 2014 is shaping up to be bigger! To all my readers, thank you for your support in 2013 and I wish you a happy and prosperous 2014 (and a few more blog posts).

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Stage gate approvals with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

A common request from people that develop workflows within Project Server is how to create a simple approval process for a project to transition a stage gate, so I thought I would write a blog post covering off how you can achieve it with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The stage gate logic I am going to use, is outlined in the flow chart below. The approval will give the user two options, either approve and move into the next stage of the project, or reject the approval and stay in Stage 1.

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First look at Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2010

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

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SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A match made in heaven

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

Posts

Speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

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Project Conference 2014 Wrap Up

It’s been a little over a week since the Project Conference in Anaheim finished up and what a conference it was. It’s always great to meet up with the Project Community and catch up on what’s happening, it’s also the only place I know that you can wax lyrical about Project Server without people looking at you as if you’re strange Anyway, I thought I would share some of the highlights with you.

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Sessions announced for the Microsoft Project Conference

In case you missed the announcement, the sessions for the Microsoft Project Conference have been released with some stellar speakers and sessions planned. If you’ve not registered yet, head on over to msprojectconference.com now and do so immediately. 😉 Join over 1,200 Project Managers, Executives and Technology Professionals from different industries to learn about the powerful capabilities included in Microsoft Project and our project and portfolio management (PPM) solution, available on premises and in the cloud.

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Work Management in SharePoint 2013–Slides and Links

Thanks to all those people that attended my session on Work Management in SharePoint 2013 at the two Australian SharePoint Conferences. As I mentioned in the sessions, I have uploaded the slides to SlideShare where you can download them. I will also publish the three demonstration videos in the coming weeks to take you through each of the demo’s in the session. [slideshare id=22854189&doc=auspc-mel-workmanagementinsharepoint2013-whatitisandwhyyoullloveit-130612044656-phpapp01] Also as mentioned in the session, here is the link to the excellent White Paper outlining the Work Management capabilities and Synchronisation with Exchange.

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Skipping stages with ‘Change / Restart Workflow’ in Project Server 2013 and Project Online & SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer 2013 is another tool that provides a means for building workflows, what is new in the 2013 release is it can now build Demand Management workflows for Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Now I am not going to go into the specifics of the tool, as you probably already know my preference, but irrespective of that, I thought it important to share how to build workflows that leverage the Skip to Stage functionality with SPD.

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Where has Close tasks to update gone in Project Server 2013?

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.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney is coming – Saturday October 27th

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.

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–4th August 2012–with 2013 content!!

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.

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What’s new in Project Professional 2013?

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.

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Sync Project Tasks to Outlook, without Exchange

One of the great new features in Project Professional 2010 was the ability to synchronise a Project schedule with a SharePoint task list. Through this capability and a SharePoint 2010 environment, simple team level project statusing can be achieved with ease. In every demonstration I have seen, and in fact given, I have always assumed that the person updating the tasks would log into SharePoint and update the task through the web interface.

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Invoke Project Status reporting, direct from the ribbon

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

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Ignite 2015 Wrap up

For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

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Project Lite now available

Project Online has been available for a little over a year now, the first real SaaS version of Project Server operated by Microsoft and available in Office 365. The online service provides all the capabilities of Project Server you would expect, the centralised view of Projects, Resource Management, Task & Timesheet management, Portfolio Analysis and Prioritisation, Reporting and powerful collaboration for a monthly per user fee. Is some cases, organisations don’t need access to all this functionality for all users, specifically team members only really need access to the Task & Timesheet functionality, collaboration sites and the ability to see their project schedules.

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The Appie Awards…

Last night at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the winners of the ‘Appies’, recognising the best apps in the Microsoft Office and SharePoint stores. The awards highlighted a number of great apps covering SharePoint, Office and Project, including: Campagna and Schott for their CS Task Board app, a runner up in the Best UI award; CPS’s Project Task Auditor, winning the Most Business Value award for Project client apps; and Sensei’s Project Dashboard, winning the Most Interesting Scenario, Project category.

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The Appies are coming…

In case you had missed the news, Microsoft have announced The Appies, a competition around creating an awesome app for SharePoint, Office 2013 or our favorites, Project Server, Project Online or the Project client (Jeremy had the scoop a few weeks ago and coined the Appies name which I think is pretty apt). To qualify for the Appies, all you need to do is submit a new app or update an existing app between November 25th 2013 and January 31 2014 to be automatically entered.

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Check out the MS Project Podcast

Earlier in the week I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the MS Project Podcast by Prasanna Adavi and David Fletcher. The interview was a little about Nintex Workflow for Project Server, some Office 365 and a fair dose of my love of all things Project Server. The episode is available at ttp://www.msprojectpodcast.com/post/65349292852/ep-2-nintex-workflows-project-server-2013-and or you can subscribe to the ongoing podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/msprojectpodcast This is a great initiative by Prasanna and David and I encourage you all to get subscribing and sharing your Project stories with them

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Happy Holidays

This past year has been massive for epmsource.com, with record numbers of readers and traffic. Next year looks to become an even bigger year with the release of Project, SharePoint and Project Server 2013. To get ready for this, I am taking a blogging holiday for a couple of weeks to spend some time with my family and will be back in late January. To all of our readers, thank you for your continued support and happy holidays.

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Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part II

In the last post, we covered a few things you will need to know when hiding or disabling ribbon buttons in PWA. In this post we will look at how to actually hide the buttons. Where to start? Irrespective of whether you wish to hide or disable a button in the ribbon, you will need to follow the same basic process by building a solution in Visual Studio that will deploy your ribbon customisation.

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Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part I

Recently I have been working on a number of projects where the requirement to disable ribbon commands in Project Server has come up again and again. There are a couple of posts out there around modifying the ribbon, but they tend to focus on adding new items, not removing or disabling them, so I thought I would post something covering it. Of course, before you look at disabling the ribbon item through a customisation, you should look to see if the item can be disabled using the Project Server security model first.

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Less than two weeks to go…

It’s less than two weeks until TechEd Australia, and I have been hard at work with Brian Farnhill putting the finishing touches to the presentation and demonstrations. For those of you coming along, I will be taking part in two sessions: OFS310 The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010 Friday 2nd September – 9:45am – 11:00am It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why.

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Using Skip to Stage with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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Creating a Internet Explorer 9 Jump List for Project Server

One of the coolest features of Internet Explorer 9, other than the standards compliance and in the case of the Release Candidate, the general speed and stability improvements, is the ability to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar allowing you to launch your favourite websites with one click. With a little more effort, it is possible to define a number of task specific entry points into your site through a jump list that is available when the user right clicks on a pinned site.

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Twenty ten has been a massive year. With the release of Project 2010, the interest it has generated amongst customers & the community and the 20,000+ visitors we have received on this blog it feels more like it’s been two years! Next year looks set to be an even bigger year, with the continued growth of the Project 2010 and a bumper crop of new posts ideas I have been working on.

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Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

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Project Server 2007 CU Links

A week or so ago, I needed to go through the various Project Server 2007 CU’s to see if a particular issue my customer was experiencing had been fixed or was a new bug. After a bit of searching I was surprised to see that there wasn’t a definitive list of all the Project Server 2007 CU’s out there. There seemed to be a few which went from RTM through to SP2 (http://support.

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Error 1053 : The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion error event.

Recently the Project Server 2007 queue at one of my customers stopped working. What made this stranger was that it occurred on the Production, Test and Development environments within days of each other. My first thoughts were to see if the customer’s IT department had made any changes to the environments, like a patch, or hosting configuration change, but after passing my polygraph tests it seems they hadn’t. Restarting the Queue Service didn’t seem to fix the issue, resulting in the error:

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Error 6875 : Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. Line 1, position 256.

I thought I would blog this so I can find it again and in case someone else runs into this issue. Last week whilst performing a health check on a Project Server 2007 installations I came across this error which seemed to be a pretty common occurrence in the event logs. Error loading and running event receiver Microsoft.Office.Project.PWA.WSSEventReceivers.PSDBUpdater in Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.PWA,Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Additional information is below. Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred.

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Encoding a Risk Matrix in Project Server

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

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Fiscal Time Dimension Not Set

For the past couple of weeks I have been building some financial reports from information stored within the cubes of Project Server 2007. The client has some pretty full on requirements around presenting the information, so I chose to implement the reports using Microsoft Excel which I can apply a bit of logic and formatting to instead of the out of the box PS2007 data analysis views. One problem I ran into was that the Fiscal Time dimension in the cubes was showing as ‘Not Set’ when trying to set it as a filter.

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Enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

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The web site specified is already linked to another project

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.

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Speaking at the Project Conference

I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

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Project Server 2010 to 2013 Migration Reference Sheet

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

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Quick Post : Workflows not working on a PS2010 farm where the Web Front End Service is disabled

I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well. In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).

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Some common errors when upgrading / migrating to Project Server 2013

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

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Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison

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.

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Filtering Projects for Portfolio Selection

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.

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Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

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Windows 8 Release Preview and 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.

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SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 2– Business data visualisation with PowerView

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.

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SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 1 – Reporting Services Data Alerts

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.

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SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services and Project Server – A match made in heaven

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.

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Project Conference Session Wrap Up

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.

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Love Business Intelligence on Project Server, install the December 2011 CU now!

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.

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Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

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MPUG Melbourne–Tuesday 6th December

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

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Turning off Personalisation in Project Server

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

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Mobile Timesheets on Windows Phone 7

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner. Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on.

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ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–22nd October 2011

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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Nintex Workflow for Project Server V2.0 Beta First look

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post! Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components: Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow; New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database; Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

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Project Server Service Pack 1–Two handy SharePoint Features

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney–Saturday 6th August 2011

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

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Project Demo Image–Excel Services problem after SP1 upgrade

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Project Server 2010 : Service Pack One

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010. To complicate matters on the same day, the June 2011 CU was also released and recommended to be installed at the same time. A full list of the fixes and changes in SP1 can be seen here, and the June CU here. At the time of writing, the June CU has a number of known issues that must be understood prior to patching as they may impact your underlying SharePoint farm.

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File not found error when viewing risks or issues

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

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Speaking at Tech.Ed Australia 2011

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled: ‘A SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010’ It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two.

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Using Skip to Stage with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

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Common errors when a PWA site is deleted ‘incorrectly’

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

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Mobile Project Server Business Intelligence with Windows Phone 7

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

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Add the target attribute to Project Server quick links

Recently on the Project forums, a user asked if it was possible to add a target attribute to a menu item in the quick links of Project Server, i.e. the target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window. This capability can be pretty useful, especially when you want to provide links to non project server content that supports the use of the tool such as a PMO help site, or perhaps even your favourite EPM blog Unfortunately the Project Server quick link functionality doesn’t give you an option to set a target and no way to decorate a html anchor statement to insert one.

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How to remove the Office.com references from your Project Server & SharePoint 2010 farm

If you look closely in your SharePoint farm, you will see references to Office.com in some of the ribbons and dialogs…. When you click on the link or button, instead of opening up a window into thousands of SharePoint apps from Microsoft and Community, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show anything Someone asked recently if it was possible to turn these off as they can be confusing for users.

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Unexpected error customising the Cost, Cost Exposure and Exposure columns in a Project Server 2010 Risk list

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

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Invoke Project Status reporting, direct from the ribbon

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

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Moving demand management assets from A to B, Part 2

In the first part of this series, we looked at using Playbooks to move demand management assets from one server to another. Whilst Playbooks is a very useful tool, it does have one limitation in that it moves all the chosen settings over, so if you wish to export a single EPT and its PDPs, you’re out of luck. Luckily Microsoft released another tool as part of its ‘solution starters’ series that allows the selective exporting and importing of demand management assets.

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Stage gate approvals with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

A common request from people that develop workflows within Project Server is how to create a simple approval process for a project to transition a stage gate, so I thought I would write a blog post covering off how you can achieve it with Nintex Workflow for Project Server. The stage gate logic I am going to use, is outlined in the flow chart below. The approval will give the user two options, either approve and move into the next stage of the project, or reject the approval and stay in Stage 1.

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First look at Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2010

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–Links and Wrap Up

Earlier today I was lucky enough to present at Melbourne’s 2nd SharePoint Saturday event, with a session entitled ‘Ten reasons why your organisation should consider Project Server 2010’. The audience was a good mix of seasoned Project Server users and people just interested in the general capabilities. In a attempt to leverage some of the excellent social media tools out there, the presentation was linked to Twitter with automatic tweets of further information being sent out at the same time on my twitter account with the #spsmelbourne-proj hash tag.

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Restoring a deleted Project Workspace from SQL Backups

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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Encoding a Risk Matrix in Project Server

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

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Project 2010 Demo and Evaluation Pack–An Unexpected Error has occurred

A couple of users on the Project forums have run into issues getting the Project Server Demo Pack to install onto the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue. But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

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Another great feature of SharePoint 2010 – Visio Services

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

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Downloadable Project Server Technet IT Pro Content

Overnight Microsoft have released all the current Technet IT Pro content for Project Server in a single convenient compiled help file, making it incredibly easy to reference all those guidance notes and best practice when on a machine not connected to the internet. The file can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb. Remember to unblock the file via a Right click / Properties before viewing or the file may not render.

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Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.

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Project Server Help Videos

How many people actually read the help files that come with software? I know I tend not to until I get totally stuck. However, today whilst installing Project Server 2010 I decided to go and have a look around the Office 2010 help site at http://office2010.microsoft.com. The site provides a wealth of helpful information around Project and Project Server, but what really stood out was the video content giving overviews of the a number of key features in Project Server, including the new web app, Portfolio management and workflows, each of which are linked to below:

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Extending the Project Backstage… Getting the data

In the first of three posts covering my proof of concept to show the workflow status in the Project backstage, I will be covering off how to access the workflow data itself from within the Project Server. Now as this was a proof of concept, I decided to go with the simple approach of getting the information directly from the Reporting database instead of calling the Project Server PSI. There were a couple of reasons for this, firstly simplicity, accessing the data in the Reporting database via SQL and VBA is much simpler in my opinion than calling the PSI.

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Extending the Project Backspace…

One of the significant changes in the Office 2010 client was the introduction of the backstage view. The way it has brought common commands front and centre and combined relevant supporting information has quickly become one of those features I can’t live without and certainly something I notice immediately when I use any 2007 Office client. In Project 2010, this is particularly noticeable, with a number of the Enterprise features that were previously buried away in the jungle of menu’s prominent on the backstage, including items such as Project Publish, Organising the Enterprise Global and accepting Status updates from your team, which is a massive improvement in usability and functionality.

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Enable backwards compatibility mode on a fresh Project Server 2010 install

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

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Entering different User Credentials with Project 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.

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A potential gotcha with manually scheduled tasks…

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

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Project Server 2010 on Windows 7 – An update

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.

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I’m Project 2010 Ready, are you?

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.

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Reminder : Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010 MPUG Melbourne

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

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Setting up Excel Services in Project Server 2010

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.

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Project Server 2010 known issues

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.

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Project Server Delegates

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.

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Project Server 2010 and Windows 7

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.

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9 things you may not know about Sync to SharePoint

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:

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Enterprise custom field improvements in Project Server 2010

One of the core features of Project Server that integrates the tool into an organisation are Enterprise Custom Fields or ECF’s. ECF’s allow the recording of business specific metadata which is used to classify the various aspects of an organisation across a project, resource and task level. During the planning stages of a Project Server implementation a significant amount of time is spent understanding the custom fields that need to be configured in order for the tool to meet the requirements of the business.

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The Appies are coming again..

One of the highlights of the 2014 SharePoint conference were the App Awards for the Office and SharePoint apps, well it seems that the Appies are being run again, this time for the upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference in July. There are six categories you can nominate your apps in: Best User Interface – App for Office or App for SharePoint Highest Performing App – App for Office or App for SharePoint Most Business Value – App for Office or App for SharePoint Best International Developer – App for Office & SharePoint Best Office 365 App Best Mobile App The last two are the most interesting as you can now submit Office 365 / Consent Flow apps and Mobile apps that extend and augment Office 365 in any of the mobile ecosystems.

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Setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013

I’ve had a few comments through the blog on setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013, so I thought I would post something to take you through how to configure this. The Workflow Proxy in Project Server 2013 is important if you intend to use the classic workflow engine (not Workflow Manager ) and will be the account that makes the PSI calls associated with the workflow. The account should be set up as part of your Project Server installation and is specified in the Plan for administrative and service accounts in Project Server 2013 documentation.

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Quick Start Guides for Project Server & Project Online

I’m a little late to the party with this, but Microsoft have released a number of excellent Quick Start Guides taking users through key concepts in Project Server and Project Online which I thought I would share with the readers of this blog. The quick start guides cover a number of topics and can be obtained from the links below: Get started with Project Online Create Projects in Project Online

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App Review–UMT 360 Workflow Visualization

One of the most common add-ons to Project Server 2010 environments was the workflow visualization solution starter that provided a graphical overview of where a project was in it’s demand management workflow. In 2013 and Project Online, Microsoft introduced an out of the box workflow visualisation component, which is pretty good at showing the stage transitions, but can be limited if you have more complex processes you want to visualize.

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App Review–Nearbaseline’s Bulk Edit

Any organisation that uses Project Server will quickly get to the point where they need to modify or add new custom fields as their organisational process or requirements change. As any Administrator will tell you, adding new custom fields is simple, however updating all the projects to reflect the new custom fields is not. Enter Bulk Edit, a popular 2010 solution starter that has been given the app treatment by a few partners.

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Project Conference 2014 Wrap Up

It’s been a little over a week since the Project Conference in Anaheim finished up and what a conference it was. It’s always great to meet up with the Project Community and catch up on what’s happening, it’s also the only place I know that you can wax lyrical about Project Server without people looking at you as if you’re strange Anyway, I thought I would share some of the highlights with you.

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Using Project Server 2013 / Project Online–make sure you read this…

The Project Support blog today published a post about a pretty nasty bug that has been found in Project Server 2013 and until very recently in Project Online that could cause you to lose resources across schedules. Full details of the bug and the actions you can take to address the issue if you have encountered it can be seen at http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2014/02/06/project-server-2013-and-project-online-what-happened-to-my-resources.aspx. If you have encountered any issues with lost resources including resource names turning into numbers, or mysterious material resources appearing, I would highly encourage you to read the above blog.

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Speaking at the Project Conference

I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

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Have your say.. SharePoint & Project Server App Development

Thanks to Jeremy Thake for the heads up, but I thought I would repost this here to alert some of the Project Server community that build apps for SharePoint and Project Server and read this blog. Microsoft have launched a public UserVoice community to collaborate on feedback for the SharePoint app model moving forward. If you’re not familiar with UserVoice, it allows you to submit ideas and vote & comment on other user ideas.

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Hiding buttons in Project Online

A common requirement from customers is to be able to hide / disable buttons within their Project Server instance and of course, this requirement will not go away with Project Online. I wrote a a while back about how you could disable or hide ribbon buttons using a simple sandboxed solution. Well the good news is that this approach is still valid for Project Online. Given all the focus on the app model and the flexibility and restrictions it introduces, it is sometimes forgotten that you can still deploy sandboxed solutions to your Project Online environment.

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Project Server 2010 to 2013 Migration Reference Sheet

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

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Speaking at the Aussie SharePoint Conference Part 2 in Melbourne

I am excited to announce that I will once again be speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference this time in Melbourne on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. Hopefully this time the demo gods will be on my side and Project’ Sync to SharePoint will work. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013.

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Quick Post : Workflows not working on a PS2010 farm where the Web Front End Service is disabled

I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well. In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).

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Some common errors when upgrading / migrating to Project Server 2013

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

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Migrating Project Server 2013 database between environments

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

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Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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Skipping stages with ‘Change / Restart Workflow’ in Project Server 2013 and Project Online & SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer 2013 is another tool that provides a means for building workflows, what is new in the 2013 release is it can now build Demand Management workflows for Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Now I am not going to go into the specifics of the tool, as you probably already know my preference, but irrespective of that, I thought it important to share how to build workflows that leverage the Skip to Stage functionality with SPD.

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Create your own ‘Getting Started with the Project Web App’ carousel

One of the most obvious differences between Project Server 2013 and 2010 is the look and feel, specifically the new modern UI style tiles to help you perform tasks / find options quickly and easily called ‘The Carousel’. On a un-customised PWA site you will see two rows of these tiles, the ‘Getting Started’ and the ‘Track your work’ options. For a while I have been thinking about how powerful one of these carousels would be within your own organisation, perhaps providing a direct link to view the queue, a link to that report everyone uses, a central lessons learned register, a PMO site, or even your favourite EPM / PPM blog.

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Setting up your Workflow Proxy account for 2010 legacy workflows in Project Server 2013

You may be aware that Project Server 2013 can now use demand management workflows built in SharePoint Designer and the new Azure based Workflow Manager. But you may not be aware that the old 2010 ‘legacy’ workflow capabilities are also still present and available for you to leverage. This is particularly important for organisations that may be upgrading from Project Server 2010 and have invested in demand management workflows and do not want to redevelop or significantly refactor their workflows for Project Server 2013 and the new Workflow Manager.

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Introducing the365project.net

With the introduction of Office 2013 and the arrival of Project Online in Office 365 I thought it would be a good time to try and bring some members of the Project and SharePoint community together to launch a new community site. So it is my great pleasure to introduce the365project.net. What is the365project.net? Well it’s a new tips and tricks site for the Project, Project Server and SharePoint, covering the existing versions and the new 2013 wave of products.

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 3 – Taking the app to the next level

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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Retrieving the ProjectUID of a workspace using _api REST interface

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,

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Where has Close tasks to update gone in Project Server 2013?

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.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney is coming – Saturday October 27th

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.

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Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison

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.

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Project Server 2013 Upgrade Process

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.

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Project Server 2013 – What’s new and what’s changed?

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.

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–4th August 2012–with 2013 content!!

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.

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Project Server 2016 IT Pro Preview – A Quick Tour

Earlier today Microsoft announced the release of the SharePoint Server 2016 IT Pro Preview, our first introduction to the 2016 wave of on-premises products. Obviously a new drop of SharePoint is exciting enough, but this release is doubly exciting as it also includes the IT Pro Preview of Project Server 2016. With 2016 there are some massive changes to Project Server, the first and most obvious one is that the Project Server bits are included in the SharePoint 2016 binary.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 3 – Taking the app to the next level

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 2 – Getting the basic app up and running

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 1 – Getting Started – Setting up a development environment

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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Setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013

I’ve had a few comments through the blog on setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013, so I thought I would post something to take you through how to configure this. The Workflow Proxy in Project Server 2013 is important if you intend to use the classic workflow engine (not Workflow Manager ) and will be the account that makes the PSI calls associated with the workflow. The account should be set up as part of your Project Server installation and is specified in the Plan for administrative and service accounts in Project Server 2013 documentation.

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Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

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How to change the Project Date Format

Recently a user asked on the forums about how to customise the date format of Project 2010 as it was not reflecting his localised regional settings by default. Project comes with a large set of predefined date formats that can be used throughout the application and will do its best to match one of these to the settings you have in your locale, but it can’t match all of them.

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Removing the progress line from a Gantt chart

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

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Multiple cost rates for a resource in the same project

Last week a question came up as to whether it is possible to have multiple cost rates for a resource within the same project. The answer of course is yes, and this is how you do it. Navigate to the Resource Sheet and double click on the resource you want to have multiple rates. Navigate to the Costs tab of the Resource Information dialog

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Using Nintex for Project Management Nirvana – Speaking at the Project Virtual Conference

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming inaugural Project Virtual Conference, a free global online conference that is dedicated to Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online that will be running for 24 hours. For those of you that may have missed it, the Project Virtual Conference is a completely free, virtual conference that has been organised by members of the Project community (Prasanna, Cindy, Treb, Ben, Rod, Paul, Julie and Vadim) in their spare time.

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Changing the default security timeout for PWA and SP2010

A common request for previous versions of Project Server was the ability to extend the security timeout of pages within the tool. Why this was requested was users typically started an action, got called away, or popped out for a coffee, then came back to the page they were editing, pressed save only to be told that the page had timed out and all their edits had been lost. Now this was not across the whole of tool, but only certain pages like editing views, SharePoint team sites etc.

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Retrieving the ProjectUID of a workspace using _api REST interface

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,

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Removing closed web parts before saving a project workspace template

Recently I have seen this problem manifest itself at two customers, so I thought I would post about it to save anyone else running into it, or scratching their heads. When you customise project workspaces, or SharePoint workspaces in general, you have two options to remove the web parts from the page: Close the web part – this stops the web part being rendered on the page, but still being created on each page load Delete the web part – this removes the web part from the page completely.

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File not found error when viewing risks or issues

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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Restoring a deleted Project Workspace from SQL Backups

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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Retrieving the ProjectUID of a workspace using _api REST interface

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,

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ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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Unable to publish projects with TRIM Context installed?

I ran into this issue at a customer recently and thought I would share it on the blog in case someone else ran into. The customer is a heavy user of the document management solution TRIM and has the program TRIM Context installed on most of their PC’s in order to allow users to store documents directly in TRIM from their desktop applications. During user acceptance testing, one user was unable to save and publish their project schedules into Project Server in one session as the publish button was disabled until the schedule was saved, MS Project closed and the schedule reopened.

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Confused by the Project 2010 tabs? QAT to the rescue!

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.

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Confused by the Project 2010 tabs? QAT to the rescue!

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.

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Quick Start Guides for Project Server & Project Online

I’m a little late to the party with this, but Microsoft have released a number of excellent Quick Start Guides taking users through key concepts in Project Server and Project Online which I thought I would share with the readers of this blog. The quick start guides cover a number of topics and can be obtained from the links below: Get started with Project Online Create Projects in Project Online

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Project 2013 Quick Start Guide Now Available

Microsoft have just published a number of Quick Start Guides for Office 2013, amongst them is this gem for Project 2013. The guides themselves are pretty comprehensive and cover not only the feature areas of Project, but also Project Online and the new Reporting and Task path capabilities. You can grab the the Office 2013 Quick Starts at Download other Office 2013 Quick Start Guides and the Project 2013 specifically at http://office.

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How to ‘Select All’ in the Resource Center

Today I was doing some work in my Project Server 2010 demo image around resources and their associated availability. One thing that kept on getting me was I couldn’t find an obvious way of selecting all of my Enterprise Resources other than clicking on each of the checkboxes individually. Well after what felt like ten minutes of clicking around, I found how to do a ‘Select All’ on the Resources.

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Restoring a deleted Project Workspace from SQL Backups

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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Project Server 2010 to 2013 Migration Reference Sheet

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

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File not found error when viewing risks or issues

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

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SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 1 – Reporting Services Data Alerts

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.

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ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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Invoke Project Status reporting, direct from the ribbon

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

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Compare projects report in Project 2010

Update****: It appears that this feature isn’t new, but rather something that was in the previous version of Project but buried deep on a right click toolbar menu. So instead of a new feature, this is the perfect example of an old feature that has been surfaced due to the introduction of the ribbon. As a project manager at a consulting company one of the jobs that I frequently had was running bids for new pieces of work.

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How to ‘Select All’ in the Resource Center

Today I was doing some work in my Project Server 2010 demo image around resources and their associated availability. One thing that kept on getting me was I couldn’t find an obvious way of selecting all of my Enterprise Resources other than clicking on each of the checkboxes individually. Well after what felt like ten minutes of clicking around, I found how to do a ‘Select All’ on the Resources.

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Three ways to toggle resource over-allocation indicators in Project 2010

Project 2010 introduces a new visual indicator that shows when a resource is over-allocated within the Gantt chart view. This is a great feature that ensures resource over-allocations are front and centre when people view the schedule, instead of being buried away on a resource tab. However there are times when you may want to suppress these indicators without hiding the whole indicators column, which may contain other important information.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Resource overallocations

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.

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Using Project Server 2013 / Project Online–make sure you read this…

The Project Support blog today published a post about a pretty nasty bug that has been found in Project Server 2013 and until very recently in Project Online that could cause you to lose resources across schedules. Full details of the bug and the actions you can take to address the issue if you have encountered it can be seen at http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2014/02/06/project-server-2013-and-project-online-what-happened-to-my-resources.aspx. If you have encountered any issues with lost resources including resource names turning into numbers, or mysterious material resources appearing, I would highly encourage you to read the above blog.

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Tech Ed 2011–Wrap up and resources

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

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Announcing April’s MPUG Melbourne : Resource Management, The Holy Grail

The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two related presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

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Hiding buttons in Project Online

A common requirement from customers is to be able to hide / disable buttons within their Project Server instance and of course, this requirement will not go away with Project Online. I wrote a a while back about how you could disable or hide ribbon buttons using a simple sandboxed solution. Well the good news is that this approach is still valid for Project Online. Given all the focus on the app model and the flexibility and restrictions it introduces, it is sometimes forgotten that you can still deploy sandboxed solutions to your Project Online environment.

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Adding Print capabilities to Project Detail Pages

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.

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Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part II

In the last post, we covered a few things you will need to know when hiding or disabling ribbon buttons in PWA. In this post we will look at how to actually hide the buttons. Where to start? Irrespective of whether you wish to hide or disable a button in the ribbon, you will need to follow the same basic process by building a solution in Visual Studio that will deploy your ribbon customisation.

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Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part I

Recently I have been working on a number of projects where the requirement to disable ribbon commands in Project Server has come up again and again. There are a couple of posts out there around modifying the ribbon, but they tend to focus on adding new items, not removing or disabling them, so I thought I would post something covering it. Of course, before you look at disabling the ribbon item through a customisation, you should look to see if the item can be disabled using the Project Server security model first.

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Invoke Project Status reporting, direct from the ribbon

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

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Encoding a Risk Matrix in Project Server

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

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Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Demo Source Code available

Since the Project 2010 demonstration image was first released in beta form there have been a few questions in the forums and around the office about how the Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Project Detail Pages (PDPs) were implemented. Both of these PDP’s give a glimpse of how the PDP infrastructure can be leveraged to collect information about a project using the most appropriate mechanism. In the case of the the Cost Benefit PDP, an custom Excel based web part is used to collect financial information which is stored in the document library of the relevant project site.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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Unexpected error customising the Cost, Cost Exposure and Exposure columns in a Project Server 2010 Risk list

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

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Updates for Project Online on the Public roadmap

Just a quick post to highlight a couple of exciting new capabilities for Project Online that have appeared in the Office roadmap, that you may have missed. The following two items have been added under the launched category. The first Bulk updates in Project Online Workflow creators in Project Online can bulk update project custom fields with a single service request. Previously, each custom field update required a separate service request.

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Some useful links for the new year

A little late, but I thought I would post information about this great resource from Brian Smith. If you’ve ever had to hunt for details of which CU contained a fix for an issue and had to sit there in Google and Bing aggregating results, hunt no more, Brian has created a single page that contains details of all the Cumulative Updates for Project and Project Server 2013 on-premises in a single location over at the Project Support blog.

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Add the target attribute to Project Server quick links

Recently on the Project forums, a user asked if it was possible to add a target attribute to a menu item in the quick links of Project Server, i.e. the target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window. This capability can be pretty useful, especially when you want to provide links to non project server content that supports the use of the tool such as a PMO help site, or perhaps even your favourite EPM blog Unfortunately the Project Server quick link functionality doesn’t give you an option to set a target and no way to decorate a html anchor statement to insert one.

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Project 2010 New File Format

With the Project 2010 client nearing launch, I thought it would be timely to remind everyone who is going to use this fantastic new release that the file format has changed. As such, schedules you create in Project 2010 need to be saved in a previous file version to share with people using Project 2007 and 2003. Luckily Project 2010 makes it really easy to save your schedules in a previous file format.

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Using schedule data within a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow

Recently I have been looking into how far you can integrate a Nintex Workflow for Project Server workflow into the day to day management of a project. One particular area I have been concentrating on is encoded logic within the workflow to check the status of tasks within the schedule. Imagine the scenario, a project can only move into the close phase if all the deliverables or milestones in the project have been met, or you may want the phase of the project to change following the completion of a specific task.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Planning for holidays

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project : Planning for the Unexpected

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.

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How to ‘Select All’ in the Resource Center

Today I was doing some work in my Project Server 2010 demo image around resources and their associated availability. One thing that kept on getting me was I couldn’t find an obvious way of selecting all of my Enterprise Resources other than clicking on each of the checkboxes individually. Well after what felt like ten minutes of clicking around, I found how to do a ‘Select All’ on the Resources.

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Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison

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.

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Checking out the new Workflow Health pages

Whilst looking into a workflow issue today on my Office 365 tenant, I noticed a new feature that appears to be quietly rolling out into Office 365, the Workflow Health screen. Dee over at DDLS also noticed it a few weeks back and blogged about it, but I thought I would dig in a little more. From the surface it looks like the feature addresses some of the issues in Office 365 when the Workflow Manager instance your tenant is attached to is down or unavailable or you want to see aggregated status of workflows in a site or list without clicking into each workflow instance.

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Project Server 2010 : Service Pack One

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010. To complicate matters on the same day, the June 2011 CU was also released and recommended to be installed at the same time. A full list of the fixes and changes in SP1 can be seen here, and the June CU here. At the time of writing, the June CU has a number of known issues that must be understood prior to patching as they may impact your underlying SharePoint farm.

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Service Resumed

Wow… I didn’t realise that I hadn’t posted for so long. Things have been a little crazy in my day job over the past few months with me moving into a new role but I’ve been keeping my finger on the Project pulse and have some great posts coming up in the next few months. PS. For those not sure of the picture, it’s a service card that used to be shown on UK TV when the service was down.

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Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison

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.

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Ignite 2015 Wrap up

For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

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Help shape Microsoft’s Ignite Conference

I’ve posted before about how fantastic the Microsoft Project & SharePoint Conferences are, well a couple of months ago Microsoft announced that they were merging those two conferences along with Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and pretty much everything in between into a new conference called Microsoft Ignite. The Microsoft Ignite team have been hard at it planning what the event will be and it looks to be a cracker, but in a break from usual conferences, the team at Ignite want to hear from the community at large as to what content they want to see in the conference and have put up a survey at http://ignite2015.

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Office 365

You couldn’t have helped but notice the blog has been a bit quiet recently. The reason is that I have been pretty busy in my day job at Nintex. Well, I am pleased to say I can finally reveal what I have been working on. This week we released Nintex Workflow for Office 365, a new product in the Nintex family that brings the power of Nintex Workflow to the Office 365 platform.

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Skipping stages with ‘Change / Restart Workflow’ in Project Server 2013 and Project Online & SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer 2013 is another tool that provides a means for building workflows, what is new in the 2013 release is it can now build Demand Management workflows for Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Now I am not going to go into the specifics of the tool, as you probably already know my preference, but irrespective of that, I thought it important to share how to build workflows that leverage the Skip to Stage functionality with SPD.

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SharePoint Sydney Wrap Up

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.

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Building advanced Project Server workflows with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

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.

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Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part II

In the last post, we covered a few things you will need to know when hiding or disabling ribbon buttons in PWA. In this post we will look at how to actually hide the buttons. Where to start? Irrespective of whether you wish to hide or disable a button in the ribbon, you will need to follow the same basic process by building a solution in Visual Studio that will deploy your ribbon customisation.

Posts

Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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Encoding a Risk Matrix in Project Server

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

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Speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

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Sync to SharePoint Screencast

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.

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Speaking at the Project Conference

I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

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Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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Microsoft PowerShell Command Builder

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Microsoft released a pretty nifty PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint. Whilst it doesn’t look to support Project Server PowerShell commands just yet, it does support SharePoint Server 2010 which as Project Server practitioners we all need to roll our sleeves up and do something to now and again. The tool itself uses a handy drag and drop interface to select what you wish to do and then prompts you to enter the relevant information for the command.

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Project Demo Image–Excel Services problem after SP1 upgrade

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Speaking at Tech.Ed Australia 2011

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled: ‘A SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010’ It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two.

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Add the target attribute to Project Server quick links

Recently on the Project forums, a user asked if it was possible to add a target attribute to a menu item in the quick links of Project Server, i.e. the target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window. This capability can be pretty useful, especially when you want to provide links to non project server content that supports the use of the tool such as a PMO help site, or perhaps even your favourite EPM blog Unfortunately the Project Server quick link functionality doesn’t give you an option to set a target and no way to decorate a html anchor statement to insert one.

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How to remove the Office.com references from your Project Server & SharePoint 2010 farm

If you look closely in your SharePoint farm, you will see references to Office.com in some of the ribbons and dialogs…. When you click on the link or button, instead of opening up a window into thousands of SharePoint apps from Microsoft and Community, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show anything Someone asked recently if it was possible to turn these off as they can be confusing for users.

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Changing the default security timeout for PWA and SP2010

A common request for previous versions of Project Server was the ability to extend the security timeout of pages within the tool. Why this was requested was users typically started an action, got called away, or popped out for a coffee, then came back to the page they were editing, pressed save only to be told that the page had timed out and all their edits had been lost. Now this was not across the whole of tool, but only certain pages like editing views, SharePoint team sites etc.

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Sync Project Tasks to Outlook, without Exchange

One of the great new features in Project Professional 2010 was the ability to synchronise a Project schedule with a SharePoint task list. Through this capability and a SharePoint 2010 environment, simple team level project statusing can be achieved with ease. In every demonstration I have seen, and in fact given, I have always assumed that the person updating the tasks would log into SharePoint and update the task through the web interface.

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Restoring a deleted Project Workspace from SQL Backups

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2010

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

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Managed metadata, Wikis and Graph web parts..

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.

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Improve document approvals with SharePoint workflows

A common problem I see again and again on projects is the drama involved in getting a project document reviewed and approved. Typically signing off a document confirms that the document contents is correct and has been accepted, this can have commercial implications or be a formal stage gate in the project management process. Many organisations use a manual approval process, sending copies of the document around by email, or worse a printed copy that jumps from in-tray to in-tray which is incredibly inefficient and is nearly impossible to track the progress of.

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Another great feature of SharePoint 2010 – Visio Services

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

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An introduction to Document Sets…

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier. The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.

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SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A match made in heaven

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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Less than six weeks until the Australian SharePoint Conference

Just a reminder for those Australian readers, tickets are still available for the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference, which is less than six weeks away. The conference has something for everyone, covering both technical and business topics, with: 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance, insurance, legal and engineering 20 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products.

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SharePoint 2010 Developer Conference Presentations

To fully understand the functionality of Project Server 2010, it’s important to have a good grasp of it’s underlying platform, SharePoint Server 2010. Back in October, Microsoft hosted the SharePoint Developers Conference in Las Vegas where pretty much every detail of the upcoming release of SharePoint was made public. I noticed today that Microsoft have released a number of the presentation decks from the conference, covering topics like: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services by Using Visual Studio 2010 Deep Dive into Open XML 2.

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Setting up your Workflow Proxy account for 2010 legacy workflows in Project Server 2013

You may be aware that Project Server 2013 can now use demand management workflows built in SharePoint Designer and the new Azure based Workflow Manager. But you may not be aware that the old 2010 ‘legacy’ workflow capabilities are also still present and available for you to leverage. This is particularly important for organisations that may be upgrading from Project Server 2010 and have invested in demand management workflows and do not want to redevelop or significantly refactor their workflows for Project Server 2013 and the new Workflow Manager.

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Sessions announced for the Microsoft Project Conference

In case you missed the announcement, the sessions for the Microsoft Project Conference have been released with some stellar speakers and sessions planned. If you’ve not registered yet, head on over to msprojectconference.com now and do so immediately. 😉 Join over 1,200 Project Managers, Executives and Technology Professionals from different industries to learn about the powerful capabilities included in Microsoft Project and our project and portfolio management (PPM) solution, available on premises and in the cloud.

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Work Management in SharePoint 2013–Slides and Links

Thanks to all those people that attended my session on Work Management in SharePoint 2013 at the two Australian SharePoint Conferences. As I mentioned in the sessions, I have uploaded the slides to SlideShare where you can download them. I will also publish the three demonstration videos in the coming weeks to take you through each of the demo’s in the session. [slideshare id=22854189&doc=auspc-mel-workmanagementinsharepoint2013-whatitisandwhyyoullloveit-130612044656-phpapp01] Also as mentioned in the session, here is the link to the excellent White Paper outlining the Work Management capabilities and Synchronisation with Exchange.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney is coming – Saturday October 27th

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.

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Ignite 2015 Wrap up

For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

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Project Server 2016 IT Pro Preview – A Quick Tour

Earlier today Microsoft announced the release of the SharePoint Server 2016 IT Pro Preview, our first introduction to the 2016 wave of on-premises products. Obviously a new drop of SharePoint is exciting enough, but this release is doubly exciting as it also includes the IT Pro Preview of Project Server 2016. With 2016 there are some massive changes to Project Server, the first and most obvious one is that the Project Server bits are included in the SharePoint 2016 binary.

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Building your first Project Server App : Part 4 – Submitting to the app store

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 3 – Taking the app to the next level

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 2 – Getting the basic app up and running

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part 1 – Getting Started – Setting up a development environment

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

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Building your first Project Server app : Part Zero–The introduction

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.

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The Appies are coming…

In case you had missed the news, Microsoft have announced The Appies, a competition around creating an awesome app for SharePoint, Office 2013 or our favorites, Project Server, Project Online or the Project client (Jeremy had the scoop a few weeks ago and coined the Appies name which I think is pretty apt). To qualify for the Appies, all you need to do is submit a new app or update an existing app between November 25th 2013 and January 31 2014 to be automatically entered.

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Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

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Work Management in SharePoint 2013–Slides and Links

Thanks to all those people that attended my session on Work Management in SharePoint 2013 at the two Australian SharePoint Conferences. As I mentioned in the sessions, I have uploaded the slides to SlideShare where you can download them. I will also publish the three demonstration videos in the coming weeks to take you through each of the demo’s in the session. [slideshare id=22854189&doc=auspc-mel-workmanagementinsharepoint2013-whatitisandwhyyoullloveit-130612044656-phpapp01] Also as mentioned in the session, here is the link to the excellent White Paper outlining the Work Management capabilities and Synchronisation with Exchange.

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Time to resume service with a few quick links…

After a month long holiday, it’s time to resume normal blog service and share some EPM goodness. I I have a couple of posts that I am working on at the moment, but in the meantime here are few gems that you should find useful Developing Project Server apps walkthrough Following on from my series covering the building the Publish All Enterprise Project app, Microsoft have released an official walk through to build a Project Server app over at http://msdn.

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Time to resume service with a few quick links…

After a month long holiday, it’s time to resume normal blog service and share some EPM goodness. I I have a couple of posts that I am working on at the moment, but in the meantime here are few gems that you should find useful Developing Project Server apps walkthrough Following on from my series covering the building the Publish All Enterprise Project app, Microsoft have released an official walk through to build a Project Server app over at http://msdn.

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Work Management Videos from SharePoint Saturday and the Aussie SharePoint Conferences

As promised a while back here are the three demonstrations from my Work Management in SharePoint 2013, What it is and why you’ll love it sessions at SPS and the Aussie SharePoint Conference. As I hate my voice on video, I have captioned them so you’ll miss out on some of the pearls of wisdom, but hopefully you will get the jist. And don’t worry, I am still alive, just a little busy in my day job, but normal service will resume shortly.

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SharePoint Sydney Wrap Up

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.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney is coming – Saturday October 27th

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.

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–4th August 2012–with 2013 content!!

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.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Toronto–7th July

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.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–22nd October 2011

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney–Saturday 6th August 2011

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–Links and Wrap Up

Earlier today I was lucky enough to present at Melbourne’s 2nd SharePoint Saturday event, with a session entitled ‘Ten reasons why your organisation should consider Project Server 2010’. The audience was a good mix of seasoned Project Server users and people just interested in the general capabilities. In a attempt to leverage some of the excellent social media tools out there, the presentation was linked to Twitter with automatic tweets of further information being sent out at the same time on my twitter account with the #spsmelbourne-proj hash tag.

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–30th October

Melbourne’s second SharePoint Saturday is coming up on the 30th October and looks to be the best one yet. As well as a stack of great content on SharePoint from Australian presenters such as Chris O’Connor, Mark Rhodes and Nalaka Withanage. I will be presenting a fantastic session on Project Server entitled ‘Ten reasons why you should consider Project Server 2010 for your organisation’ Project Server 2010 is a landmark release, providing a wealth of functionality that can be leveraged to execute projects more effectively.

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Less than two weeks to go…

It’s less than two weeks until TechEd Australia, and I have been hard at work with Brian Farnhill putting the finishing touches to the presentation and demonstrations. For those of you coming along, I will be taking part in two sessions: OFS310 The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010 Friday 2nd September – 9:45am – 11:00am It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why.

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Project Server Service Pack 1–Two handy SharePoint Features

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

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Common errors when a PWA site is deleted ‘incorrectly’

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

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Common errors when a PWA site is deleted ‘incorrectly’

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

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Project Server Service Pack 1–Two handy SharePoint Features

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

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Changing the look and feel of Project 2010 – Out of the box

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.

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Skipping stages with ‘Change / Restart Workflow’ in Project Server 2013 and Project Online & SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer 2013 is another tool that provides a means for building workflows, what is new in the 2013 release is it can now build Demand Management workflows for Project Server 2013 and Project Online. Now I am not going to go into the specifics of the tool, as you probably already know my preference, but irrespective of that, I thought it important to share how to build workflows that leverage the Skip to Stage functionality with SPD.

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Using Skip to Stage with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

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Tech Ed 2011–Wrap up and resources

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

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Moving demand management assets from A to B, Part 2

In the first part of this series, we looked at using Playbooks to move demand management assets from one server to another. Whilst Playbooks is a very useful tool, it does have one limitation in that it moves all the chosen settings over, so if you wish to export a single EPT and its PDPs, you’re out of luck. Luckily Microsoft released another tool as part of its ‘solution starters’ series that allows the selective exporting and importing of demand management assets.

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Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Demo Source Code available

Since the Project 2010 demonstration image was first released in beta form there have been a few questions in the forums and around the office about how the Cost Benefit and Risk Evaluation Project Detail Pages (PDPs) were implemented. Both of these PDP’s give a glimpse of how the PDP infrastructure can be leveraged to collect information about a project using the most appropriate mechanism. In the case of the the Cost Benefit PDP, an custom Excel based web part is used to collect financial information which is stored in the document library of the relevant project site.

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Windows 8 Release Preview and 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.

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MPUG Melbourne–Tuesday 6th December

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

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Project Server Service Pack 1–Two handy SharePoint Features

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

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Project Demo Image–Excel Services problem after SP1 upgrade

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

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Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

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Project Server 2010 : Service Pack One

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010. To complicate matters on the same day, the June 2011 CU was also released and recommended to be installed at the same time. A full list of the fixes and changes in SP1 can be seen here, and the June CU here. At the time of writing, the June CU has a number of known issues that must be understood prior to patching as they may impact your underlying SharePoint farm.

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Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

Posts

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–4th August 2012–with 2013 content!!

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.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–22nd October 2011

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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SharePoint Saturday Sydney is coming – Saturday October 27th

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.

Posts

Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

Posts

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Toronto–7th July

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.

Posts

Migrating PS 2010 to PS 2013 Walkthrough

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

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Invoke Project Status reporting, direct from the ribbon

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

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Project Server Service Pack 1–Two handy SharePoint Features

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

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Speaking at the Australian SharePoint Conference Sydney

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney on the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint & Project Server 2013. The abstract for the session is: If you have ever tried to track work in SharePoint, lists or even on pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013. With SharePoint 2013, your organisation has access to a task management solution that can start simply and scale up to the enterprise level at the click of a button.

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Sync Project Tasks to Outlook, without Exchange

One of the great new features in Project Professional 2010 was the ability to synchronise a Project schedule with a SharePoint task list. Through this capability and a SharePoint 2010 environment, simple team level project statusing can be achieved with ease. In every demonstration I have seen, and in fact given, I have always assumed that the person updating the tasks would log into SharePoint and update the task through the web interface.

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Sync to SharePoint Screencast

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.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2013

Tech Ed Australia is being held on the Gold Coast between the 3rd and 6th September this year. I am happy to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia this year with my partner in crime, Mr Brian Farnhill with an awesome session entitled…. The SharePoint 2013 App Playbook – Your Guide to Building and Publishing a Great App Office 2013 has brought an amazing new platform for developers to take advantage of, in the format of apps and the online app store.

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Speaking at Tech.Ed Australia 2011

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled: ‘A SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010’ It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2010

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

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Tech Ed 2011–Wrap up and resources

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

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Tech Ed 2011–Wrap up and resources

Last week I was lucky enough to present at Tech Ed Australia twice, once on an Ask the Experts panel for AvePoint and again presenting a full on breakout session along with Brian Farnhill called The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010. The official slide deck for the breakout session, and video / screencast will be available to view at (once processed): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011/OFS310. I have also uploaded the original slide deck, to SlideShare which is embedded below, which includes all the notes and can be downloaded to make the most of those all important resource slide links.

Posts

Less than two weeks to go…

It’s less than two weeks until TechEd Australia, and I have been hard at work with Brian Farnhill putting the finishing touches to the presentation and demonstrations. For those of you coming along, I will be taking part in two sessions: OFS310 The SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010 Friday 2nd September – 9:45am – 11:00am It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why.

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Downloadable Project Server Technet IT Pro Content

Overnight Microsoft have released all the current Technet IT Pro content for Project Server in a single convenient compiled help file, making it incredibly easy to reference all those guidance notes and best practice when on a machine not connected to the internet. The file can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb. Remember to unblock the file via a Right click / Properties before viewing or the file may not render.

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Showing the Risk or Issue Id’s in the workspace edit and display forms

It’s always puzzled me why Microsoft never did show the ID of a SharePoint based list entry in the edit or display form. What do I mean by that? Well, out of the box, when you create a list in SharePoint, each item has an ID associated. This ID is then used to identify the individual records in the list. Once you have created an item in the list you can see the ID in the view

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SharePoint Saturday Melbourne–Links and Wrap Up

Earlier today I was lucky enough to present at Melbourne’s 2nd SharePoint Saturday event, with a session entitled ‘Ten reasons why your organisation should consider Project Server 2010’. The audience was a good mix of seasoned Project Server users and people just interested in the general capabilities. In a attempt to leverage some of the excellent social media tools out there, the presentation was linked to Twitter with automatic tweets of further information being sent out at the same time on my twitter account with the #spsmelbourne-proj hash tag.

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Migrating Project Server 2013 database between environments

A common requirement when setting up a new Project Server instance, is to replicate production data back into another environment such as Development or Test. In doing so, you have an environment where you can develop, test configuration changes or even perform training against, without impacting your production Project Server instance. In this post we will walkthrough migrating data from our production Project Server 2013 environment which will be the source, over to a development / test environment which will be the target using the simple and fool-proof database attach method.

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Introducing the365project.net

With the introduction of Office 2013 and the arrival of Project Online in Office 365 I thought it would be a good time to try and bring some members of the Project and SharePoint community together to launch a new community site. So it is my great pleasure to introduce the365project.net. What is the365project.net? Well it’s a new tips and tricks site for the Project, Project Server and SharePoint, covering the existing versions and the new 2013 wave of products.

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Customising the App Launcher– Part Two–Custom Tiles.

Back in December I wrote about the ability to customise the App Launcher, or Waffle as it lovingly known. The options were relatively limited unless you built your own app in Azure and deployed it to the organisation. However one request came up again and again, the ability to create a shortcut tile to a specific site or location inside the Office 365 tenant. Imagine being able to have a dedicated waffle link for the Marketing site, or perhaps a dedicated link through to a specific PWA instance.

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Hiding the Today indicator from the Project 2010 Timeline

Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

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How to create multiple timelines

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.

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Multiple Timelines revisited

At the Project Conference I was chatting to someone who was convinced that it wasn’t possible to have different tasks highlighted on different timelines in the Project client, so I thought I would post this walk through to confirm how it can be done. To start, we need to create another timeline. I covered this a while back in this blog post, but for the sake of completeness will go through it again.

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Changing the default security timeout for PWA and SP2010

A common request for previous versions of Project Server was the ability to extend the security timeout of pages within the tool. Why this was requested was users typically started an action, got called away, or popped out for a coffee, then came back to the page they were editing, pressed save only to be told that the page had timed out and all their edits had been lost. Now this was not across the whole of tool, but only certain pages like editing views, SharePoint team sites etc.

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Where has Close tasks to update gone in Project Server 2013?

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.

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SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 2– Business data visualisation with PowerView

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.

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Mobile Timesheets on Windows Phone 7

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner. Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on.

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Changing the date format on Gantt chart bars

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.

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Make finding Project 2007 commands in 2010 easy

Following on from some of the posts I have been doing about Project 2010, I noticed this spreadsheet from Microsoft this morning that provides a mapping between Project 2007 menu items and where they are in the new Project 2010 fluent interface. Whilst the new 2010 interface makes it easier to find stuff IMHO, for people that have been using Project 2007 heavily, it may take some getting used to and this spreadsheet will help.

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Where did Copy Picture go?

A couple of people have asked me in the last few days about where the ‘Copy Picture’ icon that used to be front and centre in the Project 2007 had gone in 2010? I know it’s been posted before on other sites and in the newsgroups, but I thought I would repost it again. To find it, choose the Task tab and then click on the downward arrow next to Copy.

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Hiding the Today indicator from the Project 2010 Timeline

Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

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Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Toronto–7th July

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.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Tracking your project

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?

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Project 2013 Ignite

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.

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Three new Project 2010 demo videos

Today whilst looking around the Project site I noticed some new videos covering a number of new features of Project 2010. I was so impressed with them, I thought I would post them here so you can watch them too. The video’s cover off the following topics: User Controlled Scheduling Team Planner SharePoint Synchronisation. As well as the excellent instruction the presenter provides, there are also a number of step-by-step walkthroughs which take you through each of the features in more detail.

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Free EPMU Training

As noted over on Christophe’s blog, Microsoft have now made available free of charge online EPMU training courses covering: Microsoft EPMU – Admin Professional – Functional Implementation & Configuration of Project Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – IT Professional – Technical Implementation & Configuration of Project Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – Office Project Server 2007 Developer Training (On-Demand Recorded Training) Microsoft EPMU – Deploying Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 (On-Demand Recorded Training) Certainly an excellent way of spending some downtime if you want to skill up on all things EPM.

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Unable to publish projects with TRIM Context installed?

I ran into this issue at a customer recently and thought I would share it on the blog in case someone else ran into. The customer is a heavy user of the document management solution TRIM and has the program TRIM Context installed on most of their PC’s in order to allow users to store documents directly in TRIM from their desktop applications. During user acceptance testing, one user was unable to save and publish their project schedules into Project Server in one session as the publish button was disabled until the schedule was saved, MS Project closed and the schedule reopened.

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Handy CodePlex solution for looking up ULS logs from within SharePoint

When I was in the US last week, I commented that it would be great if SharePoint and Project Server made it easier to look up the relevant ULS log entries for a specific correlation id. Of course, the traditional way of viewing these is to navigate to the ULS log location within the farm and view the relevant log file, or to use the excellent ULS Viewer tool to interrogate the files.

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What is a Project Server Correlation ID and how can I leverage it?

Every now and again, I check the epmsource logs to see what people have been searching for on the site. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to see that people were searching for Correlation ID’s that are raised when an error occurs in Project Server or SharePoint. As a result, I thought a blog post might be appropriate to restate what Correlation ID’s are and how you can leverage them to gain insights into what is really going wrong.

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Unexpected error customising the Cost, Cost Exposure and Exposure columns in a Project Server 2010 Risk list

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

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Project 2010 Demo and Evaluation Pack–An Unexpected Error has occurred

A couple of users on the Project forums have run into issues getting the Project Server Demo Pack to install onto the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue. But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

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Project Server 2010 to 2013 Migration Reference Sheet

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

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Some common errors when upgrading / migrating to Project Server 2013

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

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Project Server 2013 Upgrade Process

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.

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Project Server 2013 Upgrade Process

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.

Posts

Project Server 2013 Upgrade Process

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.

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Entering different User Credentials with Project 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.

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Effective Project Management with MS Project – Tracking your project

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?

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Three new Project 2010 demo videos

Today whilst looking around the Project site I noticed some new videos covering a number of new features of Project 2010. I was so impressed with them, I thought I would post them here so you can watch them too. The video’s cover off the following topics: User Controlled Scheduling Team Planner SharePoint Synchronisation. As well as the excellent instruction the presenter provides, there are also a number of step-by-step walkthroughs which take you through each of the features in more detail.

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Project Server Help Videos

How many people actually read the help files that come with software? I know I tend not to until I get totally stuck. However, today whilst installing Project Server 2010 I decided to go and have a look around the Office 2010 help site at http://office2010.microsoft.com. The site provides a wealth of helpful information around Project and Project Server, but what really stood out was the video content giving overviews of the a number of key features in Project Server, including the new web app, Portfolio management and workflows, each of which are linked to below:

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Filtering Projects for Portfolio Selection

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.

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Speaking at Tech Ed Australia 2010

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

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Another great feature of SharePoint 2010 – Visio Services

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

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ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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Another great feature of SharePoint 2010 – Visio Services

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

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Project 2010 Demo and Evaluation Pack–An Unexpected Error has occurred

A couple of users on the Project forums have run into issues getting the Project Server Demo Pack to install onto the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue. But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

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Customising the App Launcher– Part Two–Custom Tiles.

Back in December I wrote about the ability to customise the App Launcher, or Waffle as it lovingly known. The options were relatively limited unless you built your own app in Azure and deployed it to the organisation. However one request came up again and again, the ability to create a shortcut tile to a specific site or location inside the Office 365 tenant. Imagine being able to have a dedicated waffle link for the Marketing site, or perhaps a dedicated link through to a specific PWA instance.

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Customising the Nav Bar & App Launcher in Office 365

A while back Microsoft announced the release of the App Launcher in Office 365, also lovingly christened the Waffle by many due to it’s resemblance to the popular food. In the last few weeks the Waffle has started to appear across Office 365 tenants providing a much cleaner way of navigating to the various bits of Office 365 you care about. However, even with this cool new capability, I miss the old Projects and OneDrive links that used to be on the Navigation Bar and often find myself cursing having to go over to the top left and clicking on what I want.

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Quick Post : Workflows not working on a PS2010 farm where the Web Front End Service is disabled

I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well. In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).

Posts

ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web Part

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

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What’s new in Project Professional 2013?

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.

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Managed metadata, Wikis and Graph web parts..

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.

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Project Server 2010 on Windows 7 – An update

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.

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Project Server 2010 and Windows 7

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.

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How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Windows 8 Release Preview and 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.

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Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

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Mobile Project Server Business Intelligence with Windows Phone 7

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

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Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

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Mobile Timesheets on Windows Phone 7

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner. Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on.

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Mobile Project Server Business Intelligence with Windows Phone 7

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

Posts

How to create a Windows 8 tile to access Project Server

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

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Project 15 Feature Wish list

With Project Server 2010 on it’s way out of the door, Microsoft are no doubt starting the planning for the next version, Project 15. Whilst Project 2010 is a fantastic product, there are still a few niggly things that I think should be improved, and no doubt you have some ideas too. So, in the vein of Long Zheng’s excellent Taskforce site, where users registered and voted on features they thought could be improved I am starting a wish list and you are free to add things you would like to see.

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Checking out the new Workflow Health pages

Whilst looking into a workflow issue today on my Office 365 tenant, I noticed a new feature that appears to be quietly rolling out into Office 365, the Workflow Health screen. Dee over at DDLS also noticed it a few weeks back and blogged about it, but I thought I would dig in a little more. From the surface it looks like the feature addresses some of the issues in Office 365 when the Workflow Manager instance your tenant is attached to is down or unavailable or you want to see aggregated status of workflows in a site or list without clicking into each workflow instance.

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Setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013

I’ve had a few comments through the blog on setting up a workflow proxy account in Project Server 2013, so I thought I would post something to take you through how to configure this. The Workflow Proxy in Project Server 2013 is important if you intend to use the classic workflow engine (not Workflow Manager ) and will be the account that makes the PSI calls associated with the workflow. The account should be set up as part of your Project Server installation and is specified in the Plan for administrative and service accounts in Project Server 2013 documentation.

Posts

Quick Post : Workflows not working on a PS2010 farm where the Web Front End Service is disabled

I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well. In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).

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Introducing Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013

I try not to mix my day job at Nintex with my community work and the content on this site, but today I want to make an exception and share some news on one of the projects I have been working on for the past few months. I am pleased to announce that we have shipped Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2013 (NW4PS), an update to the popular workflow product for Project Server 2013.

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Setting up your Workflow Proxy account for 2010 legacy workflows in Project Server 2013

You may be aware that Project Server 2013 can now use demand management workflows built in SharePoint Designer and the new Azure based Workflow Manager. But you may not be aware that the old 2010 ‘legacy’ workflow capabilities are also still present and available for you to leverage. This is particularly important for organisations that may be upgrading from Project Server 2010 and have invested in demand management workflows and do not want to redevelop or significantly refactor their workflows for Project Server 2013 and the new Workflow Manager.

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Collecting business requests in SharePoint and automatically pushing into Project Server

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.

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Project Server IE9 Jump Lists Revisited

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.

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Project Conference Session Wrap Up

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.

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Checking out the new Workflow Health pages

Whilst looking into a workflow issue today on my Office 365 tenant, I noticed a new feature that appears to be quietly rolling out into Office 365, the Workflow Health screen. Dee over at DDLS also noticed it a few weeks back and blogged about it, but I thought I would dig in a little more. From the surface it looks like the feature addresses some of the issues in Office 365 when the Workflow Manager instance your tenant is attached to is down or unavailable or you want to see aggregated status of workflows in a site or list without clicking into each workflow instance.

Posts

Setting up your Workflow Proxy account for 2010 legacy workflows in Project Server 2013

You may be aware that Project Server 2013 can now use demand management workflows built in SharePoint Designer and the new Azure based Workflow Manager. But you may not be aware that the old 2010 ‘legacy’ workflow capabilities are also still present and available for you to leverage. This is particularly important for organisations that may be upgrading from Project Server 2010 and have invested in demand management workflows and do not want to redevelop or significantly refactor their workflows for Project Server 2013 and the new Workflow Manager.

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Using Skip to Stage with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months). In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

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First look at Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2010

Arguably one of the most exciting features in Project Server 2010 was demand management or project lifecycle management (PLM). What PLM provides is a set of tools within a Project Server 2010 instance to manage the whole project lifecycle, from the concept of project phases and stages, a mechanism to collect and display data as you move through the project and best of all, a workflow engine. Out of the box, the development of workflows for use in PLM can be quite arduous.

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Improve document approvals with SharePoint workflows

A common problem I see again and again on projects is the drama involved in getting a project document reviewed and approved. Typically signing off a document confirms that the document contents is correct and has been accepted, this can have commercial implications or be a formal stage gate in the project management process. Many organisations use a manual approval process, sending copies of the document around by email, or worse a printed copy that jumps from in-tray to in-tray which is incredibly inefficient and is nearly impossible to track the progress of.

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Unexpected error customising the Cost, Cost Exposure and Exposure columns in a Project Server 2010 Risk list

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

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Project Online’ hidden Gem… Click to Run

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.

Posts

Introducing Project Social

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.