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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.