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.

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.

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.

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.

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.