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.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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.

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.