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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.