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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.