A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering. Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications.

A week or so ago, I needed to go through the various Project Server 2007 CU’s to see if a particular issue my customer was experiencing had been fixed or was a new bug. After a bit of searching I was surprised to see that there wasn’t a definitive list of all the Project Server 2007 CU’s out there. There seemed to be a few which went from RTM through to SP2 (http://support.

Recently the Project Server 2007 queue at one of my customers stopped working. What made this stranger was that it occurred on the Production, Test and Development environments within days of each other. My first thoughts were to see if the customer’s IT department had made any changes to the environments, like a patch, or hosting configuration change, but after passing my polygraph tests it seems they hadn’t. Restarting the Queue Service didn’t seem to fix the issue, resulting in the error:

I thought I would blog this so I can find it again and in case someone else runs into this issue. Last week whilst performing a health check on a Project Server 2007 installations I came across this error which seemed to be a pretty common occurrence in the event logs. Error loading and running event receiver Microsoft.Office.Project.PWA.WSSEventReceivers.PSDBUpdater in Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.PWA,Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Additional information is below. Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred.

Out of the box Project Server provides the ability to store a project’s risks and issues within an associated project workspace. As these risks and issues are stored in SharePoint lists, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility to customize these lists. As a consultant, a common request I hear again and again is the need to extend the out of the box risks lists to encode some form of risk matrix, such as the one outlined below:

For the past couple of weeks I have been building some financial reports from information stored within the cubes of Project Server 2007. The client has some pretty full on requirements around presenting the information, so I chose to implement the reports using Microsoft Excel which I can apply a bit of logic and formatting to instead of the out of the box PS2007 data analysis views. One problem I ran into was that the Fiscal Time dimension in the cubes was showing as ‘Not Set’ when trying to set it as a filter.

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.