I am pleased to confirm that I will be speaking at the forthcoming Project Conference in Anaheim in February 2014. For those of you that haven’t been to a Project Conference, I absolutely recommend you do your best to get to one, the quality of speakers, presentations, networking and all round Project and SharePoint knowledge under one roof is second to none. Once again I will be representing Nintex, a silver sponsor of the conference and presenting a session entitled:

Following on from the last few upgrade and migration posts, I thought I would pull together a simple reference sheet that takes you through the migration process from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013. The sheet takes you through the key steps and commands required to migrate between Project Server 2010 and Project Server 2013. The reference sheet can be downloaded from http://sdrv.ms/12qUa8M or by clicking on the picture above.

I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well. In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).

The process of upgrading from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013, or migrating between environments can be quite complex, requiring a number of steps to be completed in the correct order. In this post, I am going to document some of the common and uncommon errors that you may run into. I also intend to update this post as I uncover more. Unmounted Project Service Database Unlike SharePoint Content databases, Project Service databases need to be mounted before you can run a Test against them.

In this post I am going to take you through the process of migrating Project Server 2010 into Project Server 2013. Usually there are two ways of doing a migration, either an in place upgrade, where if you were particularly brave, you would take your production system and then run the installer for the new binaries on it to upgrade. I say ‘Brave’ because frequently this method of upgrade would be fraught with danger, not giving you sufficient options for dry runs or rolling back.

I thought I would post this for those of you that are upgrading to Windows 8 and wanted to create a simple way of accessing Project Server. In this particular case I am going to show how to pin Project Online, but the same is possible with your on premise Project Server 2013 and 2010 instances. Pinning from the desktop To start, navigate to your Project Server instance in either Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop.

Project Server 2013 introduced a number of changes to where key settings are located throughout the product. Andrew Lavinsky wrote about it earlier this week and stole some of my thunder for this little tool I was putting together.. introducing the Project Server 2010 / 2013 Preview Setting Comparison spread sheet. The tool maps the various server settings for Project Server 2010, Project Server 2013 On Premise and Project Online all in a handy filtered Excel spread sheet.

A question came up in the Project forums recently around how it was possible to filter the available projects for a portfolio analysis, so I thought I would post a little tip here, which from a majority of the Project Server 2010 implementations I have seen is usually forgotten or managed by business process. When you create a portfolio analysis, Project Server allows you to choose which projects you want to use as part of the analysis, out of the box, this shows you all the projects currently within the PWA instance, irrespective of their status.

At SharePoint Saturday Toronto, I presented one of my favourite sessions on SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management using Project Server 2010, based on Christophe Fiessinger’s and Scott Jamison’s session from TechEd NA 2011. I’ve delivered this session three or four times now, showing how organisations can benefit from using Project Server to collect business requests and guiding them through a process to successfully collect information, objectively determine which project to implement and then assist in the implementation.

Last week Microsoft released the latest preview of Windows 8, the release preview which you can grab from preview.windows.com. Being a fan of the bleeding edge, I downloaded and installed it onto my slate and have been loving it. However, a number of my colleagues reported that they were having issues using Project Server 2010 with the inbuilt desktop version of IE 10, running into ‘**This Project Server 2010 feature requires at least Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

In this second post looking at some of the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 and how they can be leveraged in your Project Server farm, we are going to look at PowerView. PowerView was originally announced as Project Crescent and has wowed pretty much anyone that has seen it. In essence, PowerView allows you to build visualisations of your data using a simple drag and drop interface that are ‘Presentation Ready’ meaning there is no nasty wiring up of data, simply drag your data onto the surface and being analyzing it.

Project Server has a fantastic reporting story, with a dedicated reporting database containing pretty much every piece of data you put in, and a myriad of ways to retrieve, tabulate and visualize that data for the end user. With a little customization or configuration it is possible to build reports that will show the status of the project portfolio, risk and issues and just about anything you want to see. With such powerful reporting it can quickly become difficult for a Project or Portfolio manager to identify the projects or information they are interested in seeing.

Back in 2011 I sat in a session at TechEd Australia where Carolyn Chau showed off a number of the reporting enhancements coming in SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 is a massive release, providing a stack of new features across all aspects of the server . Some of my favourites include things like Availability groups, support for Server core, a new Visual Studio based management to name but a few.

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.

It’s always sound advice to try and keep your Project Server 2010 environment patched to the latest cumulative update, typically these include bug fixes or small enhancements to keep your environment running smoothly. Back in December, Microsoft released the December Project Server 2011 CU, which included a number of fixes and changes to timesheets amongst other things. As Project Server runs on top of your SharePoint environment, it’s also necessary to patch SharePoint at the same time.

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.

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees. The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1 We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner. Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on.

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site: Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

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.

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation. As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch.

_**Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching 🙂**_ Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 Firefox 3.

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010. To complicate matters on the same day, the June 2011 CU was also released and recommended to be installed at the same time. A full list of the fixes and changes in SP1 can be seen here, and the June CU here. At the time of writing, the June CU has a number of known issues that must be understood prior to patching as they may impact your underlying SharePoint farm.

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace. On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is: The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled: ‘A SharePoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010’ It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two.

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.

Disclaimer: This post isn’t going to be up to the level of one of Brian Smith’s technical posts and is based on my own experiences and testing. You’re mileage my vary and I encourage you to vigorously test anything detailed in this post before attempting yourself, I accept no liability should you run into issues etc etc. Recently there have been a number of posts in the project forums from users that have been running into issues when they have deleted a PWA instance incorrectly.

Out of the box, Project Server 2010 is arguably the most business intelligence heavy application that Microsoft build on the SharePoint platform. It’s a bold statement, but when you think about it, a default installation of Project Server will implement a dedicated relational reporting database and provides the capability for numerous analysis services instances, each containing up to 14 OLAP cubes, all configurable from within the tool. With the reliance on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, a number of new and improved capabilities are made available, including PerformancePoint Services & Visio Services which provide new and improved ways of visualising project data to quickly expose trends and possible issues so they can be corrected.

Recently on the Project forums, a user asked if it was possible to add a target attribute to a menu item in the quick links of Project Server, i.e. the target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window. This capability can be pretty useful, especially when you want to provide links to non project server content that supports the use of the tool such as a PMO help site, or perhaps even your favourite EPM blog Unfortunately the Project Server quick link functionality doesn’t give you an option to set a target and no way to decorate a html anchor statement to insert one.

If you look closely in your SharePoint farm, you will see references to Office.com in some of the ribbons and dialogs…. When you click on the link or button, instead of opening up a window into thousands of SharePoint apps from Microsoft and Community, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show anything Someone asked recently if it was possible to turn these off as they can be confusing for users.

An annoying feature of Project Server 2010 when it shipped was the inability to fully customise the risk list of a Project workspace. Whilst most of the list could be customised, when you tried to modify the Cost, Cost Exposure or Exposure columns, you would get a really annoying ‘An Unexpected error has occurred’ message, even cracking open SharePoint Designer to try and modify those columns would result in an error.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a number of projects that required the Project Server ribbon to be customised in one way or another. During one of these, I started to wonder how simple it would be to integrate a Reporting Services report into the ribbon, specifically a Project Status Report. It turns out the answer is very simple, so read on Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should say that for this post I am not going to reinvent the wheel, instead I am going to leverage the Project Status report that ships as part of the Project Server 2010 Demonstration and Evaluation pack.

In the first part of this series, we looked at using Playbooks to move demand management assets from one server to another. Whilst Playbooks is a very useful tool, it does have one limitation in that it moves all the chosen settings over, so if you wish to export a single EPT and its PDPs, you’re out of luck. Luckily Microsoft released another tool as part of its ‘solution starters’ series that allows the selective exporting and importing of demand management assets.

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.

Earlier today I was lucky enough to present at Melbourne’s 2nd SharePoint Saturday event, with a session entitled ‘Ten reasons why your organisation should consider Project Server 2010’. The audience was a good mix of seasoned Project Server users and people just interested in the general capabilities. In a attempt to leverage some of the excellent social media tools out there, the presentation was linked to Twitter with automatic tweets of further information being sent out at the same time on my twitter account with the #spsmelbourne-proj hash tag.

There was a post in the Project forums a few weeks ago from a user asking how to undelete a project workspace that had been deleted accidently. Project Server provides functionality that allows enterprise objects including projects, calendars & resource pools to be backed up and subsequently restored, but this capability does not cover project workspaces. As workspaces are stored within a SharePoint site collection, it is necessary to use SharePoint backup and restore techniques to get the workspace back.

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:

A couple of users on the Project forums have run into issues getting the Project Server Demo Pack to install onto the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue. But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

Overnight Microsoft have released all the current Technet IT Pro content for Project Server in a single convenient compiled help file, making it incredibly easy to reference all those guidance notes and best practice when on a machine not connected to the internet. The file can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb. Remember to unblock the file via a Right click / Properties before viewing or the file may not render.

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.

How many people actually read the help files that come with software? I know I tend not to until I get totally stuck. However, today whilst installing Project Server 2010 I decided to go and have a look around the Office 2010 help site at http://office2010.microsoft.com. The site provides a wealth of helpful information around Project and Project Server, but what really stood out was the video content giving overviews of the a number of key features in Project Server, including the new web app, Portfolio management and workflows, each of which are linked to below:

In the first of three posts covering my proof of concept to show the workflow status in the Project backstage, I will be covering off how to access the workflow data itself from within the Project Server. Now as this was a proof of concept, I decided to go with the simple approach of getting the information directly from the Reporting database instead of calling the Project Server PSI. There were a couple of reasons for this, firstly simplicity, accessing the data in the Reporting database via SQL and VBA is much simpler in my opinion than calling the PSI.

One of the significant changes in the Office 2010 client was the introduction of the backstage view. The way it has brought common commands front and centre and combined relevant supporting information has quickly become one of those features I can’t live without and certainly something I notice immediately when I use any 2007 Office client. In Project 2010, this is particularly noticeable, with a number of the Enterprise features that were previously buried away in the jungle of menu’s prominent on the backstage, including items such as Project Publish, Organising the Enterprise Global and accepting Status updates from your team, which is a massive improvement in usability and functionality.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

A while back I posted about getting the Project Server 2010 beta to run on Windows 7. Whilst this wasn’t an officially supported scenario, it was possible. Fast forward to the Release Candidate and it seems that MS have introduced a check that will stop the install happening on any Windows client 🙁 Thanks to a comment by Aric, I tried installing both the SharePoint and Project Server release candidates on a Windows 7 x64 virtual machine.

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Project Server 2010 Ignite training in Sydney. The training was delivered by Christophe Fiessenger and Jan Kalis and covered all aspects of the upcoming Project 2010 release. The quality of the training was great, providing insights into all the features of the 2010 products, highlighting changes and where there are opportunities for partners to innovate on the platform. Jan and Christophe presented a heap of sessions covering each of the new feature areas, both with slide and demonstration based content.

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. Are you ready for Microsoft Project 2010? Microsoft EPM Specialists Darren Deason and Alex Burton will take you on a journey around the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up. Some of the topics discussed will be as follows: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Project to WSS Synchronisation · Integrated Portfolio Management · Enterprise Project Templates

Project Server 2010’s reporting and business intelligence story is phenomenal. One of the most noticeable changes is that the Data Analysis views of previous versions have been deprecated in favour of using Excel Services based reports that interface directly with the cubes. As part of a default Project Server installation in the beta, a library of templates and sample reports are created within Project Server for use, however they won’t work until you have configured the server correctly.

Update : Links changed. I just stumbled upon this list of known issues for the 2010 Server products at http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/microsoft-office-servers-beta-2-known-issuesreadme-HA101267292.aspx. Listed is the known issue around the provisioning of project workspaces, plus a few others I hadn’t run into around timesheets and deliverables.

One of the features of Project Server 2010 I was really keen to try out was that of delegates. In Project Server 2007, when a Project Manager goes on leave, it is necessary to go through and manually reassign each task in the schedule to a new status manager so they can see the tasks, their updates and manage the schedule effectively. When that user returns from holiday, you then have to repeat the process and reassign each task back.

Update: Check out http://epmsource.com/2010/02/22/project-server-2010-on-windows-7-an-update/ for an update on this post. A while back I heard that there would be an improved developer story for the next version of SharePoint. For those that have never tried developing for the platform, you typically have to have a virtual machine and dev against that. Given the change to 64bit only and the large resource overhead running SharePoint and Project Server in a VM is a bit more of a challenge.

The Project Team wrote a while back about the Sync to SharePoint feature of Project 2010. This past week, the beta of Project 2010 has been released to TAP and MSDN / Technet and I have had a chance to play around with it. Since hearing Microsoft’s positioning of the Sync to SharePoint feature, I have been keen to try it out and see how useful it really will be. So here are 9 things you may not know about this awesome feature:

One of the core features of Project Server that integrates the tool into an organisation are Enterprise Custom Fields or ECF’s. ECF’s allow the recording of business specific metadata which is used to classify the various aspects of an organisation across a project, resource and task level. During the planning stages of a Project Server implementation a significant amount of time is spent understanding the custom fields that need to be configured in order for the tool to meet the requirements of the business.