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:

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.

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Microsoft released a pretty nifty PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint. Whilst it doesn’t look to support Project Server PowerShell commands just yet, it does support SharePoint Server 2010 which as Project Server practitioners we all need to roll our sleeves up and do something to now and again. The tool itself uses a handy drag and drop interface to select what you wish to do and then prompts you to enter the relevant information for the command.

_**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.

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.

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.

A common request for previous versions of Project Server was the ability to extend the security timeout of pages within the tool. Why this was requested was users typically started an action, got called away, or popped out for a coffee, then came back to the page they were editing, pressed save only to be told that the page had timed out and all their edits had been lost. Now this was not across the whole of tool, but only certain pages like editing views, SharePoint team sites etc.

One of the great new features in Project Professional 2010 was the ability to synchronise a Project schedule with a SharePoint task list. Through this capability and a SharePoint 2010 environment, simple team level project statusing can be achieved with ease. In every demonstration I have seen, and in fact given, I have always assumed that the person updating the tasks would log into SharePoint and update the task through the web interface.

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.

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.

A common problem I see again and again on projects is the drama involved in getting a project document reviewed and approved. Typically signing off a document confirms that the document contents is correct and has been accepted, this can have commercial implications or be a formal stage gate in the project management process. Many organisations use a manual approval process, sending copies of the document around by email, or worse a printed copy that jumps from in-tray to in-tray which is incredibly inefficient and is nearly impossible to track the progress of.

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.

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier. The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.

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 🙂

Just a reminder for those Australian readers, tickets are still available for the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference, which is less than six weeks away. The conference has something for everyone, covering both technical and business topics, with: 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance, insurance, legal and engineering 20 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products.

To fully understand the functionality of Project Server 2010, it’s important to have a good grasp of it’s underlying platform, SharePoint Server 2010. Back in October, Microsoft hosted the SharePoint Developers Conference in Las Vegas where pretty much every detail of the upcoming release of SharePoint was made public. I noticed today that Microsoft have released a number of the presentation decks from the conference, covering topics like: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services by Using Visual Studio 2010 Deep Dive into Open XML 2.