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.

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.

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.