SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

Last week Microsoft released Project Online. For me it has been a long wait as I have been playing around with Project Online since the preview version was available in July 2012.

So for people that don’t know Project Online it is basically the cloud version of Project Server.  You now have the ability to provision it in the cloud and use it on a per user basis. In my opinion this will make Project Server functionality a lot more accessible and flexible to small and medium sized businesses.

I can image that a lot of businesses in the past didn’t choose for a PPM Solution like Project Server or any other PPM solution because of cost and effort that is needed to implement such a solution. Now with a few click of a button you have your own Project Online environment to support your projects. The per user basis of Project Online gives an organization a lot of flexibility in the use of the PPM solution.

So why should you and your business get excited about Project Online?

Project Online offers a centralized place for all your projects, a centralized resource pool to determine demand vs. capacity within your organization, it offers portfolio management, on demand reports and the list goes on. All you need to guide your projects to success.

In my opinion Project Online is a great step by Microsoft to make a PPM solution accessible to smaller markets. But it doesn’t stop there, it is also a great way for a bigger organizations to support program’s or specific departments. But don’t take my word for it, try it yourself http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/.

I am looking forward to see how the adaptation of Project Online will be in the coming months and the responds of the business that are using it.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/microsoft-releases-project-online/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

A nice and quick post on one of my experiences at a client.

This client was having problems with their SharePoint & Project Server 2010 environment. All resources in Project Server where not able to click on Timesheets without the following error coming up:

Now the environment itself was not up to date with updates only running SharePoint 2010 SP1 with the August 2010 CU. Before I could troubleshoot the problem I wanted to get the environment to a decent service level. I chose the December CU of 2012 as it mentioned an issue solved that is very similar to the issue my client is experiencing.

Now I wanted to install the CU and got the following error:

I had troubles understanding why this happens until I came across a statement that said the entire environment needs to have at least SP1. Since my last visit the client had installed a language pack which I didn’t know off and the client did not update the languague pack  to SP1. To solve my issues I downloaded and installed service pack 1 for the language pack. Then I was able to run the SharePoint & Project Server 2010 December 2012 CU.

Luckily for me the SharePoint & Project Server 2010 December 2012 CU solved the issue of the view of the timesheet not being able to load. Getting the environment updated and solving the issue is like killing two birds with one stone yeah me!

So the moral of this story is: When installing new components to your SharePoint & Project Server farm always make sure you’ve installed the correct version with the correct updates this also includes language packs!

The next time I am getting the error “The expected version of the product was not found on the system” I will know where to look first.

That is it for me see you next time.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/the-moral-of-this-story-is/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

Just a small announcement.

Not so long ago the blog the365project launched. This blog has been created to provide tips around SharePoint, Project and Project Server. These tips are provided by MVP’s and all kind of members of the community  including me.

Every few days a new tip will be posted. There is already a lot of useful tips on there that you can take advantage of. So go take a look if you are interested http://the365project.net/

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/the365project/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

Before I begin I hope everyone had a great Christmas and I wish you all a great 2013!

A lot of great things will happen in 2013. SharePoint & Project Server 2013 are out and I will be playing around with that and off course Project Online the cloud version of Project Server is on the horizon. Happy times I would say.

Now in December I had the pleasure of going to England to our Partner/Colleagues Corporate Project Solutions. The purpose of this visit to play and learn everything I could within three weeks of Project Server 2013. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone at CPS for this great experience.  It was a honor to work with such a talented bunch of people.

So what did I learn?

I tried to learn as much as I can on some of the below topics:

• Installing Project Server 2013.
• Configuring new Exchange features (Task aggregation and Out of Office Sync)
• ADFS and Office365 integration (Interesting topic with the coming of Project Online)
• The new Project Server SharePoint Permission Model
• The Transition from SharePoint Task List to Enterprise Projects
• New Timesheet enhancements

Off course I did a lot more but these are the highlights. I’ll will blog about all these subjects as soon as I get around to it to give some more insight in the installation and new features.

In this post Ill talk a little about my experience when installing Project Server 2013.

One of the first things I started with at CPS was the installation of Project Server 2013. If you are familiar with the installation of SharePoint and Project Server 2010 you quickly realize that the core installation process of SharePoint 2013 and Project Server 2013 is almost identical.

So I won’t bore you with that except one note. I was building my environment on Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012. Strangely you still need to install the SQL Server Native Client 2008 and SQL Server 2008 ASAMO10 for the cube to build successfully. 

So what else?

Well there are some small changes like when you provision a Project Web App by default it will have the SharePoint Security Model. (I’ll talk about this model in a different post.) It can be turned back to the Project Server classic mode but only via PowerShell.

Project Server Mode (Classic)

Set-SPProjectPermissionMode –URL http://servername/pwa -AdministratorAccount domain\accountname -Mode ProjectServer

And if you wish back to SharePoint Mode. Note: Switching between SharePoint permission mode and Project Server permission mode deletes all security related settings.

SharePoint Mode

Set-SPProjectPermissionMode –URL htt://servername/pwa –AdministratorAccount domain\accountname –Mode SharePoint

With the coming of Project Online Microsoft has chosen to move some of the web functionality from the server setting to SharePoint Central Administration.

General Queue Settings also have been moved from PWA Server settings to the Project Server Service Application.

Is this it?

Well from what I learned these are the most notable. Off course there are some other additions but those are more SharePoint related then Project Server.

This is it for now in my next post I’ll talk about the new SharePoint permission model.

As for now I am done, again I wish you a good 2013 see you next year!

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/england-project-server-2013-and-learning/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

I have been working with Microsoft Project for a decent amount of time now and I go to a lot of clients during my Project Server implementations. One thing I noticed with the average Project Manager that they never use the feature to customize their ribbon. For the people that do not know what the ribbon is, it is the action bar where all the buttons reside in Office products.

While most buttons you use in Project are already present in the ribbon, they sometimes are not in the place you like them to be. It is my experience that when working on your project plan you mostly use the “Task” tab in your ribbon. What I like to do, is to add a few buttons I use on regular basis in the other tabs to have them in available in the “Task” tab.

Because I work with Project Server a lot I always like to have the “Publish” button in my ribbon, the same goes for the “Set Baseline”, “Entire Project” and “Team planner” buttons.

So how do you do this?

That is the easy part. Go to “File” and select “Options”. In the options menu you can find “Customize Ribbon” and “Quick Access Toolbar”. For this post I will only customize my ribbon.

When you selected the “Customize Ribbon” option you are able to add button to all tabs. Here we will customize the “Task” tab.

Expand the “Task” tab. Now I advise you to make a custom tab for the buttons you want to add. To do this click on “New Group”.

So that is the group. Now that we have our group lets populate it with the extra buttons we want shall we.

Select the button you want to add in my case that is “Publish” and press add. Now select other buttons you want and press ok. Go back to the tab you customized to see the result.

It is that easy. Above the result. Having these buttons all in the “Task” tab saves me the hassle to go the other tabs for them. Everything you need one click away.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/practice-makes-perfect-part-8-customizing-the-ribbon/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

After a vacation of both authors we are back and recharged and ready for whatever the last two months of 2012 can throw at us. Blogs will start popping up again in a sort of regular fashion. To start this of, I would like to announce that I am again giving a Dutch presentation at Microsoft in the Netherlands about the new release of Microsoft Project on the 1ste of November.

I am really pleased that I can do this again. I will be giving a overview on what is new in Project Professional 2013 and show you the cloud based version of Microsoft Project Server “Project Online” This session will give you a good overview of the new enhancements and features in the new release that will help anyone that works with Microsoft Project.

It is a free session so if you are interested you can sign up at the link below. Please keep in mind this session is in the Netherlands and will be given in Dutch.

First Look new release of Microsoft Project

Hope to see you there

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/second-session-new-release-of-microsoft-project/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

In my post Practice makes Perfect Part 3 – Views I explained how you can make your own  view. In that post I promised to also show how you can make your own groups and filters. While I expect a lot of people find this easy or just use the default groups and filters it is still useful for beginners.

I will also take the time to go trough the default filters and groups and might be useful on a daily basis.

And again I will be using the preview version of Project Professional 2013 for this post. This is not the final product and changes may still occur. If you are curios about the new version of Microsoft Project go here and try it out for yourself.

So where can I find groups and filters?

There are actually two ways to use groups and filters in your project. When you are in you project select the view tab.

The other ways is in your Gantt Chart and go to Task Name and expand it (Dropdown). As you can see in the image below you are able to select Group By and Filters.

What groups and filters are there?

There are a lot of built in groups and filters. These are very useful to any Project Manager. Some good groups include: Auto scheduled v. Manually scheduled, Status, Milestones and Complete and Incomplete task. These groups are great way to get the information out of your project plan fast.

Some good filters include: Completed tasks, Critical, Incomplete tasks, Late tasks and Milestones. Like groups this is a great way to filter all the data in your project plan.

Using groups and filters is a timesaver when you are working with big project plans and you have to get to the data you want quickly.

How can I make my own Group?

Go to the view tab and select the groups. Expand it and select “New Group By”.

In the next screen you be able to make your group. In the image below I made a easy selection. I will group by milestone to see all the tasks that are milestones. In the order I selected descending to force tasks that are milestones to appear on top. I also have changed the cell background to light blue. Here you also have the ability to show the summary task where the milestones resides just to give you more information. As you can see you also have the ability to group the data by more then one field.

Grouping this way will give you this result.

As you can see this is a really easy way to group your data really quickly. Making this group took me about 1 minute. And if you are a Project Manager that 1 minute will properly save you 15 minutes if you would have to look for all the milestones in a big project plan. Next how to filter.

How can I make my own Filter?

Making your own filter on the same way you made a group. Go to the view tab and select the filter. Expand it and select “New filter” For this exercise I made a quick filter that filters on my own custom field Progress and show the tasks that equals the value Yellow. This basically filters my project plan on tasks that have a yellow smiley.

The image below show the outcome of the filter.

Using Groups and Filters is really easy and can save you a lot of time when working with big project plans. Both the group and filter have been made in about 1 minute.

I hope this post demonstrates how to make groups and filters and how easy it is. When working with big project plans and especially custom fields where you don’t have a filter or group for it is a must to know how to do this so you can access your data fast.

This is it for me. In the next post of Practice makes Perfect will be talking about Costs and Budgets in your project plan.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/practice-makes-perfect-part-7-groups-and-filters/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

I rarely use team planner in my day to day activities what is a shame as it cool be valuable tool for anyone that regularly works with resources. In this post I will try to explain team planner and how you can use it. I will for instance show how resource leveling works and of course all the other options that are available.

Again I will be using Project Professional 2013 for this post. This is still in the preview version and it is not the final product. If you are curious about Project Professional 2013 you can go here and try it out for yourself.

Team planner what is it?

The new feature team planner was added in Project Professional 2010. This feature lets you plan your tasks for resources in a kind of roster. It is also great to spot over allocations and resolving these over allocations. As you can see in the image below you can see that Molly Dempsey is over allocated because she has to do two tasks at once.

Team planner here allows you to move your tasks to solve this over allocation. In this case above you have two options. 1. Reschedule your task or 2. Assign the task to someone else, and this is easy, you can just drag and drop the task.

Within team planner you have also the ability to use resource leveling. Resource leveling does exactly how it sounds. It will automatically solve (reschedule tasks) the over allocations you have your project. While this sounds cool I should also warn you that I might not always does what you want to do. Treat carefully when using this feature. As you can see in the image below I leveled the resource Molly Dempsey. Microsoft Project will automatically solve the over allocation by placing one task behind the other. This solved the over allocation. However some tasks that have dependencies have been delayed. Like I said be carefully as this will not always do what you want it to do. This is mostly because of dependencies and constraints of a task you didn’t think about.

Always carefully inspect what Microsoft Project has done to your project. A good way to do this is set a baseline before you level. It is a great way to keep track of the changes made in your project. If you don’t know how to make a baseline and use it here is a early post I have made about baselines. Practice makes Perfect Part 2 – Baseline

You have four options when using resource leveling. Level resource will level the selected resource. Level All will level all of your resources in your project. Luckily you have the option to use Clear Leveling if you don’t like what leveling did to your project. Then you also have the ability to play around with the Leveling Options. I am not going to highlight these options here as they are pretty straight forward. Just look at them and play around with some settings.

There are some more things you can do with team planner like adding a note to a resource, great for reminding you what you did with a particular resources. You see check the information of the resource and you can even create a new resource in the team planner view.

The last thing I want to talk about is the details view. I recommend you turn this on all the time. This will give you all the information on the selected resource like what the resource is working ect. This information can be really useful when rescheduling tasks.

I hope this will give you a bit more insight in what you are able to do with the team planner feature and how you can use it when you want to handle over allocations in your project plan.

Up next in the Practice makes Perfect series – Groups and Filters.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/practice-makes-perfect-part-6-team-planner/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

With the Project Preview that started in July I had the time to test out Project Online. For people that do not know what Project Online is, it is basically Project Server 2013 in the cloud.

Previously made a post about the Project Professional Timeline and how you can use it. That post you can find here and this post is a little addition as Project Online has the Timeline in Project Web Access. I personally really like this addition to Project Web Access as it gives you a nice graphical presentation of your project. However there is a little more in Project Online.

Project Online is still in the preview version this is not the final product so changes can still be made.

So what is it?

Next to the normal functionality of the timeline what is now available in Project Web Access you have the added ability to add projects to the timeline. This enables you to make a graphical presentation of all your projects over time or just a subset of your projects whatever you prefer. So you are basically able to make your own Project Calendar pretty neat right?

So how does it work?

The timeline view in Project Web Access work the same as it does in Project Professional. Go to your project and select the task you want to add to the timeline.

Click add to timeline and you are done. From here you have the options to give them any color you want, make callout tasks and so on.

How can I do this for Projects?

When you are in project center you can select a project and in your projects menu you can select add project. If you want you can even add tasks to that view from a selected project.

When your done adding your projects to the timeline you can create something like this.

Pretty cool I would say. With just a few mouse clicks you can make a graphical presentation of your entire portfolio. If you click on a specific project in the timeline you can even open de project directly from the there.

Microsoft really tried to make Project Web Access as good as it can get. All these little features really make it easy for a project manager to do most of his work just from his browser.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/project-online-the-timeline-in-project-web-access/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

Next week on the 6th of September Ill be giving a Dutch presentation at Microsoft in the Netherlands about the new version of Microsoft Project. Ill be giving a overview on Microsoft Project Professional 2013 and Project Online. I will demonstrate all the new features that are available in the new version.

This session will give you a good overview of what’s new and coming your way and how to use the new version of Project in your business.

There are still places left for this free session so if you are interested you can sign up here. Please keep in mind this session is in the Netherlands and will be given in dutch.

First Look new release of Microsoft Project

Hope to see you there.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/first-look-session-on-the-new-release-of-microsoft-project/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)