SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

Since long i have been vocal about the distant connection between Project sites and PWA, formerly known as Project Work spaces in PS2007. Although project sites are meant to be a second home, other then PWA, to project team for their project activities.

However this distance some how comes in a way while convincing users to use project site associated with project to manage artifacts such as documents, issues and etc. One of the common request received in this case was, how to show projects tasks or project status on project site? and since there is no OOB way of achieving this in PS2010, then you have to come up with all these brilliant ideas of developing different custom solutions to accommodate such requests.

But it comes as a pleasant surprise in PS2013 that Project Sites are now more seamlessly connected with PWA. Though still the distant feeling exist, but was overcome to some extent to give user a more connected feel of Project site with their projects.

Your first experience: Project site link do not exist on ribbon anymore, its from with the Project now.

 click on Project Name, and you will see the Project Site link along with PDPs.

 click on Project Site link, and it will NOT open in separate window as new site like old times: (unless you prefer, and use any of the trick to open in new window 🙂  )

(some whistles.. please 🙂 )

my first impression was WOW, the home page by-default shows the status including Project Timeline and Alert alert that you are behind schedule.


Deliverable/Issues and Risks lists are the same, in fact Paul Mather few days back wrote about the change of functionality of linking tasks along with issues/risks and documents here and took the opportunity away from me since i was also planning to write the same 🙂

(ok, ready for more good things …. :), here you go )

Tasks link until PS2010 was of no good in most cases, in fact i used to rename it as “Team Tasks OR Personal Tasks” for customers to avoid the confusion of mixing these tasks as project schedule tasks.

But now these alternates are not required any more. Lets click on Tasks link: 

Your project tasks are displayed here to be shared with team, and of course you can change the view of tasks page to show you only Yours Tasks or etc. However you cannot edit the values of tasks here, such as %complete, it will take you back to project schedule for the editing which i believe is pretty logical.

Before we wind up, a quick hint to show that you can also add a famous Timeline web-part  to your project site home page to show timeline alone. And also you can modify the existing Project Summary web-part to reflect information minus timeline.

Here you go:

And now last but not the least, in order to go back to PWA, no need to look for navigation link on project site. Simply click on Project Details link to access project details:

Fig-1

This is it for now, we have seen enough good things – now lets get back to the real work issues 🙂