SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Following on from the announcement a while back and the details on the Office 365 roadmap, you might see the unique Project ID feature now available on your tenant. The link to the roadmap notification is below:

http://bit.ly/1LN3zPA

This feature enables you to create a unique Project ID for each project in a particular Enterprise Project Type (EPT). To access the configuration for the unique ID click PWA Settings > Enterprise Project Types and click on the EPT that you require a unique ID for each project. This is an EPT setting and not a global setting. Once navigated to the EPT page you will see the following section – Project Id:

The starting number and minimum digit padding settings are required but you can also set a prefix and post fix. On my demo environment I set the following:

This feature adds a new default Project ID field as seen on my PDP:

This field is also added to all the default Project Center views such as the Summary view as seen below:

It can be added to new Project Center views too:

The project id is set when the project is created using that EPT, so for existing projects a Project ID will not be set even if you edit it and publish it. The “Pauls Test Project 001” existed before the feature was available on my PWA instance, as you can see this has a blank Project ID field:

You can type an ID in there if needed, for example I manually typed the next number available (00003):

I then created another new project but this duplicated the Project ID as seen below for project “Pauls Test Project 4”:

You can also modify a Project ID that was auto generated, see project “Pauls Test Project number 002” below:

This new field is available in the Odata Reporting API (_api/ProjectData/Projects), it is called ProjectIdentifier as seen below:

It is also available in the JSOM REST API (_api/ProjectServer/Projects) as well:

This is a great new addition to Project Online, just be aware that existing Projects wont get an ID generated and the Project ID can be set / updated manually.