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)

Recently it was announced that it would be possible to rollup some of the data in the time phased feeds for Project Online, the support documentation can be found here: http://bit.ly/2yQUZQp

Currently today in Project Online, the time phased data is stored in the Reporting schema at the day level. For some organisations, this is too granular and they end up having to aggregate the data for reports to weekly / monthly etc. For those customers, having the data at the day level isn’t convenient as storage / performance improvements can be gained from having the data stored at source pre-aggregated. With this change, that will now be possible.

I believe this feature will start rolling out in the next week or two but let’s have a quick look at the options. From the PWA Settings menu you will see a new option under Enterprise Data for Reporting as seen below:

This shows the following page:

As this new feature has been rolled out to an existing PWA site, this defaults to Daily but new PWA sites created once this feature is rolled out to the tenant will have this setting set to Never.

Let’s look at the impact on the data using my simple project plan that has a task with a duration of 5 days:

Using the TaskTimephasedDataSet you can see the data below for Task 2:

As expected, there are 5 days displaying work. I will now change the setting to Weekly:

For this change to take effect I will need to publish all of my projects but for the purpose of this blog post I will just publish my test project. Refreshing my Excel data, you can see I have two rows as the task spans two weeks:

The hours are aggregated on the first day of the week as defined by the PWA site regional settings:

Now I will increase the task duration to 50 days to span a few months and set the reporting to monthly then publish my test project. Updated project:

Updated to Monthly:

Updated Excel report:

As you can see the hours are now aggregated on the first day of the month. You can also base this on the fiscal periods defined in PWA.

The feeds that are impacted by this change are:

• AssignmentBaselineTimephasedDataSet
• AssignmentTimephasedDataSet
• TaskBaselineTimephasedDataSet
• TaskTimephasedDataSet

Once available in your tenant, set the time phased data reporting setting as defined by your reporting requirements and publish all of the projects. I would recommend you did this on a non-production PWA instance first as you might need to update you reports, apps etc. that consume date from those four feeds. Also remember to set this up for new PWA instances created once this feature is live as they will be set to Never.

Keep an eye out for this feature reaching your tenant soon.