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)

I am lucky enough to be at Microsoft’s Ignite conference this week, there are several of my CPS colleagues here with me too: Alan Eardley, Ivan Lloyd and Sacha Cohn. I will try and blog a summary each day if I can.

So on day one we arrived at the conference center ready to start the day. We collected our passes the day before so didn’t have to queue up to do that luckily! When we arrived at 07:30 in the morning I was surprised how many people where there already. After breakfast we headed to the main hall for the keynote, even at 08:10 in the morning there was a swarm of people heading there:

Inside the man hall was very impressive, the pictures below do not do it justice:

The keynote’s were interesting, some new things demonstrated and discussed. This included all of the changes and new features coming to the cloud. These are summarised already on the following Microsoft cloud blog:

http://bit.ly/1OWSjqn

Office productivity too:

http://bit.ly/1ENHkrb

Also a great demo showing the new features Windows 10 has to offer – having only really read about Windows 10 and not having installed it yet, this was very impressive. I am looking for to this operating system.

Other key announcements were Office 2016 Public Preview, Skype for Business improvements, Sway for Business and Education. A good round up can be found here.

I then went on to look around the Expo hall, WOW this was impressive. So many booths and I would have been there all day if I went to all.

After lunch I went evolution of SharePoint session, the key takeaways for this for me were that the SharePoint 2016 server roles can be set on the install using the configuration wizard. In previous versions the server role was defined by the services that were running on the server, for SharePoint 2016 when running the configuration wizard as you install there will be role options such as Web Front End, Application, Search, Distributed and an option or a customised role. Cache SharePoint 2016 will have “zero down time” patching (great news!) and the are going to be improvements in the hybrid models for the SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Online. NextGen portals were also mentioned including Delve and Office 365 videos. There will be an update released later this year for SharePoint 2013 to include Delve.

The last session I went to was for Excel 2016, this session gave an overview of what was coming in Excel 2016 client. The key takeaways for me here were that Excel 2016 will have components natively in the product rather than add-ons, by this i mean things like Power Map, PowerPivot and Power Query will be included in Excel 2016 by default and no longer require separate add-ons. The advantage to this is that the usage of these tools will be more intuitive and accessible, this also enables automation of Power Query using VBA etc. There is a new function is Excel 2016 that does exponential smoothing for Forecasting – this was pretty cool how simple Excel 2016 will make forecasting for time series data. Another great feature is the Time Grouping option so that you can group time data by month, by quarter, by year etc. at the click of a button without having to write the DAX query. New chart types will also be in Excel 2016, these include Tree Map, Sunburst, Waterfall, Box & Whisker and Histogram & Pareto.

That’s it for now, hope to have a summary for Day 2 later 🙂

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)

This script will enable the users to view the resource calendar exceptions for a particular resource. The script can be downloaded from the script gallery below:

http://bit.ly/1KzuKOc

To get the script to work you will need to download the following jQuery library: jquery-2.1.1.min.js – jQuery download Another version of this library may work but this was the one I used / tested with. Upload this library to your PWA site collection then update the script file with the correct location. I uploaded this file to the style library as you can see in the code below:

This example script does use the /ProjectServer REST API, so users will need access to that for this to work.

Once the script is downloaded, upload this to the PWA site collection, in this example it was uploaded to the shared documents library. Choose where you want the script to be accessed, in this example I created a new page, added a content editor web part on the new page then referenced the uploaded script using the content editor web part:

Once loaded, the page will look like this:

If no exceptions are found the table will display “No data available in table”, change the select menu to another resource that does have exceptions in the resource calendar and these will be displayed:

This only uses intrinsic fields so should work for any Project Online / Project Server environment but do test it thoroughly first. You might want to improve the error handling etc. before deploying to a production environment. Also remember this does require the user to have access to view resources via the /ProjectServer REST API for this to work.

The script is provided "As is" with no warranties etc.

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)

If you want want to disable the Lync / Skype for Business presence in Project 2013, see the steps below.

Lync / Skype for Business Presence enabled:

Lync / Skype for Business Presence disabled:

To do this, install the April 2015 Cumulative update for Project 2013 (fully test on a test machine before using in production): http://bit.ly/1Od9oGX

Then create the registry key as detailed in the KB article.

You can either do this manually or via PowerShell, an example PowerShell command can be seen below:

This will create the following key:

Always back up the registry before making any changes (manually or via PowerShell etc.)

To enable Lync / IM presence again update the DisableIMStatus key value data to 0 and restart Project.

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)

The Office 2013 April 2015 Cumulative Updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1Od9mi2

Project Server 2013 April 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1EE7M8n

Project Server 2013 April 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1Od9oGW

Project 2013 April 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1Od9oGX

Also worth noting, if you haven’t done so already, install Service Pack 1 http://bit.ly/1uorn2C first if installing the April 2015 CU.

The Office 2010 April 2015 Cumulative Updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1Od9mi2

Project Server 2010 April 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1Od9oXa

Project Server 2010 April 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1EE7MoG

Project 2010 April 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1Od9oXc

SP2 is a pre-requisite for the Office 2010 April 2015 CUs.

As always, fully test these updates on a replica test environment before deploying to production.

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)

One issue or query that has been raised a few times is that when reporting on manually scheduled tasks and auto scheduled tasks the Start / Finish date fields do not show the same data that they do in Project or PWA for the manually scheduled tasks. For example, take a look at the example project plan below:

If I generate a reporting for this project using the equivalent fields from the OData API, see below:

As you can see all tasks have start and finish dates. The Manually scheduled tasks that are either blank or have text displayed in Project Pro contain dates in the report. These default to the Project Start date. The OData query used is below:

Tasks()?$Select=ProjectName,TaskName,TaskStartDate,TaskFinishDate,TaskIndex

This can be quite misleading from a reporting point of view. There are two options (probably more but two documented here!), these are detailed below in order of preference:

Option 1:

The preferred option would be to create a calculated field in the report, in this example, as I am using Excel I will create this in Power Query. I have my dataset in the Power Query Editor like below:

The OData query used is below:

Tasks()?$Select=ProjectName,TaskName,TaskStartDate,TaskStartDateString,TaskFinishDate,TaskFinishDateString,TaskIsManuallyScheduled,TaskIndex

Now click Add Column > Add Custom Column:

Give the column a name then create the formula:

Click OK to add the new custom column, repeat for the finish date:

After re-ordering and removing some columns my dataset now looks like this in the Query Editor:

The final change is to update the Data Types of the columns, in this example I updated the TaskStartDate and TaskFinishDate columns to Date/Time and my calculated DisplayedStartDate and DisplayedFinishDate columns to Text:

Now I am happy with the query I click the Close & Load button on the Home tab:

This will load my data into Excel:

As you can see the data displayed in my calculated columns on my report match the data in the fields on my Project Plan:

Option 2:

The other option is to create new Enterprise Custom Fields in Project Online that are calculated. Using Start date as an example, create a task level text field that is based on  formula, the formula would be =[Start]. I have called the field “DisplayedStartDate”. In Project Pro:

In my updated Excel Report:

The OData query used is below:

Tasks()?$Select=ProjectName,TaskName,TaskStartDate,TaskFinishDate,DisplayedStartDate,TaskIndex

As you can see this also gives the correct data but does introduce two additional calculated task level fields in your Project Online configuration. It is recommended to keep the task level calculated fields to a minimum – ideally below 5 for performance reasons hence this option being the least preferred. 

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)

Some good news, I’m very pleased to announce that my Project MVP award was renewed for the third time after first being awarded in April 2013. I am really grateful for the recognition, especially as I still enjoy helping out the Project and Project Server / Project Online community so much. It is kind of a hobby of mine I guess, or maybe just an obsession!