SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

The guide also includes the SharePoint Central Administration PWA settings.

The guide can be downloaded from here.

Happy downloading.

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 🙂

This post will help you to find key feature of Project Server 2013, Security Settings in Project Server 2013, that used to be under server settings of Project Server 2010.

With the introduction to new security mode in Project Server 2013, i.e. :SharePoint Permission mode, your new PWA by default will provision with SharePoint permission mode and hence you will find Security section missing from PWA server settings page.

Advantages, and what is enabled and what is not, while staying with SharePoint security mode are detailed here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161361.aspx

Out of the above article, and with R&D i have done so far, the major features you were not be able to use in SharePoint security mode are as follows:

• Unable to edit default permission of groups
• RBS
• categories
• Delegation

• Administrator
• Portfolio Managers
• Portfolio Viewers
• Project Managers
• Resource Managers
• Team Leads
• Team Members

In order to switch the permission mode back to Project mode, use the following windows powershell cmdlet:

Set-SPProjectPermissionMode [-Url] <Uri> [-Mode] <SharePoint | ProjectServer | UninitializedSharePoint | UninitializedProjectServer> [[-AdministratorAccount] <String>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>]

For detail of above cmdlet, see this technet article:: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219486.aspx

Once the prompt will be back after execution, refresh the PWA server settings page to see the Security group available to be used.

Note that Switching security modes deletes all permissions configuration information for the specified Project Web App instance and reverts to the default settings for the specified mode. You need to be carefully planning this well in advance that which security mode you have to configure.

And as usual, always try the patches to test servers prior to apply to productions environment.

• 74-343 Managing Projects with Microsoft Project 2013
• 74-344 Managing Programs and Projects with Project Server 2013

The high level details of the skills going to be measured for each of the above exams are as follows:.

Please see the links below for more details:

Project Server 2013 March Update (includes Feb CU as well):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2768001

Project Professional 2013 or Project Standard 2013 Feb Update:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2738031

Also see the Brian Smith’s post for details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2013/03/18/project-server-2013-february-2013-cumulative-update-delivered-with-march-2013-public-update.aspx

Also note that any future Project Server 2013 CU or update requires this March update as prerequisite.
The deployment of the server update is the same as previous Project Server updates. Find the link below to know more about SharePoint server 2013 update process: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff806331.aspx

Happy Patching 🙂

Load control template file /_controltemplates/TaxonomyPicker.ascx failed: Could not load type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.TaxonomyPicker’ from assembly ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’.

Although i cannot find any particular reason for this error, neither it will affect any of your services, but it would be better if you can find a solution and resolve it, so that it wont bother you while looking to your event log 🙂

Eventually i have found cause to this error from Microsoft support site as:

To get rid of this error, follow the simple steps:

1. Navigate to /14/TEMPLATE/ControlTemplates/TaxonomyPicker.ascx user control
2. Open the user control in a text editor and locate the first line
3. Find the character string , and replace with a comma ‘,’ (without quotes).
4. Save the user control.

Hope this helps.