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 a post I wrote over a month ago regarding checking entities from multiple Project Online PWA instances, this post covers updating multiple Project Online PWA instances. The first post can be found below:

http://bit.ly/1GMeEUi

In this post I demonstrate a way in which you can manage configuration across multiple PWA instances, for example you might want to create a new custom field on more than one instance. This is a simple example just to show you the idea. As this is very much an example, I haven’t released any code or solution but you can see the core code further on in the post.

For the purpose of this blog post I created a C# .Net console application. Once you have a new visual studio console app project you will need to add the references to the following DLLs:

I used the v15 SharePoint and Project Server dlls here.

In the program add these dlls:

The first part of the code is to capture the custom field name and description plus the number of PWA instances to update:

It then goes into a loop to create the custom field on the specified PWA site:

The code below is used to secure the password in the console input:

That is it. This example will create a Project level custom field but you could easily update the code to get the user to enter the entity type (task / resource etc.)

To see this in action see below:

Enter the custom field name:

Enter the custom field description:

Enter the number of PWA instances to update:

Enter the first PWA site URL:

Enter the username for an account that has access to create custom fields:

Enter the password for that account:

After pressing enter it will go off and create the custom field on the first PWA instance:

Press any key and it will go back to ask for the 2nd PWA instance:

It will then prompt for the username and password as before. It will keep looping through depending on how many PWA sites needed to be updated.

On one of those PWA instances we can see the field was created:

Nice and easy, saves navigating around multiple PWA site collections for a simple change you might want to roll out across multiple instances.

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 2016 December 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1NaR2rX

Project 2016 December 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1IE0nK1

The Office 2013 December 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1NaR2rX

Project Server 2013 December 2015 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1NaR5nw

Project Server 2013 December 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1IE0mpm

Project 2013 December 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1NaR5nA

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

The Office 2010 December 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1NaR2rX

Project Server 2010 December 2015 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1NaR5nC

Project Server 2010 December 2015 update:
<no specific Project Server 2010 update>

Project 2010 December 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1IE0nK5

SP2 is a pre-requisite for the Office 2010 December 2015 updates.

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)

This is a supporting blog post for a new JavaScript file I have published to the Microsoft Gallery, it can be downloaded here:

http://bit.ly/1ltpYdS 

This script enables you to capture the the team / staff morale each day – your team members just need to click one of the smiley faces:

In the example above I am logged in with the tenant admin account called “admin admin”. When a user clicks one of the icons it creates an item in the “ProjectTeamMorale” list in the PWA site:

If they click the happy faces it sets the item status to Happy, if they click the sad face it sets the status to Unhappy.

This list will need to be created manually with the following details:

List Name: ProjectTeamMorale

Columns:

The Date column setting defaults to Today:

Once the list is set up the script can be added to the PWA homepage using a content editor web part:

Reference the location of the project_team_morale.js file – in this example I added the JavaScript file to the Shared Document library in the PWA site:

That is it. The script can easily be updated to use different images or include more than two statuses etc. In this example I have done this for PWA but this could be added to a SharePoint intranet site to capture the staff members morale rather than just the project team in this example.

You can then generate a report to view the team / staff morale over time.

Try it out 🙂

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 Project Online Power BI content pack is now available – take a look today!

Log in to your Power BI site, click Get Data then click Get on the Services card under the Content Pack Library:

Scroll down the list and you will see Microsoft Project Online:

Click the tile:

Then click Connect and type the PWA URL – I connected to one of our demo instances:

Click Next and change the Authentication method to oAuth2 and click Sign in:

When prompted, enter the credentials.

The content pack will then be deployed to your workspace, it will first import the data as displayed in the top right hand corner:

Once completed you will see the Microsoft Project Dataset, Report and Dashboard accessible in the left navigation pane:

There are default reports for Issues:

Risks:

Portfolio Status:

Project Compliance:

Then there is a dashboard that displays some of this data:

Awesome work from the Project team at Microsoft 🙂

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 2016 November 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1HLj8p5

Project 2016 November 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1GZx2Js

The Office 2013 November 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1HLj8p5

Project Server 2013 November 2015 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1HLj8pa

Project Server 2013 November 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1HLj9t7

Project 2013 November 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1HLj9t8

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

The Office 2010 November 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1HLj8p5

Project Server 2010 November 2015 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1HLj8pd

Project Server 2010 November 2015 update:
<no specific Project Server 2010 update>

Project 2010 November 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1GZx18q

SP2 is a pre-requisite for the Office 2010 November 2015 updates.

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)

It’s been a few weeks now since the Project Virtual Conference, for those of you that missed it, sign up here: http://bit.ly/1JyMYCg and you can view the recordings.

This post will give a summary of my session on Project Online BI Made Easy:

http://bit.ly/1l5n2o1

The aim of this session was to give an overview on some of the reporting technologies available to Project Online, this included:

• Excel
• Power BI
• SSIS / SSRS
• JavaScript / HTML

Firstly I demonstrated some example Excel dashboards I created for the session, screen shots of these can be seen below:

The project report below is from my Project Online report pack found here: http://bit.ly/1sDmW66

The report below is an example portfolio dashboard showing key metrics / data:

The report below is an example portfolio type report that can filter by programme:

I then demonstrated some example Power BI reports and dashboards that I created for the sessions:

The report below contains 4 pages, the first is another example portfolio type report:

The second page shows an example Treemap visualisation for the projects in the portfolio based on the % complete:

The third page shows an example project report:

The final page displays the drill down capability in Power BI, it shows the total cost per project initially:

Clicking a project drills into show the task cost for that project:

I also put together an example dashboard containing visualisations from the reports and natural language queries from the dashboard data:

The third technology demonstrated was SSIS / SSRS. The reporting technology was SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) but without SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) an SSRS report would not be possible with Project Online data. Well that isn’t strictly true but you need to extract the data out of Project Online into another data source such as SQL – SSIS can do this but so could a .NET console application using CSOM for example.

Below is an example SSRS project status / highlight report that displays data from my Project Online PWA instance:

The fourth technology was JavaScript / HTML, I put together an simple project report that displayed project information – project level data, milestones / marked tasks, issues, risks and data from a custom list on my project site called benefits. This also demonstrated the capability of rendered the HTML tags in multiline fields and accessing custom SharePoint list data from the associated project site. The report can be seen below:

I also demonstrated a reporting add-in that we use for PS+ but this was just to give another example using JavaScript / HTML:

I then covered a bit around best practice when using the Odata API regarding filtering the data at source as much as possible to minimise the data being pulled down – this means using filters and selects to only pull the information you need.

The final part I walked through creating a new Excel based report from a blank workbook and also create a new Power BI report from a blank Power BI Desktop file.

Take a look at the session for more details.

To help get started with reporting in Project Online, take a look at some of the links below:

Excel Project Online Report Pack: http://bit.ly/1l5n4MI

http://bit.ly/1pw7ROI

Blogs posts on Excel / Odata:

http://bit.ly/1l5n2UX

http://bit.ly/1KVIJf1

http://bit.ly/1J3jw4a

http://bit.ly/1FEO6CJ

http://bit.ly/1NtSOqU

http://bit.ly/1KVIJf4

SSIS links:

http://bit.ly/1l5n532

http://bit.ly/1KVIJf5

Power BI:

http://bit.ly/1M9xYMm

http://bit.ly/1giTosL

JavaScript examples:

http://bit.ly/1l5n2V6

http://bit.ly/1vzh7vi

http://bit.ly/1KzuKxY

There are plenty of details out there, just have a quick search and you will find lots of helpful articles for each technology!

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 is part two of the mini series on the new Resource Management feature that is being rolled out to Project Online, the first part on upgrading / activating the feature can be seen here:

http://bit.ly/1X7lgjU

In this post we take a look at what this feature has to offer from a Project Manager and a Resource Manager point of view.

For the purpose of this demo, I have created a new simple test project called “Pauls Resource Engagements Test” that can be seen below:

I have also created two test resources, “TestRes1” and “TestRes2”, see below:

Notice only “TestRes1” has been marked as requiring an engagement – this is to demo the different behaviour. The new field “Requires Engagements” indicates this. This is set against the resource using the new resource attribute as detailed in post 1 but can be seen below:

Both these resources have been added to my project team. So firstly I am going to assigned the resources to those test tasks to see what happens. TestRes1 who requires the approval is assigned to Task1 and TestRes2 is assigned to Task2 and the project is saved and published. Notice the new icon in the indicator column for Task 1 only as TestRes2 on Task 2 doesn’t require the approved engagements:

This is telling the Project Manager that the assignment is created without an approved engagement. Right-clicking on the icon gives the ability to view a new feature, “Fix in the Engagement Inspector…”

Clicking this loads the Inspector:

Clicking the “View Engagements conflicts in Task Usage” loads the following:

Here the PM can easily create an engagement request using the “Create and save new engagement for this assignment’s resource” button under actions or assign the task to another resource using the “Assign the task to a different resource” button. These actions are also available without accessing the Inspector, right-clicking the icon in the indicator column for the assignment row gives these options:

Clicking the Create new engagement option will load this dialog box:

It will default to the Resource and the task start and finish dates. The PM then has the ability to add a description and comments plus change the allocated by options:

Clicking OK then updates the Inspector to give the ability to submit the engagement:

Clicking the “Submit my engagement for review” will then create the request for the Resource Manager to accept / reject. The Inspector then indicators that there is a proposed engagement that covers the assignment:

Putting the Resource Manager hat on I will jump to the Resource Center in PWA. I select “TestRes1” in the grid then click the “Resource Requests” button on the ribbon:

This loads the following page:

Here I can change the views, check resource assignments, check the new capacity planning feature, edit the engagement, delete the engagement, add a new engagement or accept / reject the engagement. Firstly I will look at the new Capacity planning page:

The default view here shows a heat map for the engagements but my test engagement doesn’t appear here and it is only proposed and not committed as I am yet to accept it. I can check the checkbox “Include proposed booking” and my engagement data will appear for this example assignment:

There are other configuration options on the ribbon such as units, timescales and thresholds for under and over capacity. Also on this page is the ability to change the view:

In this example I switched to the Resource Utilisation view:

The others are similar, just show the data differently. These can be exported to various other formats uing the Download option:

Now I will switch back to the Resource Requests page and Accept the engagement request by selecting it and clicking the Accept button:

The Resource Manager then has the ability to add comments:

The engagement then updates to committed:

Putting my Project Manager hat back on, I switch back to Project Pro and I see that I still have a warning:

To fix this I need to refresh the engagements in this project. To do that, change the view the the “Resource Plan” view and click the Engagements tab:

Now click the Refresh button on the ribbon:

The engagement status has now updated to Committed. Switching back to another view and the warning has been removed:

Switching back to the Resource Plan view, the Project Manager can open the engagement and see the comments:

Clicking in the Format tab the Project Manager can change the view settings:

On the Engagements tab the Project Manager can create new engagements, launch the inspector, submit engagement requests for approval or refresh the engagement data:

A new request has been created for TestRes2 called Test and the details planned using the time phased grid:

Once submitted the Resource Manager will see this in the Resource Request page for TestRes2 – this time showing the time phased view:

In this example, as the Resource Manager I will edit this request to add 8 hours for the 3rd, 5th and 6th November:

Then I will click the Accept button. As the Project Manager in Project Pro, I refresh the engagements and see the changes:

The Resource Manager can also create engagements for resources in the Resource Center using the Add Engagement button in the resource requests page:

This gives the Resource Manager the ability to create engagements for the resources selected from the resource center grid, in this is example I only had TestRes1 selected:

As before, the Project Manager would need to refresh the engagements in the project to see the updates.

Next up part 3 where we will look at some quick reporting options for engagements.

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)

Just a quick post highlighting some new features being rolled out to project online:

Task Notifications in Project Online: http://bit.ly/1jG0A4v

Some links here that details this new feature:

http://bit.ly/1LN3yuW

http://bit.ly/1jG0A4x

Unique Project IDs in Project Online: http://bit.ly/1LN3zPA

To keep up to date, check the roadmap site here: http://bit.ly/1LN3A5O

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 that the Resource Management feature in Project Online was being rolled out (link below), my test Project Online tenant now has this feature.

http://bit.ly/1Fiq0Pc

In part 1 of this short series of posts i will provide some links for articles that explain this feature then I will look at enabling this feature on my environment and show you what happens once this feature is enabled. The later posts will look at using this new feature.

Firstly some links for this new feature:

http://bit.ly/1U0h1VO

http://bit.ly/1KBXljN – lots of useful links in the article

Once this feature is available to your tenant you will see the status banner like below displayed in the Resource Center page and the PWA Setting page:

On the Additional Server Settings page you will see a check box for Activate on the “New Resource Management Features Available” setting:

Part of this post will be to see how this changes existing resource plan data, so before I tick that setting I will just detail some of the test data I have so we can see the impact of this change.

I have a test project called “PM test project” – all these years of blogging and my imagination for dummy projects (and tasks) has not improved!

I only have one task on this project that the “Admin Admin” resource is assigned to, the admin admin resource is the only resource on the project team:

In the resource plan for this project I have two other resources with work:

The ProjectData APIs have the following data – quick example put together for this project in Excel:

Assignment and Assignment Timephased data:

The rest of the Assignment Timephased data:

I will now Activate the Resource Management features. Checking the check box gives this pop up:

Click OK then click Save on the Additional Server Settings page – only do this when your organisation is ready to use the new features. Fully test this on a test PWA instance first before production.

Whilst this processes, this setting in Additional Server settings will update to show the status of the resource plan data:

Once that has completed successfully the “New Resource Management Features Available” section will disappear, we can then see what has happened to that resource plan data.

Once the process is completed, the resource plan work will be deleted as can be seen in the example report from above after refreshing the data:

That resource plan work has been created as engagement requests, see the new example report below:

The rest of the Engagement Timephased data:

As you can see the data from the resource plan has been copied to the engagements data. The proposed resource plan work is only a proposed engagement. The engagements feature has the following endpoints for the ProjectData API:

• /Engagements
• /EngagementsTimephasedDataSet
• /EngagementsComments

We will look at these in more detail in a later post when we look at Engagement reporting.

A quick look in the “PM test project” in Project Professional 2016 and we can see these engagements, change the view to the Resource Plan then click the Refresh button on the Engagements tab to update the engagements:

The engagements can also be seen in the Resource Center, select the resources then click the Resource Requests button on the ribbon:

This will load the Resource Requests grid for the selected resources:

As well the resource plan data migrating to the resource requests / engagement some other changes happen. The old Resource Plan buttons are replaced with the new Resource Plan buttons, these just open up the project in Project Pro 2016 with the Resource Plan view:

A new resource attribute will appear on the edit resource page, this is called “Resource requires approval for all project assignments”:

With this set the resource will require an approved engagement request for project assignments.

Also a new category permission is available, this is “Manage Resource Engagements”:

This controls access to the resource engagements.

There is also a new Capacity planning feature accessed from the resource center, select resources and click the Capacity Planning button:

This loads a new page with some reports / views:

That’s it for the upgrade / activation part. Next up we will look at creating new resource requests and the process around that.

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 2016 October 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1jmI153

Project 2016 October 2015 update:
<no Project 2016 update this month>

The Office 2013 October 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1jmI153 

Project Server 2013 October 2015 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1RFH03s

Project Server 2013 October 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1RFGZfO

Project 2013 October 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1jmI156

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

The Office 2010 October 2015 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1jmI153

Project Server 2010 October 2015 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1RFGZfY

Project Server 2010 October 2015 update:
<no specific Project Server 2010 update>

Project 2010 October 2015 update:
http://bit.ly/1jmI159

SP2 is a pre-requisite for the Office 2010 October 2015 updates.

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