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 very popular series of posts on getting started with Project Online, Microsoft’s Office 365 PPM cloud offering, round up found here. I started a mini series towards the end of last year where I covered getting started with the Portfolio Analysis functionality, part 1 here and part 2 here. I mentioned here that I would also do the same for workflow. I have finally got around to creating the workflow version – sorry for the delay, it has been a busy few months.

In this series of posts I will touch on some of the workflow capabilities that are available for Project Online and show you how to getting started.

For the purpose of this post I have already configured a project ideas type list in my PWA site collection, the portfolio strategy / analysis piece, some enterprise project types and have some custom fields.

The first post in this series will look at creating a project from the project ideas list. The workflow will assign a task to a SharePoint group for the approval, once approved a project will be created in Project Online using the correct Enterprise Project Type.

The project ideas list on my test environment looks like this:

Very simple, with a couple of SharePoint fields. I have mapped these fields to Project Online custom fields:

This is so that the metadata captured from the idea is copied over to custom field when the project is created.

I have also created some new Enterprise Project Types in this test environment:

Some of these will be used in later posts for this getting started series.

We will now look at creating an approval workflow for this ProjectIdeas list. Launch SharePoint Designer 2013 and open the target PWA site.

Click Workflow from Navigation pane:

Click List Workflow then choose the list:

Complete the details as required:

Click OK.

Now you can start creating the workflow in the designer. For this example I will firstly insert two more stages using the Stage button:

Then rename the stages:

Starting with the Initiated stage, click where is states “Start typing…” and more options will be enabled in the ribbon:

Click the Action button and scroll down to the “Assign a task” action and click:

Now click this user:

In the dialog box that appears complete the details, for the Participant I selected the Administrators group:

For the task title I used the string builder and added the following with a lookup to the item:

For the description I used the string builder to create the following:

Once the details are completed:

Click OK.

Now click in the transition to stage section:

Using the condition ribbon menu button, select if any value equals value:

Now click the first value:

Then click the fx button:

In the box that appears set the following:

Click OK.

Click the second value and choose Approved:

Now select the Insert go-to under the If and select Go to a stage on the Action menu:

Click a stage and select Approved:

Do the same for Else but select the Rejected stage:

In the Approved stage I will insert a parallel block:

In this parallel block I will insert four If conditions:

The If conditions are then configured like below:

The action for each If will be “Create Project from Current Item”:

Then you can choose the Enterprise Project Type:

Set this up to match to correct EPTs:

I then added two further actions:

To send ad email and to set a field on the list.

The email was configured as below:

The workflow then set the Approval Date field to Today:

The transition to stage was then update to end the workflow:

The final stage to configure is the Reject stage, in this stage we just send and email to the user that created the item then end the workflow:

Once completed, save the workflow and check for any errors.

Using the navigation bar, click the workflow name:

Then set the start options for the workflow:

Once you are happy with it publish the workflow to the list.

Back in SharePoint, if we look at the Workflow settings for the list we should see the workflow name:

Now if I create a new item on the list the workflow will fire and create a task for one of the administrators to approve, the item shows as in the initiated stage:

As a PWA administrator I would receive a email notifying me that I had a task assigned, I could then approve that item or reject it. In this example I will approve it:

When the workflow fires the item will update to Approved, a project will get created in Project Online, an email will be sent to the user who created the idea and the Approval Date will be set on the list item.

The updated project idea item can be seen below:

The project can be seen below in the project center with the correct Enterprise Project Type:

The data from the Project Ideas list has been copied to the correct Project Custom fields:

That’s it for the simple project ideas list workflow – there is lots more that can be done but hopefully that gives you a good idea on how to get started. Next up we will take a look at getting started with the project life cycle workflow and progress a project through various stages and phases.

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)

Quick post to highlight that the Project Online CSOM DLL ‘Microsoft.ProjectServer.Client.dll’ is now available via the NuGet package for SharePoint, see the blog post below for details:

http://bit.ly/1PWBtCA

Direct link to the package: http://bit.ly/1SO8x4X

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

http://bit.ly/1KbV7sH

Project 2016 January 2016 update:
http://bit.ly/1JIOjrw

The Office 2013 January 2016 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1KbV7sH

Project Server 2013 January 2016 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1KbV685

Project Server 2013 January 2016 update:
http://bit.ly/1JIOjry

Project 2013 January 2016 update:
http://bit.ly/1KbV7IW

Also worth noting, if you haven’t done so already, install Service Pack 1 http://bit.ly/1uorn2C first if installing the January 2016 CU.

The Office 2010 January 2016 updates and cumulative updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1KbV7sH

Project Server 2010 January 2016 CU Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1KbV7IY

Project Server 2010 January 2016 update:
http://bit.ly/1JIOjHO

Project 2010 January 2016 update:
<no update this month>

SP2 is a pre-requisite for the Office 2010 January 2016 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)

As you may know or not know, creating a report that contains data from a custom SharePoint list from all Project sites, for example a Lesson Learned list or Change list is not that simple. The default lists for Issues and Risks are simple as the data is synchronised to the reporting schema and available in the Project OData reporting API. In this blog post I will show you a simple example using Power Query to access the list data and create a simple cross project report consuming data from the SharePoint list APIs on the Project Sites.

In this example I use the Issues list but the same principle will apply to any SharePoint lists on the project sites. I have used Power BI Desktop to author this report but the same would work in Excel using Power Query. First load Power BI Desktop and click Get Data >  ODATA Feed and enter the REST API for the list using an example Project Site:

The URL I used was: https://TenantURL/sites/PSP/Acquisition%20Target%20Analysis/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle(‘Issues&#8217;)/Items()?$Select=Title,Priority

In this example I am only getting the item title and priority from the Issues list. To use a different list update GetByTitle(‘Issues’) with the name of your list and then update the Select to include the correct columns.

Click OK and you will see the data from this list:

Click Edit to load the query editor.

Rename the query to something meaningful;

Access the Advanced Editor:

Change the Power Query code to add in the following code to turn this into a parameterised function:

The top and bottom lines were added and the OData.Feed URL updated the remove the reference to the example site we used to load the initial data, this was replaced with the site parameter. Click Done and you will see the following:

Don’t invoke the function as this will edit the code. Now we need to add in the query to get the list of projects. So within the query editor on the Home tab click New Source > ODATA Feed and enter the URL to get you list of Projects and Project Site URLS:

The URL I used was: https://TenantURL/sites/PSP/_api/ProjectData/Projects()?$Filter=ProjectType ne 7

This filters out the Timesheet row, the properties will be selected in the next step. Click OK to load the data:

Click OK and click Choose Columns:

I only selected ProjectName and ProjectWorkspaceInternalUrl, other columns can be added but only these were required for this example:

Click OK and rename the Query to something meaningful:

We now need to add in a custom column to call the function. Click Add Column > Add Custom Column and enter the following:

So above we are calling the LoadIssueData function and passing in the ProjectWorkspaceInternalUrl. This will be used in the site parameter value. Click OK and the data will load:

The column needs to be expanded to show the data, click the expand button next to the column name and chose the columns to expand:

Click OK to load the data and expand the columns to see Title and Priority columns from the Issues list:

Now click Close & Apply from the Home tab to load the data model:

We can now create a report that displays the data, a simple table example can be seen below:

The expanded column can be renamed to something more meaningful, for example:

Depending on the number of projects / project sites the data load might take a while as it has to traverse all of the project sites and get the SharePoint data using the list REST APIs. Each Project requires a separate REST call to get the list data from the associated Project Site.

Hopefully that will open up your reporting options for getting data from those custom SharePoint lists or the Project sites or even if you want to use the default Issues and Risks list but have custom columns on those lists.

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.

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 🙂