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)

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

http://bit.ly/1A1UeDm

Project Server 2013 May 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1QLs5oe

Project Server 2013 May 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1A1UeDn

Project 2013 May 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1QLs4As

Worth noting is that the SharePoint 2013 and Project Server 2013 updates are in Windows Updates: http://bit.ly/1A1UeDr

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

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

http://bit.ly/1A1UeDm

Project Server 2010 May 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1A1UeDs

Project Server 2010 May 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1QLs5oh

Project 2010 May 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1A1Ucvi

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

For more details on these patches see: http://bit.ly/1QLs4Ay

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)

A common requirement is to see and access the Issues and Risks lists on the Project Detail Pages in the PWA site for the associated project. Previously I wrote a script that displayed the Issue and Risks data in a table but this was read-only. This can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1ctq4xK 

This new script will display the Issues and Risks (or any other list for that matter – slight code change / update required) on the PDP but will allow you to create / edit the lists items providing you have the permissions of course. Martin did something similar here. The script can be downloaded from the script gallery below:

 http://bit.ly/1ctq68Z

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:

Alternatively you can reference a CDN if preferred.

Once the script is downloaded, upload this to the PWA site collection, in this example it was uploaded to the shared documents library. Choose what PDP you want the script to be accessed, in this example I created a PDP called SharePoint Data, 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:

Don’t worry about the message – this is because there is no project UID available here.

Add the new PDP to the require Enterprise Project Types then navigate to the Project Center and access one of those projects from that EPT. Click the new PDP and you should see:

Click one of the buttons and that list should load:

You can also change the behaviour of the list form and use modal pop ups for a better experience:

This currently includes Risks and Issues but can easily be updated to include other SharePoint lists.

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)

The last day of the Microsoft Ignite conference I lined up three sessions, one on why trust Microsoft Enterprise cloud with your data, the next session was on auditing in Office 365 and the final session before we make our way home back to the UK was the Project Online / Project Server support.

The session on Office 365 and why trust Microsoft is a big topic and one with split views, Microsoft are working very hard to make customers data secure and also make the customers know their data is secure. There is lots of information on how Microsoft do this and the compliance standards etc. here: http://bit.ly/1ALekfP. I believe the data is probably more secure in the Microsoft cloud than it is in your own network – obviously there would be some exceptions to this for government / highly secure sites etc. Also a key take away from that session was that it isn’t the cloud that isn’t secure, it is the devices that the end users use each day (connecting to on-prem or cloud). Microsoft do monitor unusual activity from devices and make this information available to the admins.

The second session was on auditing options in Office 365. This covered the compliance center, the audit activity reports, the API available to for activity management and the centralised compliance auditing store. All the work Microsoft are doing around auditing shows how seriously they are taking security and how they are making this data available to admins.

The final session of the day was the Project Online / Project Server support session by Brian Smith. This was a great session and gave good insights on how the Project escalation engineers support project. Brian blogged about this session earlier: http://bit.ly/1zKFsR6

Time for me to head to the airport now to head home back to the UK. It’s been a great week here in Chicago with lots of things to understand and digest. Top marks for Microsoft, a great conference 🙂

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)

Day 4 of the Microsoft Ignite conference was spent at the following sessions. The first was on how to strategically evolve your role as an IT pro, then a session on best practices on design and performance for SharePoint Online, the next session was on BI for Project Online and Project Server 2013. The session after that was around the experiences Microsoft IT had in migrating from on-prem to Office 365 and the final session of the day was the Project Online customisation best practices.

I didn’t know what to expect from the first session of the day as it wasn’t really a specific technology session but it was a very good session and one I’m glad I went to. This covered how the role of the IT Pro is changing and the role will continue to evolve. As you can imagine this is a big topic and one with many split views. In summary, in my opinion the role of an IT Pro is evolving to more of a business / IT strategic role – I guess an internal IT consultant to the business.

The second session of the day was best practices for design and performance for SharePoint Online. I felt this was a good session as the concepts for SharePoint are applicable PWA. Firstly the branding was side of things was covered. This summarised every thing from the very basic changes such as the composed looks / theme, the next level up with the designer and CSS and to the higher end with custom master pages and layouts. The very basics have a low impact with upgrades etc. where as the more complex changes can be high impact and the customisation may stop working with updates to SharePoint Online etc. With customising the UI /UX one key factor is to think about the users and devices, make the designs responsive, an example can be found here for making Seattle.master responsive: http://bit.ly/1H3Ya65

If you are not familiar with custom master pages, a good place to start is here: http://bit.ly/1zKlkhZ

The next part of this session covered performance considerations. The top 5 reasons for slow loading sites are: site structure and navigation (publishing sites), content roll up (expensive queries), large files (large high res images and videos), lots of different requests on the pages (JavaScript, CSS, images etc.) and lots of different web parts on pages. The session then gave some ideas and examples of pages load times by make changes. Some of the changes included: Navigation optimisation using search etc., Content by search web part for content roll up instead of content by query, Optimise images – correct resolution etc., Load content that is displayed on the visible part of the page rather than the whole page, download remaining images etc. as the user scrolls the page and those images need to be visible. Look to use CDNs for jQuery etc. For guidance see the Performance Tuning guides: http://aka.ms/tune

The third session after lunch on BI for Project Online / Project Server, this was a great session demonstrating the tools available, Excel, Power Pivot, Power Query and Power BI. There were some announcements around performance improvements to OData, things like increasing the row limit for timephased data from 200 rows to 2000 rows which has increased performance – other endpoints have also been optimised and Microsoft will continue to monitor and optimise the service.

The fourth session was around the experiences that Microsoft had when migrating from On-prem to Office 365. This discussed some approaches that they used with some tools and custom PowerShell scripts.

The last session of the day was the Project Online customisation session which followed a similar theme to the SharePoint design and best practices. Consider what is displayed on the pages, only have web parts you need, only have columns in the views that you need etc. It was also mentioned that Microsoft are constantly monitoring performance logs and optimising the service, many improvements are in the service already and more will be coming. The changes will also be in Project Server 2016, one interesting overhead / improvement Microsoft have made is to drop the Project Service Application in SharePoint as this was an overhead that has been re-engineered. Project Server 2016 will still have the windows services (queue, event, calculation) etc. For performance considerations for Project Online see: http://bit.ly/1H3Ya66

Lastly I dropped by the Ignite party to grab a beer and have a chat with some familiar faces. Another great day at the Ignite conference. 🙂

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)

Day 3 of Microsoft’s Ignite conference I went to sessions covering what’s next for SharePoint 2016 for an IT Pro, a session on App /Add-in provisioning and deployment, planning for Internet performance and capacity, how to deploy Project: online and server and the final session was on a developer session for Project.

The first session of the day was on what’s was new for SharePoint 2016 for an IT Pro covered all of the new features and changes in SharePoint 2016 that will improve the performance, deployment and availability of SharePoint. As most of you know, my focus is Project / Project Server / Project Online (the site title gives that away :)) so I was keen to hear about what was going to change in the SharePoint world as that will directly impact Project Server too. All of these great new features that the SharePoint product team are introducing in SharePoint 2016, Project Server 2016 also benefits from these.

The key changes mentioned this morning were that SharePoint 2016 requires Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 10 for the OS and SQL Server 2014 SP1 x64 or SQL Server vNext x64. SharePoint 2016 no longer supports a standalone install using SQL Express, SQL Server will need to be installed on the box. The upgrade path from previous version is the database upgrade approach. If the SharePoint farm is earlier than 2013, the databases will need to be upgraded to SP 2013 before SP 2016.

SharePoint 2016 uses a MinRole approach for User roles / services, Robot services and cache services. The user services are for all user generated requests such as page loads, project, excel and one note etc. The robot service all for all system generated requests such as timer jobs and provisioning. I’m sure you can guess what the cache role is for 🙂. The roles are setup on the install using the configuration wizard, you can choose whether the server is a web front end, application server, search, distributed cache or a specialised role. The specialised role option enables you to determine the server role by starting / stopping the services running on the farm (like 2007, 2010 and 2013). There is a new health analyser for the MinRole feature. This health rule will check that the correct services are running on that server based on the role selected on the install. If the specialised role is selected that particular server will be ignored by the new health check.

Patching of SharePoint 2016 has greatly been improved as mentioned here. There is now zero down time for build to build patches with SharePoint 2016 as this a an online process where as before the process took services offline. The patches are also a lot smaller, with a lot less MSI and MSP files so the patching process is quicker.

The software boundaries have not yet been confirmed but will be increased, the indicated boundaries are content DBs in the Terabytes, 100,000 site collections per content DB, the list threshold will be great than 5000, the max file size has been increased to 10 GB and character limit restrictions removed, index items increased to 500 million items.

Other key changes include, a change to the user profile service to remove the built in FIM service, this is now possible to use an external FIM server. The Project Server database has been merged into the SharePoint content DB but it is still licensed separately. Links are now durable so that if a link to a document is emailed to a colleague then at a later date the document name changes or the document is moved in 2013 the link would be broken but in 2016 the link would still work as the links are based on resource ID based URLs. There are options to view how the systems is used, browsers, sites accessed etc. to give you insight and have a better understanding of trends. There are improvements to the “Follow” functionality so that it works across on-premise and online. Hybrid deployment configuration is now possible via the UI rather than PowerShell.

The second session I went to was around app / add-in provisioning and deployment, nothing new here in the technology just an overview of what can currently be done. Only new (ish) change is the name, apps are now known as add-ins.

The third session I went to was planning for Internet performance and capacity with Office 365. This session covered the things your network admins should be aware of. If migrating from on-prem to Office 365 (or any cloud based solution for that matter), it is key that you have good baseline information for the network bandwidth usage so that you can work out if you need a more bandwidth. For Exchange / Outlook: http://bit.ly/1DTlD5j for Skype for Business (Lync): http://bit.ly/1zNKIUf for OneDrive for Business: http://bit.ly/1DTlD5m. Other general recommendations for SharePoint are around caching with proxies, also considering using WAN accelerators and for working with documents using the Office Web App rather than the rich clients. For Outlook it is recommended to use Cache mode and by pass any proxies and also use the latest version of the Outlook client.

The fourth session was on Project Online and Project Server – an intro into deployment for both environments.

The last session of the day for me was the developer session for project. This covered general best practice for developing add-ins for Project and Project Online. A demo of the new Project client JavaScript APIs that now allow you to write back to the project plan from the task pane – a great improvement for the task pane add-ins for Project. You can also get all tasks in one go too which is.

This evening finished with an MVP social event at the House of Blues which was great.

That’s it for today.