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)

Today was the 2nd day of Microsoft’s Ignite conference, a summary of my 1st day if you missed it can be found here: http://bit.ly/1OWSimb – one thing I did miss off this was the end of the day keynote that gave details into Microsoft Research – a great summary here.

So today started out with the Project Portfolio Roadmap, this session announced some key changes for Microsoft PPM – these were highlighted in a blog post yesterday: http://bit.ly/1GMDm0n so i won’t cover these again. Look out for blog post covering these topics in detail soon.

The next session I went to was the Power BI overview where some improvements were discussed around new visualisations, content packs and the Power BI designer. Power BI is a great data visualisation tool!

The 3rd session of the day for me was the Tools and Tips for administering Office 365. This session demonstrated some great new report dashboards and Power BI content packs for visualising usage data for Office 365. There will also be workload specific roles in Office 365, so not just the usual Global admin, billing admin etc. there will be SharePoint Admin, Skype for Business Admin etc. Also improvements to the Office 365 Admin mobile app such as push notifications were on the roadmap. It was also clear PowerShell will still play a key part in Office 365 admin. A blog post can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1JpQWtu

The final session of the day for me was Building Solutions with Office Graph. Office Graph is very exciting and opens up a lot of opportunities to be able to map the relationships between people, content and interactions from all of the Office 365 workloads.

Walking around the Expo hall I came across the MVP wall which was cool:

That’s it for now until tomorrow.

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 to highlight some of the new features and changes that are coming to Project – these were publicly announced today at the Ignite conference. Look out for full detailed posts later this week.

The improvements include:

• multiple time lines in Project Pro
• write back support for task pane apps in project desktop
• resource engagements – a great new feature that enables the project managers to make resource requests and send those to the resource manage to accept / reject
• resouce heat map chart – great visualisation for resource capacity
• investments in the Project Server 2016 architecture including all of the project sql objects moving into the  SharePoint content database – much easier the manage!

Great improvements from the Project Product team 🙂

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.