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)

Inspired by my colleague Alan Eardley’s recent webinar on Office 365 groups, I thought it might be good to blog about this from a project perspective.

For many types of projects, team collaboration is very important. There are many different options currently to support team collaboration. The default one being the project site in a Microsoft PPM environment. Other options include email distribution groups, shared mailboxes, Yammer etc. The latest option to consider is Office 365 groups, this feature was released towards the end of last year in Office 365. A good intro video on Office 365 groups can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3OLvYXepvE

Groups are managed via the Outlook Web App on your Office 365 tenant, you will see the Groups section below the folders in the left pane:

Clicking the blue + symbol next to the Groups heading or the “Create group” link will load a pane of the right hand side:

Give the group and a description. The Group ID will be generated automatically from the name you enter but can be modified if required.

Then choose the privacy level, typically you would probably only want the project team members or a subset of the project team to have access so in this example it will be set to Private.

I have also enabled the subscribe option so that members receive group conversations and calendar events in their inboxes.

Then click the Create button at the top of the pane and the group will be created:

Next I need to add the members to the group:

For this example I have only added a generic CPS user account, once all the users have been selected click the Add button at the top of the pane and you will see an adding members message:

Your group is then created:

The group name, description and image can easily be edited by clicking the edit icon on the group image or the edit group option on the ellipsis menu.

You can also let people outside of the organisation email the group too – these appear as normal conversations in the group. Once the changes are made click save. In this example I clicked discard then you can view the group / updates to the group.

From here members can easily start new conversations:

Easily reply or like a message:

Members can navigate to the group calendar, notebook or file share:

Easily create meetings in the group calendar and invite the group members:

Each group has a dedicated OneDrive site to share documents:

Keep in mind that if the group is deleted the documents will be lost so key documents probably want to be stored in the project site / document management portal.

You can then add a link on the Project Site to the Office 365 group if needed:

Take a look and see what you think.

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 July 2015 Cumulative Updates are now available, please see the links below:

http://bit.ly/1I3wfqU

Project Server 2013 July 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1SnR8N8

Project Server 2013 July 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1I3wfqV

Project 2013 July 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1SnRaEz

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

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

http://bit.ly/1I3wfqU

Project Server 2010 July 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1SnRaEA

Project Server 2010 July 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1I3wfr0

Project 2010 July 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1SnR8N9

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

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)

Following on from a post / script I created a year or so ago to bulk create project sites, there have been requests to be able to bulk delete projects sites. I have been reluctant to do that as i am always cautious when “bulk” deleting! The script i have created reads the list of projects from a text file so that the user running the script knows exactly what project sites they are going to be delete. The script can be downloaded from the Microsoft Script gallery below:

http://bit.ly/1QSXuZb

The text file will need to be created with a list of projects names from your PWA instance – ONLY INCLUDE project names for the project sites you want to delete – all site data (lists, documents etc.) will be deleted as the site will be deleted! The only scenario I would really use a script like this is if I wanted to delete all of my project sites, if I only needed to remove a handful I would do it manually via the UI. The example text file can be seen below:

Update the location of the text file and text file name for the Get-Content command.

The web service proxy URLs will need to be updated for your PWA instance, replace the http://vm753/pwa with the correct URL.

The script can be seen running and deleting sites below:

From the PowerShell ISE:

All data from the project sites will be lost so please use this with care and only enter project names in the text file for projects sites and project site data you no longer need.

Run the script with a PWA administrator account.

Fully test this script on a test / non-production PWA instance before running on any production environment. As a precaution, take full database backups (PWA and SharePoint Content) before running the script on the production environment so that you can roll back if needed.

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)

Following on from my post the other week regarding the announcment of the Project Virtual Conference, post here: http://bit.ly/1FEnY67, the call for speakers is now open:

http://bit.ly/1e3krHx

If you are interested in speaking at this event, please do submit your sessions before 24th July.

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 quick post to support a very simple script to change the Owner display label on a Project Detail Page page. Quite often clients request to change the Owner to something else such as Project Manager. The script can be downloaded from the script gallery below:

http://bit.ly/1FOXor1

This code will replace “Owner” with “Project Manager” but can easily be updated.

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. Select the PDP that has the Owner field displayed, then reference the uploaded script using the content editor web part:

In this example it is the Project Information PDP.

Once loaded, Owner will display as Project Manager:

One thing this script doesn’t handle is if you have another custom field on the page that contains “Owner” in the string, that will also get replaced 🙂

This is a very simple script but do test this before rolling out to production etc.

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

http://bit.ly/1Qmg8sq

Project Server 2013 June 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1cJMhaJ

Project Server 2013 June 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1Qmgbo5

Project 2013 June 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1cJMk6m

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

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

http://bit.ly/1Qmg8sq

Project Server 2010 June 2015 Server Roll up package:
http://bit.ly/1cJMk6q

Project Server 2010 June 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1Qmg8IG

Project 2010 June 2015 CU:
http://bit.ly/1cJMk6s

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

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)

Announced today is the “Project Virtual Conference”, which is a free online conference on 22nd October 2015 that will run for 24 hours – get the date in your calendars 🙂

The conference is focused on Microsoft Project, Project Online and Project Server and is being organised by a volunteers with a lot of support from a few Project MVPs.

To stay updated follow the Project Virtual Conference site here: http://bit.ly/1JyMYCg 

Follow the Twitter @ProjectVConf handle and use the #ProjectVconf hashtag for all Twitter activity.

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 pleased to announce that CPS’ PS+ solution was an Award Finalist in the recent Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards 2015 in the Project and Portfolio Management Competency. This is the second year running that the PS+ solution has been an award finalist.

For a full list of winners and finalists see:

http://bit.ly/1RTwDcO

http://bit.ly/1AVaDK3

Great work to all the partners that received awards.