SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I have been playing around with Project Server 2013 for a while now and there is a specific, for the lack of a better term feature (I will refer it as a feature for the rest of this post) that from my point of view is easy to use and can add a lot of value. In Project Server 2013 you are able to make a site and in this site you are able to make a custom list. While that is not that interesting, it becomes a lot more interesting when you know that new items in that custom list can be promoted to Enterprise Projects.

Being able to promote custom list items to Enterprise Projects and able to map these list items to a specific Enterprise Project Type gives an organization a lot of options like:

Idea Center:

Letting employees fill the custom list with ideas that would benefit the organization in some way. When one of these idea’s is chosen to be implemented and is big enough to be a project you are able to easily take that idea and promote it to an Enterprise Project so that a Project Manager can start managing that project.

Proposal Center:

A sales department of an organization can enter all the proposals that are sent out to clients in the custom list. When a client accepts a proposals it can be immediately be promoted to an Enterprise Project.

I think people can think up a lot more ways to use this feature then these two example but it just shows how it can be used in an organization.

So how does it work?

I will start with the immediate drawback. To be able to promote custom list items from a site it needs to be a site that is under the /PWA site collection. The reason why I call this a drawback is that I rather see it being a SharePoint site like an intranet to make it easier for users to contribute idea’s for instances.

The site you create doesn’t really matter and for this example I am using a Team Site.

When done making a new site the next step is making a custom list. When you created a custom list you can fill it with the columns you need.

As you can see in the screenshot I created some Project Idea’s. Now if you want to promote a idea to a Enterprise Project select the item in the list and under the tab items select “Create Projects”. You will now get a screen that allows you to map info to custom fields that are present in Project Server 2013. Select your Enterprise Project Type and click on ok.

Project Server 2013 will take the information you entered and will start making it an Enterprise Project Type and will be creating everything that is defined under that Enterprise Project Type for example: Workflows will be started and the Project Site and Project Plan Template will be created.

When Project Server 2013 is done the Project Manager can go to work on the project like you do with regular projects. This feature gives an organization another option to create projects and works really well and easy to use and I hope most of you will agree.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/using-custom-list-entries-to-create-enterprise-projects/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

This week I had to troubleshoot a strange problem on SharePoint 2010 (But also applies to SharePoint 2013) of a client regarding PerformancePoint. The reason of this post is that it took a while to figure out the resolution and I have seen multiple people asking for a resolution for the same problem without a clear answer.

This specific client uses a lot of PerformancePoint Dashboards showing users their required information. All the dashboards are configured with “Per-User Idenitity” authencation. The reason I tell you this is that “Per-User Idenity” authencation needs to be Kerberos on the SharePoint farm  to function correctly. The client had a double two-tier SharePoint farm. So they had two databases and two application servers that also function as the web servers. All of a sudden out of nowhere all dashboards stopped working.

The client started to see the following errors:

"This action cannot complete because PerformancePoint Services is not configured correctly. Additional details have been logged for your administrator."

This error was displayed on almost all the dashboards. The strange thing is that if you refresh the page, sometimes a dashboard would show correctly. After searching through all the logs that didn’t give me a idea where the problems where coming from I opened one of the dashboards in the Dahsboard Designer and tested the connection there.

My results:

I tried again:

Whenever I tested my connection I got a successful connection once and then a error the next try. The above behavior points to a problem with authentication and so I went on a search on the internet to look for what I was missing. I found the following:

When running kerberos the account that run the Claims to Windows Token Service needs the following rights:

• Local administrator on the application server running PerformancePoint

Local Security Policy

• Act as part of the operating system
• Impersonate a client after authentication
• Log on as a service

As stated above the client had two application servers and there was the problem. For some reason still unknown the Claims to Token Windows Service account had the above rights removed on one of the servers.

I re-added the right for the account on that server, restarted the Claims to Token Windows Service and all the dashboards started working again like expected.

The moral of this story is: Check the configuration of both servers first before going on a wild goose chase.

The reason why the rights for the Claims to Token Windows Service where removed is unknown but it can only be that they have been removed manually or removed via a group policy so check with your IT Department so this does not happen again!

I hope this post helps people with a similar problem in the future as it can really take forever to figure out why this is not working.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/per-user-identity-for-performance-point-exhibits-intermittent-behavior/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

A long while ago I wrote about the new reports functionaly avialable in Project Professional 2013. When I wrote that piece I was still working with the preview version now with Project Professional being realease for a while now I just want to quickly revist the report functionality in Project Professional 2013.

In Project Professional 2013 there is a new reports tab with quite a few reports that can benefit any Project Manager.

The report tab is divided in subjects with corresponding reports:

– Dashboards (Project Overview, Burndown, ect.)
– Resources (Overallocated Resources, Resource Overview)
– Cost (Cash Flow, Earned Value Report, ect.)
– In Progress (Critical Task, Late Task, ect.)

As you can see Microsoft did their best to give a Project Manager alot of differant options to report on thier project. These reports are really usefull to share information about your project and the reports are easily custimizable and make them accesable for any project manager.

All reports are easy to copy and past to other office products making it easy to use them for instance in PowerPoint.

If you are still working with Project Professional 2010 and thinking of going to Project Professional 2013 my advice just go for it the new functions and features make Project a lot better.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/project-professional-2013-reports-revisit/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)