MS Project and MS Project Server 2010 OCT CU

The October 2011 Cumulative Updates for Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010 have now been released. The 2007 Server packages that were withdrawn for a short period are now re-built and available. For details you can visit Brian Smith blog where all the links of the server roll-up packages are also available.

As Project Server 2010 is now based on SharePoint Server 2010 Microsoft strongly recommend that you install the Project Server 2010 Server Rollup Package as there are a large number of individual server packages for SharePoint Server. The Project Server 2010 Server Rollup Package contains all the patches released in this Cumulative Update for SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010.

And last, always try the updates on the test environment first, untill then happy patching.

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Preparing Hyper-V VM with Project Server 2010 Demo Pack

Recently i was preparing my new laptop to run the Project Server 2010 Hyper-V VM and i came across few issue while setting up my machine to run VM. Although its been long since the Information Worker VM and Project 2010 pack is out for MS Partners and Customers to evaluate and for demo purposes, but thought that its a good idea to put all the bits together for others reference again.

To run the MS Hyper-V VM you need to have the Virtualization enabled system to support the Hyper-V functionality, and the Hyper-V manager is only available on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 so far. But the good news is that it will be availabe on Windows 8 platform, so you dont have to prepare the dual boot system, but till then install the Windows 7 on your C drive and install the Windows Server 2008 on seperate drive (C or E or etc.) to have the dual boot option. There are lot of material available over the web related to the dual boot, you can go through this for your reference. There is also an excellent blog posted by Jan Kalis some time back about useful tips for Demo here.

While installing and running the Windows Server 2008 R2 for the first time, when you open the Server Manager to enable the Hyper-V role or any other role you might come across this issue:

• roles and features are not displayed with a yellow bang against them in the Server Manager window. You receive the following error message at the bottom of the Server manager if you try to open it:
• Server Manager
• Unexpected error refreshing Server Manager: The remote procedure call failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706BE)

For more information, see the event log: Diagnostics, Event Viewer, Applications and Services Logs, Microsoft, Windows, Server Manager, Operational.

At the same time, the event below is added into the Microsoft-Windows-ServerManager/Operational log:

• Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-ServerManager/Operational
• Source: Microsoft-Windows-ServerManager
• Date: <date & time>
• Event ID: 1601
• Task Category: None
• Level: Error
• Keywords:
• User: <user name>
• Computer: <computer name>
• Description:
• Could not discover the state of the system. An unexpected exception was found:
• System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x800706BE): The remote procedure call failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706BE)
• at System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHRInternal(Int32 errorCode, IntPtr errorInfo)
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.ComponentInstaller.CreateSessionAndPackage(IntPtr& session, IntPtr& package)
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.ComponentInstaller.InitializeUpdateInfo()
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.ComponentInstaller.Initialize()
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.Common.Provider.RefreshDiscovery()
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.LocalResult.PerformDiscovery()
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.ServerManagerModel.CreateLocalResult(RefreshType refreshType)
• at Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.ServerManagerModel.InternalRefreshModelResult(Object state

Here is the Microsoft support article to resolve the issue, the only point you have to be careful about is the drive letter to access the folder mentioned in this article. The common mistake you can do is to use C drive, although most likely you have windows 7 on your Drive C and Windows Server on Drive D or E may be. So be careful else you will end up finding nothing and this will increase your frustation :)

Now once done with this, enable the Hyper-V role and follow the VM Setup Guide that consist of all the details of how to set-up your information worker VM to start the for first time. Assuming you have successfully import the VM to Hyper-V manager and managed to start, now its the Project 2010 Demo pack you have to install now. On the surface the demo pack appears to install without issue.

But when you try to navigate to http://project.contoso.com/PWA you get the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’.

On navigating the Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and checking the provisioned Project sites, it appears that no Project Server Web App sites have been provisioned, even though the demo installer reported it was successful.

It seems that the installer runs into an issue when the underlying demo VM has either expired or was not activated prior to installing the Project Demo and Eval pack. Luckily, fixing the problem couldn’t be simpler.

Firstly, follow the instructions in VM Setup Guide to activate the VM. To Activate the Virtual Machine an internet connection is required.  To do this, add a second NIC to the VM using the Hyper-V management console & connect it to an external network connection that has internet access.  Activate Windows from within the VM.  Windows will still expire after 180 days, but it will not prompt for activation or shut down after 2 hours.

Once the VM has been activated, you should see the following.

As the demo installer has done most of the hard work, including restoring the various databases, creating the web application and configuring things like the Secure Store and Excel Services, all that is remaining is to (re)provision the Project Web App site using the restored databases. To do so, navigate to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Project Server Service Application and choose to ‘Create a Project Web App Site’.

In the web page, choose the ‘project’ web application to host the Project Web App as per below.



Then enter the names of the databases that were previously restored as per below and click on ok.



After a short while the Project Web App site will provision and http://project.contoso.com/PWA will be accessible without the dreaded ‘An unexpected error has occurred’.

Happy evaluating :)

-37.814251144.963169

 

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My View: Project 2010 & Project Server 2010 Certifications

This post was long been pending from my side, recently i have passed the following Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 exams and would like to share my experience and tips to prepare for the exams:

• TS: Project 2010, Managing Projects
• TS: Project Server 2010, Configurations

Although i was slightly late to attempt for these exams, but i always appriciate the benefit of being certified in the practising technology and domain. And i belive that being certified helps you gains employer confidence, and validate, your product knowledge.

So few tips for anyone of you out there who wants to attempt for the exam. There are certain knowledge areas related to each of the above mentioned exams, and if you validate your knowledge against those topics can help you pass the exam. For me Project 2010, Managing Projects were relatively more diffcult than Project Server 2010 exam, but for you it could be other way around. So here are few points you can consider while preparing For Project 2010, Managing Projects:

1. Expect lot of questions related to the new features of Project 2010. Trust me if you know this good, more chances are that you pass the exam.
2. Understand the positions of features and options on a new Office Ribbon User Interface.
3. Knows the use of the new and old features of Project 2010 well. Now this is important, if you do not use Project in your everyday routine you might face some difficulty in this area.
4. Understand the Task Types and their impact to a task's work, duration and resource assignment when one of these changes.

The way i have practised and prepared for the exams was: i have looked into the domain areas of the exam mentioned on the Microsoft Learning site under this particular exam page and verified my knowledge related to these skills. And i have used this book to study, Microsoft Project 2010 Step by Step. Its an easy to read and good to start with if you are beginner user of Project 2010. You might can find training classes or material based on the area you are located.

The Project Server 2010 exam, 70-177, covers the configuration areas of the product. You can also get scneario based question and asked for your expert opinion about the next step you should take. Unlike Project 2010 exam there are no such area from where you get the most of the questions. The best way to prepare for this exam is to go through the official skills measure page of the exam and verify your preparation. The number of questions from each skill area is based on the percentage mentioned for that area, and that is almost equal.

Please feel free to ask for any help related to the exams, be aware that these are the only two exams released so far for EPM 2010. For those who are planning to attempt the exam, I wish you good luck.

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August CU for Project and Project Server 2010

The August 2011 Cumulative Updates for Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010 have now been released. However there is a delay in server roll-up package due to late issue identified with the Sharepoint Foundation CU, and thus delays the release of the server roll-up packages. The server rollup patch is the preferred patch because it contains the fixes for all of the server technologies used by Project Server 2010. 

This delay does not affect the August 2011 Cumulative Update for Project and Project Server 2007.

Description of the fixes and and to download individual server package of Project Server 2010 can be found at the following link:

Individual Project Server Package:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553047

For Project 2010 hotfix package:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2584056

My advice, as always, is to test any CUs with a recent copy of your production database before deploying into production to prevent issues with your production server.

For more details, visit Brian Smith blog.

Happy patching.

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Tech-Ed Australia 2011

Tech-Ed Australia 2011 is live now, from 30th Aug - 2nd Sept 2011. And I would like to take this opportunity to spread the word about our fellow EPM Consultant and MVP, Alexander Burton, Tech-Ed Australia 2011 sessions. He will be taking part in following two sessions:

The Sharepoint Developers Guide to Project Server 2010

It’s just meant to be – Project Server and SharePoint server are better together, and this is the session that will show you why. Come and join us as we take you on a tour showing how the two products work together, and how you can deliver better solutions by integrating the two. Get to know how developers can leverage both of these great tools together and how you can deliver more value, what the features of the tools can offer and what you need to know as a developer to start solving real world business problems.

Ask a SharePoint expert Q/A panel

Join the SharePoint End / Business user ‘experts Alexander Burton. Dan Holme, Ben Walters & Bhavik Merchant for a open forum Q&A panel in the SharePoint Interactive Theatre in the Expo hall, sponsored by AvePoint.

More over videos of the session shall be available online after the event here, I hope those who attend will have some great time. Good luck.

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Project Server 2010 JUN CU Issue to Multi-Lingual Deployments

For those who are working with the Project Server 2010 multi-lingual implementations, please be aware of a recently discovered issue after the June CU and SP1 have been installed.  It would appear that we have a bug whereas all column headers in the Project Center and Resource Center grids appear in English, regardless of the selected UI language.  The issue appears to be related to the June CU, as an SP1 / SP1 language pack environment (without the June CU) does not display the problem.

Resolution:

Since there is no solution to avoid this so far, you can opt for one of the listed options below. This is basically to bring the importance of the issue to MS notice, because usually the MS time to resolve such issues based on its severity and wide impact to the users.

1. There is a thread already posted on official Project Server forums, you can go and leave your feedback here.
2. You can log your issue at support@microsoft.com 
3. You can leave the comment on this blog post, OR send me an email through my blog "send me an email" option and i will forward your feedback to the related MS person. 

All the credit goes to the Quint Mouthaan to notifying the users about this issue on Project Server Forums, and also allowing me to post this on my blog to spread the word as much as possible.

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Project Server 2010 and MS Dynamics AX 2012 better together

This is to announce the release of new White Paper explaining the integration of Project Server 2010 with Dynamics AX 2012 Financial and Project module. You can download the document from here.

This document explains the integration architecture for The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Project Server 2010 and provides instructions for setting up integration between the two programs. By setting up integration between the two products, project managers can create projects in either of the products and synchronize project data between them. This solution enables you to draw on both the core project management capabilities in Project Server 2010 and the financial management capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics AX.

You can also go through this document to know more about New, Changed and Depreceated features for the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2010 here. This document provides a summary of new and changed features that are planned to be implemented in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Additionally, it provides deprecated feature notices for features which are planned to be removed in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 or future releases.

Hope this excites you a bit :)

Leave comments if you think this post helps you by any means.

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Using Content Type to Hide Default Issue/Risk columns from Input Form

In my previous blog, Create/Manage Issue/Risk list centrally, i talked about How to create and manage Issue list centrally and how it helps the administrator to save lot of unwanted work. In this post i will explain another one of the great advantage you could achieve if you use content type to manage the lists. One of the frequently recieved clients request is: How to hide/remove default Issue/Risks columns from the Project site? Now you might wondering that what is so difficult about this :) but this is a tricky part, because removing/changing the default Issue/Risk list columns can cause you lot of trouble. But the good news is that you can do this without any issues if you are using content type, below are the steps for you:

1. Create Issue list content type, please follow my previous blog to create the content type.
2. Once created, go back to the list settings, and click on content type:

3. Here you will see all the default and custom columns we have added in the content type earlier, click on the one you want to hide from the form, in my case i will click on the "category" column:

4. And there you can set it to Hidden from the column settings:

And if you can now go and add new item to the Issue list, you will notice that category column appears no more on the form to bother the users. 

*23-0-2013**Update**
This is to update that there is an exception to the above process, i.e. hiding any of the default fields of Issues/Risks list available on project site. That even hiding of some fields can result in queue error, to be precise its the Links column available on these sites. Hiding this column cause queue error similar to the deletion of columns, so you need to leave this column as is in order to avoid queue errors.

Thanks to Dan Stopher, of EPM Partners, for finding this culprit :) Please see his blog for more details about the exception.

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Create/Manage Issue/Risk List Centrally using Content Type - Part 1

This is sort of a refresher blog, posted originally sometime back by fellow consultant and Project MVP Andrew Lavinsky and which you can find it here. In this blog i will define the Content type and its uses in two parts, that is how to manage the Project site metadata centrally. And how to hide the default not required columns from the Issue/Risk forms without breaking the sync, since you might already aware that the out of the box fields of Risk/Issue list cannot be removed/changed else you will end up with a mess.

So in this first part, i will define how to create/manage centrally Issue and Risk list metadata using Content types. And this procedure is applicable to both versions, i.e. Project Server 2007 and Project Server 2010.

You can define Content types to organize, manage, and handle content in a consistent way across a site collection within a Sharepoint farm. So basically you can create a content type for Issue or Risk list, and can control the list metadata from a central interface, any changes i will do can be trickle down to the existing or the newly created Project Sites. Changes in the Issue/Risk list could be quite often and this can save the life of poor system administrator as the administrator don't have to do the changes in every project site, he can manage the changes from the central location. 

Next i will create list content type for Project Site Issues list, and will walk you through the steps to define and manage the content type. Please be aware that in a similar fashion, content type can be created for Risk, project documents etc. etc. 

1. Create content type on the top level site in site collection, i.e. PWA. Go to Site Settings, Under the section galleries click Site Content Type:

2. Select create button:

3. Name the content type as Project Issue, select the type as List content type and i prefer to categorize the content types in their relevant group to make it easier to find later:

4. This will redirect you to the configuration page, from here you can create all the required data:

5. I will create Issue Number field for demonstration purposes only:

The content type for Issue list is created, ideally i should incorporate this content type to the Project site template but for the demonstration purposes i will just add this to one of my existing project site.


6. Open the Project Site, click on Issues lists and select list settings:

7. From there, select Advanced Settings:

8. Set the list to allow the Management of Content Type:

 9. After the changes are applied, you will be back to the settings page where you can see that Project Issue content type is already deployed:

10. From here, add new content type:

11. Once done, you can now set the newly added content type as the default one to be used. You can also keep more than one Issue tracking list based on different methodology from here:

12. You can now add all the list columns to this new content type. Go to the list settings, and click on the new Project Issue content type:

13. Select from the available columns box and add them all:

That's it, we are all done and set to use our centrally created content type Project Issue list. To verify this, create new Issue by clicking on Add new item:

And you must see on the form the column i have created, it automatically picks up any column you create in future and saves you the hassle of adding new column while browsing to the every project site. 

In my next post i will show the steps to achieve one of the most received request from the clients, that is to hide some of the default columns from the form. You might already aware that we cannot simply delete/modify the default Issue/Risk columns in order to remove them from the form, as it will break the synchronization. But the good news is that you can hide those not required default columns from the form without deleting them, yes you heard it rite without delete :). And that you can only do if you use the content type. 

Any comments/appreciation is widely welcome as usual.

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Project Server 2010 - Resource Picker on PDP

Recently I came across a customer request that: How to select a resource from Project server  group by the Project Manager, or have resource picker web-part,  in the Project Detail Page (PDP)? I stumble upon this query and thought I should write a detail blog because the answer is that there is no OOB way of achieving this. - surprised!

Now you might can see this as one of the very common request, where the user has to mention the Project stakeholder or Project sponsor details on project detail page for reporting purposes. Your first guess might be to use the project owner web part for such purpose, but soon you will realize that its one of the default system behaviour and you cannot utilize owner field for anything else but to define the owner of the project. Moreover the irony is that there is no resource picker webpart available for such requirement as well. So how to collect Project Sponsor information? One way, or the easiest way, could be to create a enterprise custom project text field for the PDP and capture the information in plain text format. But this doesn't sound very attractive, isn't it? 

So in this blog I will show you the usage of Project Server solution starter called Autocomplete web part,  that kind of meet this requirement. 

1. Download the latest version of Solution starter from here.
2. UnZip the PDPCustomizaton folder
3. Go to the Deployment folder and edit the deploy.bat file and set the URL with your PWA URL.
Although the Readme document file comprises of steps to deploy the webpart is already there, but for the sake of putting everything in one place i am mentioning the deployment steps also.

4. Run command prompt as an administrator and execute Deploy.bat.

5. Once successfully deployed and activated you can then go to the server settings, create enterprise project custom field single line text called "Project Sponosor'", and click project detail pages section of PWA.

6. Click on the name of new project Project detail page to edit

7. Click Add web part, and select PDP Customization -> Autocomplete web part and click Add button.

8. Edit web part setting by clicking Edit Web Part. Select the enterprise project custom field of PDP you want to appear as resource picker and select the group from where you want to select the resource for that custom field.

9. When done apply the changes to the project detail page and stop editing. Now open the page and you will see the Project Sponsor field with the picker icon next to it. Click on the icon will allow you to select from the group's resources as Project Sponsor.

At run time the web-part changes the behavior of project custom field to appear just like a resource picker would, and allowing the user to select the resource from the group that will then save in the project custom text field.


This is one easy way of achieving the desired requirement, however the option of developing a custom web-part to achieve this is always available. Hope to see some comments if this helps you by any means.

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