Project Server - Working offline with the Project

Quite often i have seen post on Project Forums regarding working on Projects in offline mode. The good news is that Project Server does allow users to take the Project offline and work, and when connected back to the server can synchronize the changes back to the server. But there are certain steps needs to be followed to accomplish this to avoid corruption of project data OR to end up with different versions of project files on the server.

First, you'll have to take a project "offline." In this process the project is stored in the cache on the computer you're using to take it offline. To take the project schedule offline:

• File - Info - Manage Accounts - Work Offline

•  File - Close
• Specify "Save" the file; "Keep project checked out"; and click OK

•  Close and exit Project Professional.

Now, to open and work on Project offline:

• Open Project Professional and connect in offline mode.
• Click "Work Offline."

In case you want to verify that you really are working on the Project offline, you can always check the 'connected' indicator at the left bottom of the Ms Project. A globe with the red mark reflects that the Ms Project is open in the offline mode, and the globe without the red mark appears while connected with the server.

Once connected in a offline mode, you can open the Project schedule from the cache. To open the Project file from the cache:

• Click File | Open.
• Click on the project schedule to open.
• Click Open.

You can now update the project in the offline mode. The reason, we have checked-out the project and then disconnected from the server, is to prevent the change in the project schedule at the same time from a different user. After you've made your changes, save and close the project schedule:

• File - Save.
• File - Close

While doing this, you must aware about this important step that: Don't check in the Project schedule. Just close Project Professional.

To bring an offline project back online and synchronize with the server: 

• Open Project Professional and connect to Project Server
• Make sure that the lower right corner indicates that you're connected to the server:
• File - Open.
• Select the project plan and click Open (do not double click the Retrieve Projects from the server)

You can now verify, from the status bar, that Ms Project is connected with the server and your offline Project schedule changes are automatically synchronized with the server.

Save the Project schedule to the server, and Publish (if required). And there you go, you have updated the Project schedule offline and synchronized it back to the server successfully.

Please drop a line if you find it useful, and happy scheduling.

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Project/Project Server 2007/2010 - April CU released

This is to announce the release of  April CU of Project and Project Server 2007/2010, which is now available for download. There is one KB for server roll-out package still need to be published, for further details see the Brian Smith blog about the CU and to download browse the MS admin blog.

The webcast, Information About Microsoft Project and Project Server Cumulative February Update, about the Cumulative Update detail will be on 10th May and you can click here to register to attend the webcast.

NOTE: Microsoft strongly recommends testing within a NON-Production environment prior to rollout. Feel free to open a support incident at http://support.microsoft.com if you run into any issues with the installation.

Happy patching!

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Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011

This morning, the start of the day was not so great, was also feeling down and lazy. Opened my inbox without much interest, and there you go - there was an email from Microsoft with an announcement that i have been given a "Microsoft Community Contributor" award in recognition to my contribution to the online forums.

Although it was never intended, but hence proved that a little appreciation always helps you to fuel up with new energies. Thank you Microsoft and all the readers/fellows to help me achieve this, really humbled to be part of this great community.

Lot more to go - because i can, and i will.

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Project Server - Project hand-over process from PMO to PM

Recently i was creating a Project hand-over process for PMO, where after performing required PMO activities the Project has to hand-over to the Project Manager for the execution. The process comprises of list of activities that Project Managers have to perform to accept the project from PMO so that he/she can continue with the execution of the Project. These activities involves the Project Owner and Status Manager fields of the Project and i thought this of a good share as i haven't seen much about the use/advantages of Status Manager and Owner field of the Project. I also can see more and more organization in my region tend to establish PMO for better Project Management, and that requires the users to understand the role of the Status Manager and Owner of the Project.

Microsoft Project Server 2010/2007 uses two fields to track the leadership of any enterprise project. The Owner field lists the person who created the project and saved it initially in the Project Server database. The Status Manager fields lists the person who initially published the resource assignments in the project using the Publish button. The Status Manager is the person who receives task updates in PWA from team members assigned to the tasks in the project. Now depending on your organization policy and requirement, you can change either the Owner of the project, the Status Manager of the project, or both the Owner and Status Manager of the project as part of the hand-over process.

PMO Role:

After receiving the Project Schedule along with any other required documents, Project Charter etc., following activities PMO could do:

• Baseline the Project, to identify any variance later with the current values.
• Fill-in any PMO required Project custom fields
• Save and Publish the project to the server
• Change the owner of the Project to the respective Project Manager of the Project from the PWA

Project Manager Role:

Once received notification from the PMO about the Project been saved on the server, following activities should be performed by the Project Manager to make sure that he/she wont miss any task updates from the resources.

• Open the project in Project Professional 2010.
• (If required) Change any generic/local resources with the enterprise resources in the project.
• Apply any Task view, such as the Gantt Chart view. 
• Right-click on the column header to the right of the Task Name column and select Insert Column from the shortcut menu.

• Select the Status Manager field from the list of available fields.
• Click the Status Manager pick list and select your name from the list for every regular task that you must manage.

• Save and Publish the Project so that the changes can take effect.

There are few interesting points you will observe when you insert the status manager field in the Ms Project, the field drop down will list all the previous status managers of the project in-addition to your name. Any of your Project user with the open/save/publish project to the server permission, when open the project can able to set themselves as the status manager of the activities belongs to them. This is one of another awesome advantage of the Status Manager, alteast i rate it awesome and always highlight this to my users/attendees, that it let you have more than one approver in the same project plan. This particularly applies to the large projects where more than one Project Manager are involved, and each one of them is responsible for their set of activities in the project.

As usual your comments, feedback are widely welcome.

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Microsoft Tech.ed North America 2011

The 19th annual Microsoft Tech·Ed North America conference provides developers and IT professionals the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft's current and soon-to-be-released suite of products, solutions and services.

The four day event at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia offers hands-on learning, deep product exploration and opportunities to connect with industry and Microsoft experts one-to-one. If you are developing, deploying, managing, securing and mobilizing Microsoft solutions, Tech·Ed is the conference that will help you solve today's real-world IT challenges and prepare for tomorrow's innovations.

Below are the Project and Project server sessions going to be held in the event:

Topics	Speakers
SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Project Server 2010	Scott Jamison, Christophe Fiessinger
Application Lifecycle Management: Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010, Better Together	Ed Blankenship, Christophe Fiessinger
INT Best Practices Troubleshooting Microsoft Project Server 2010 Deployments	Brian Smith

For more details of the event, please browse: Tech.Ed North America 2011

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Project Server 2010 - White Paper about Portfolio Analysis

Few days back an excellent White Paper been published on techNet forum about Portfolio Analysis with Microsoft Project Server 2010. The paper has been written by our fellow consultant Andrew Lavinsky, with the Business User as a target audience. And following is the executive summary from the white paper just to give you the glimpse of what is hidden inside :)

This white paper is a comprehensive user guide for the Portfolio Analysis module of Microsoft Project Server 2010. The intended audience for this document is an experienced non-technical user or PMO administrator charged with analyzing portfolios of projects within Project Server 2010.This white paper assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the mechanics of working with resource loaded projects within Microsoft Project Professional 2010.This white paper does not address the technical aspects of configuring Project Server 2010 to support Portfolio Analysis, that is, any of the functionality typically found on the Server Settings page of Microsoft Project Web App (with several minor exceptions as noted). This white paper does not address the implementation of workflow to support organizational Demand Management practices, including discussion of Project Detail Pages or Enterprise Project Types.

In other words, this white paper focuses primarily on the new functionality that is behind these three simple links on the Project Web App Quick Launch:

• Driver Library

• Driver Prioritization

• Portfolio Analyses

 Please go and download, it surely is a good read.

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Project Professional 2010 - Interactive Guide

Folks, i would like to share the treat with you :)

This is for those who recently moved to the Project 2010 from Project 2007 and struggling to learn the ribbon menu of Project 2010 to find out the where the toolbar menu and commands are. Since Microsoft has revamped its office family products  with the new ribbon based outlook, it usually takes some time to learn the new places for all the activities you use to perform in Project 2007 and the new and improved actions of Project 2010.

To speed up this learning period, i recently came across with this great interactive Project 2010 guide published by the Microsoft. It lets you select the activities of Project 2007 and shows you the new place for those activities in Project 2010. You can find the setup here, once you will install and run the guide it will be open for you in IE. If you like to download the workbook on desktop to use in offline mode, you can download it from here, though its not as interesting as the hosted one but will still server the purpose.

Hope it will help you to speed up your Project 2010 learning.

Happy reading ...

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Project Server 2010 - Latest SDK

Project Server 2010 latest SDK is now available for download.

The Project2010SDK.exe download includes two help files: Project2010SDK.chm (conceptual topics and managed code reference), and Project2010_ReportingDB.chm (the Reporting database schema reference). Additional references for reporting include the OLAP cube schema reference (OLAPCubeSchemas2010.xlsx) and a pivot table to help select fields in the Reporting database (RDB_Field_Selector.xlsx). The WINPROJ.DEV.hxs file is an update for VBA Help in Project Professional and Project Standard, along with instructions for installation. The SDK download also includes the default Project Guide files, the XML schema for Project 2010, and the XML schema for the ChangeXML parameter for Statusing methods in the Project Server Interface (PSI).

You can still access it online in MSDN library.

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Project Server 2010 - FEB CU released

A little late to post, but this is to announce that the Feb CU of Project and Project Server 2007/2010 have been released. Although there are some problems reported with the server roll out packages, and the current advice is to wait for the release during the week of 3/7/2011. For more details, browse the MS admin blog.

The webcast, Information About Microsoft Project and Project Server Cumulative February Update, about the Cumulative Update detail will be on 8th march, the link to access the webcast is:   https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032455141 

However, Project 2010 client package is ready to be installed from here. The instruction to install the client patch to the client is pretty simple and is the same as it was in Project 2007:

1. Download the hotfix from the link in the KB Article mentioned above.

2. Extract the patch package by running the .exe file that you downloaded.

3. Run the extracted .exe file to apply the patch to your Project Professional/Standard client.

NOTE: Microsoft strongly recommends testing within a NON-Production environment prior to rollout. Feel free to open a support incident at http://support.microsoft.com if you run into any issues with the installation.

Happy patching!

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Project Server 2010 - Administrator Guide

I want to spread the word about the release of the Project Server 2010 Administrator's Guide by Microsoft. I must say that MS active contribution and support so far related to the latest Project Server version must take the product to the next level. The guide consist of mighty number of pages and list down all the administrative activities to be performed by the administrator of the system.

This also help Project Server consultants while preparing and delivering the role guides at the end of the Project to the customer. The guide can be found and downloaded from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=212383

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