EPMSource

It’s always sound advice to try and keep your Project Server 2010 environment patched to the latest cumulative update, typically these include bug fixes or small enhancements to keep your environment running smoothly. Back in December, Microsoft released the December Project Server 2011 CU, which included a number of fixes and changes to timesheets amongst other things. As Project Server runs on top of your SharePoint environment,  it’s also necessary to patch SharePoint at the same time. With the December 2011 CU, the PerformancePoint team rolled in a number of enhancements to allow the viewing of PerformancePoint dashboards, reporting services reports and excel services on the iPad which Project Server gets to benefit from free of charge! Check out the screenshots below of the various Business Intelligence reports and dashboards rendering on an iPad.

There are a number considerations for allowing your reports and scorecards to render correctly on an iPad. From my limited testing most, if not all of the the Project Server v1 demo image rendered correctly without modification, with the exception of one of the status reporting services reports. Microsoft published a technet article outlining the limitations of the type of reports that can be displayed on the iPad and tips on how to interact with the reports.

Finally, don’t forget to check Brian Smith’s and Adrian Jenkins webcast covering the contents of the December CU including the various fixes and design changes it implements, to make sure the patch is right for your farm & circumstances.

Happy Patching

A couple of weeks ago I traded in my iPhone for a new Mango based Windows Phone 7. For those of you that haven’t tried WP7, I would strongly suggest you do. In addition to being able to view your favourite EPM software through the mobile browser, the whole platform and experience seems vastly superior to the Apple offering.

Whilst the WP7 marketplace has a wide variety of application that is growing on a daily basis, it is a little light on Project related applications. So inspired by the fantastic Project Server and SharePoint iPhone app by Giles Hamson, I thought I would have a go at doing something myself, so I am pleased to introduce Project Social.

What is it?

Project Social is a social viewer application that aggregates MS Project related Twitter and RSS feeds from the official MS Twitter accounts and blogs, a number of community blogs and the Project Server Technet content feeds all into one convenient application. Each item can be read directly on the phone where you can interact socially with it by via twitter (tweets, replies or retweets) email or directly via the browser. The application is based on the excellent Codeplex Social Viewer template which is constantly being updated, so watch out for some exciting new updates in the future.

Where can I get it?

Project Social is available now as a free download from the Windows Phone Marketplace or by clicking on the image below.

If you have any suggestions, or would like to add or remove your feed, please contact me directly at wp7@epmsource.com.

It’s time for the last MPUG Melbourne of 2011, being held at Microsoft Melbourne on Tuesday 6th December. In a change from previous events, this session is being held at 12:00pm, instead of the usual 5:30pm start, based on feedback from attendees.

The topic for December is The low-down on Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1

We will provide an overview of the recently released Microsoft Project & Project Server 2010 Service Pack 1. Demonstrating the improvements that have been made that were highly requested by EPM users, including multiple-browser support, synchronisation to Microsoft SharePoint task list updates, manual scheduling extensions, and schedule web part improvements. We will also provide guidance on how to successfully deploy this Service Pack within your organisation.

If you’re running Project Server 2010 and haven’t installed SP1, then this is a must attend event. Registration is free, but please RSVP via EventBright so we know numbers.

Date:  Tuesday 6^th December 2011

Time: 12pm to 1:30pm

Location: Microsoft Melbourne, Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place, Southbank VIC 3006

One little known capability of SharePoint is the ability to personalise web part pages to allow a user to remove or add web parts or change the layout of the page for themselves without the change being made for all other people that use that page. In some organisations this can be a useful feature allowing users to tailor the look and feel of SharePoint to their exact to allow them to work more efficiently.

In other organisations, it can also be a source of confusion when end users personalise a page and remove enterprise web parts from the page or totally configure the page , leading to an increased support overhead, which is why some organisations wish to turn off this capability.

Luckily doing so is incredibly easy and can be done at the web application level meaning both your PWA site and project workspaces can have Personalisation disabled in a couple of mouse clicks.

To start, navigate to Central Administration and choose Manage Web Applications

Select the web application you wish to turn of Personalisation off within, then click on User Permissions on the ribbon. This will show all the permissions for the web application which you can customise. Scroll to the bottom of the dialog box and uncheck Add/Remove Personal Web Parts and Update Personal Web Parts items.

Once you have saved the settings, you will find the Personalize this Page option is no longer available from the top right hand menu, stopping users from personalising PWA or any other sites within the web application.

A couple of weeks ago I finally took the plunge and got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a Windows Phone 7 and promptly upgraded it to the new Mango release. After using it in anger for a while, I can’t believe I didn’t upgrade sooner.

Now why am I telling you this? Well whilst out on the road last week, I forgot to complete my timesheet. My company, like many others out there use Project Server 2010’s timesheet capability to record the time for each project we are working on. The only device I had on me at the time was my WP7, so I thought I would give it a go.

To my surprise, PWA popped up and rendered perfectly in Mango’s IE9 app. Now as I haven’t worked out how to screenshot in WP7, I have opened up PWA in the desktop emulator to give you an idea of what it looks like.

Zooming in by pinching the screen will let you see more detail. Unlike the iPad that I wrote about previously, moving around the page is very simple and easy to achieve.

If you are in need of a mobile timesheet and task solution for Project Server 2010, then you can’t really go past IE9 in Mango. Nice work MS!

A couple of months ago, I was wondering if there was a simple way to show project reports automatically within a project workspace. The problem seems quite simple at first, all you need to do is work out which workspace you are in, then pass that value into the Reporting Services viewer web part as a web part connection. After a bit of experimenting with the out of the box web part filter providers, jQuery and other black magic, I quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be an easy ask and so cracked open my old friend, Visual Studio 2010.

A couple of hours later (yes, it really did take me that long), I came up with a web part which I have called the ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web part. To use it you simply drop it onto a Project workspace, the web part will determine the ProjectUID of project the workspace is linked to and then make that available via a web part connection that the Reporting Services Viewer can consume.

Once installed, the web part is available for use in the custom category of the web part gallery.

When added to a workspace, the web part is very minimalistic with the following chrome in edit mode and nothing in the normal rendering mode.

If the workspace you are adding the web part to is not connected to a Project, or is not a Project workspace at all, then an error message will be displayed.

To utilise the filter, add a Reporting Services Viewer web part onto your project workspace. In this example I have added a single Reporting Services Viewer web part and configured it to render the Project Status Report from the Project Demo and Evaluation Pack.

Next we need to connect the filter provider web parts together, to do this select the context menu for the Reporting Services Viewer Web part, then choose Connections > Get Report Parameters From > ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting…

A dialog box will then be displayed allowing you to wire these together, which will default to the ProjectUID. Click on Finish and the web parts will be connected.

Once you are happy with the page and stopped editing the Project Status Report will render automatically using the ProjectUID passed in from the Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer Web part.

Of course, the real value of this web part comes into its own when you have more than one report on the page that you wish to render for the specific project. By creating multiple web part connections you can supply the ProjectUID to other Report Viewer web parts.

Now, as I mentioned above I have been sitting on this web part for a few months, why you may ask? Well, for me the killer use of the web part would be to use it in a Project Workspace template, so you could template the reporting dashboard. Unfortunately though if you were to configure the web part connections and create a template, the connections are lost due to the way SharePoint works There are solutions to this, which are quite complex and involve event receivers, which I haven’t had a chance to look at in detail just yet. So please be aware of this limitation if you choose to use the web part.  The reason I decided to release the web part now was to help a Project forum user that was after this very capability.

The web part and associated source code can be downloaded from my Skydrive account by clicking below. As usual, this is provided as is, with no warranties or support and use at your own risk etc etc.

ProjectUID Filter Provider for Reporting Services Viewer

Of course, if you find the web part useful, or wish to suggest changes, please do not hesitate to contact me.

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is coming up again, being held on the 22nd October in Melbourne’s CBD. For those of you that don’t know , or haven’t heard about SharePoint Saturday here is a definition from the SharePointSatuday.org site:

Join SharePoint architects, developers, business users and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for a ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

The speaker line up is top notch, with at least two SharePoint 2010 MCM’s, several MVP’s and a number of Microsoft speakers all chomping at the bit to spread the SharePoint word

This year I am pleased to have been given the opportunity to spread the Project Server Love once again, presenting a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation.

Tickets for SharePoint Saturday Melbourne are available from http://spsmel11.eventbrite.com/

I know I promised no more Nintex posts for a while, but this week, Nintex announced the availability of the first beta of Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2.0, the latest version of the popular Nintex Workflow for Project Server product and I just had to post!

Version 2.0 provides a number of enhancements to the existing product, including the following changes to the demand management components:

• Change Enterprise Project Type from within the workflow;
• New Publish project workflow action – Provides the ability to publish the project that the workflow is associated with, ensuring that project information is kept up to date in the Published Database;
• Query Project Server (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Provides a direct interface to PSI methods that query or read data from Project Server; and
• Update project properties (also available in Site / List Workflows) – Update project properties using site and list workflows.

If the ability to query the PSI from within the workflow wasn’t compelling enough, version 2.0 also boasts one other new feature, which I think will be a game changer, the ability to associate workflows to the Project Server Event Handler engine .

Through using these new Event Driven workflows it is now possible to create workflows and then associate them to the Event Handler engine within Project Server. Some of the uses that come to mind immediately including:

• Create a simple audit workflow that logs who published, edited or updated a schedule to a SharePoint audit list;
• Alerting the resource manager whenever one of their resources are added to a project schedule via a workflow task and alert;
• Synchronising a lookup table with an external system, or a SharePoint list when the list is updated or checked in; and
• Alert resource managers when new users are created in PS requiring an RBS to be assigned.

I have only had a couple of hours to play with the beta, but can already see some pretty compelling reasons and scenarios for use. Stay tuned for a couple of cool walk throughs in the coming weeks.

The Beta is available to all Nintex Partners.

Disclosure: I am an employee of OBS, a member of the Nintex group. However, this did not inform this post, I really think it’s a great update to an already great product.

With the introduction of Service Pack 1 for Project Server and SharePoint in late June, in addition to the raft of bug fixes, a number of new features were included. The Project product team has as usual, done a diligent job in communicating these changes and I am not going to recap what they have already covered. Instead I am going to look at two new features of SharePoint that will no doubt benefit users and administrators of Project Server.

Site Recycle Bin

With WSS 3.0, Microsoft introduced a recycle bin capability that allowed items that had previously been deleted accidently to be captured in a recycle bin, allowing users, or site collection administrators to restore those items if required. Whilst the recycle bin captured pretty much everything SharePoint could throw at it, one glaring omission was that it couldn’t capture sites natively. With the introduction of SharePoint 2010 SP1, all sites that are deleted via Site Actions> Delete Site are now captured in the Site Collection Recycle Bin, allowing site collection administrators to recover any site deleted accidently.

When I first heard of this feature I was keen to see how Project Server would work with it. As you are aware, Project Server allows you to save backups of various settings into the Archive database via a scheduled or administrative backup. However, this backup does not include the workspaces. Typically if you accidently delete a workspace, you need to do a database restore and recover the site accidently deleted. So when I heard this feature was coming, I was pleased to know there was a quick and convenient option to restore the sites should the need arise.

However, it appears there is a Project Server related ‘gotcha’ with this feature. If you choose to delete a site via the Server Settings > Delete Enterprise Objects of Project Server by checking the ‘Delete the associated Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sites?’ option, the site will not captured in the Site Collection Recycle Bin.

Only those sites that are deleted via the Project Workspaces Site Actions > Delete Site option are. I am not sure why this is the case, but based on this I would suggest that any administrators that use the Delete Enterprise Objects functionality and usually choose to delete the associated workspace at the time of deletion choose not to check the ‘Delete the associated Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sites?’ option and instead manually delete the site, giving an option to restore from the recycle bin should it be needed.

Storage Metrics

The second feature I wanted to look at was is called Storage Metrics This feature provides an overview of the storage being used by the sites and folders within a Site Collection allowing an administrator to see which sites are storing too much data within a site or if you are using quotas, which sites need archiving to ensure the quota is not breached.

I can personally think of several customers that would benefit from the ability to easily see just how big certain project’s workspaces are becoming.

I am pleased to announce that I will be spreading the Project Server Love at the forthcoming SharePoint Saturday Sydney with a session entitled ‘Leveraging Project Server 2010 for SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management’. The session will showcase the new SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution recently released by Microsoft and provide a glimpse of how this can be leveraged to improve governance and lifecycle management in your organisation.

As like all SharePoint Saturday’s attendance is free and the content top notch. You can register for SharePoint Saturday Sydney at http://spssyd11.eventbrite.com/.