EPMSource

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/.

Another Update: Thanks to SeaMonkey76 in the MSDN forums pointing out that this issue is fixed in the October 2011 SharePoint CU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596582), so get patching

Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that this behaviour is is the norm where there isn’t a root site and it’s best practice to implement one. I totally agree and have run into situations where things like InfoPath have ceased to work due to this. The purpose of this post is more for those people that run into this error in the demo image, after an upgrade and can’t figure out why. It took me a little while to track it down, so I just through I would share.

I am posting this in case anyone else runs into a similar problem in Excel Services and to give some search engine index bait.

Following upgrading my IW demo image to SP1 + June CU, I noticed that Excel Services components in the Business Intelligence centre were no longer rendering and consistently showing the loading graphic.

On closer inspection, the browser was showing the following error:

Message: Syntax error
Line: 1
Char: 1
Code: 0
URI: http://project.contoso.com/_layouts/EwaStringsHandler.ashx/en-US?rev=V5cXKzVnvQRpcOxdnGD5cQ%3D%3D&flh=4sHCQGJUaMtQCBbbV6EmZw==

Checking the ULS logs showed these error messages:

An internal error occurred.    at Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.MossHost.MossHost.Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.Host. IEwaHost.IsSecureConnection()     at Microsoft.Office.Excel.WebUI.EwaCUIDataSource.EnsureDocument()     at Microsoft.Web.CommandUI.CUIDataSource.RunQuery(UIQuery query)     at Microsoft.Office.Excel.WebUI.EwaRibbon.QueryRibbonDataSource(CultureInfo uiCulture, String clientID, Boolean denormalizeImareUri)     at Microsoft.Office.Excel.WebUI.EwaStringsHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)

and

Watson bucket parameters: SharePoint Server 2010, ULSException14, 5f9be61a “excel services application”, 0e00178d “14.0.6029.0″, f5b5c9d6 “microsoft.office.excel.server.mosshost”, 0e001785 “14.0.6021.0″, 4d65e5e7 “wed feb 23 21:00:23 2011″, 000002d3 “000002d3″, MISSING, 4a6d3421 “nullreferenceexception”, 66326e39 “f2n9″

It seems that Excel Services now needs a site collection to be present in the root of the a web application or it will throw the above error. I am not sure when this behaviour changed, but given the IW Demo Image and Project Demo and Evaluation pack does not install a site at http://project.contoso.com it is necessary to create a blank site collection via Central Admin manually.

Once this is done, the Business Intelligence Centre should start to render the Excel Services components once again.

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008
• Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008
• Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003
• Firefox 3.6.8+ on Mac OS X v10.6, Windows 7 (32-bit/64-bit), Windows Vista SP2, Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 and UNIX/Linux
• Google Chrome 6.0 on Windows 7
• Apple Safari 5 on Mac OS X v10.6

What isn’t listed is Safari for iOS which the iPad uses which I was keen to see would work or not. Like many people, I purchased an iPad so I could sit on the sofa and catch up with twitter, RSS feeds, email and play Angry Birds without having to have a massive laptop burning a hole through my legs.  So the idea of being able to fill in my timesheets in Project Server using an iPad really appeals to me.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I thought I would wire up my SP1 + June CU VM to my home network and point my iPad over at PWA to see what would happen. To my surprise, instead of seeing the new cross browser error message (below)…

I was granted with this

Clicking through the cross browser pages (Tasks, Timesheets and Risks / Issues), the pages seem to render fine, both in portrait and landscape mode:

However the issues seem to start when you try and use the app.

Splitter Bar

To start with the splitter bar (as highlighted above) doesn’t seem to work via the touch interface, which if you have a lot of fields being displayed in the left hand pane, can make the screen unusable.  There is a potential workaround for this, by reducing the number of columns in the view, however these won’t be reflected until a new period is created.

Scroll Bars

Like the splitter bar, the scroll bars don’t seem to operate as expected, but touching on the region outside of the actual scroll bar as marked in red below will work

On closer inspection the scroll bar itself is not a traditional scroll bar, instead it is one rendered in HTML as part of the JSGrid, which might explain why Safari on the iPad is having trouble interacting with it.

Keyboard sensitivity

Again, more of a limitation of the iPad, but when trying to enter text into a timesheet entry towards the bottom of the screen, the keyboard will fly out and obscure where the text entry is taking place.

One option is to run this in portrait mode, but that will have the side effect of hiding some of the columns of information.

Ribbon

Finally, the ribbon seems to be having a bit of a hard time when used on the iPad. When you pinch to zoom in, the ribbon tries to do it’s best and resizes as per the screen below. However when you zoom out the ribbon can take a while to realise. This isn’t a Project thing per se, and I would imagine it’s an issue with all SharePoint sites viewed via the iPad.

Conclusion

As I said above, Project Web App on the iPad works, sort of. But it does have some limitations and annoyances which you will need to work around. As this isn’t an officially supported browser within SP1, if you use the iPad you will have to live with these, but kudos to the Project team for their excellent implementation of cross browser and not explicitly blocking the iPad.

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  To complicate matters on the same day, the June 2011 CU was also released and recommended to be installed at the same time.

A full list of the fixes and changes in SP1 can be seen here, and the June CU here. At the time of writing, the June CU has a number of known issues that must be understood prior to patching as they may impact your underlying SharePoint farm.

As for installing, make sure you have read and completely understand the Deploy Service Pack 1 for Project Server guidance on Technet, I would also recommend you read this article by Spence Harbar which gives some great guidance and advice on patching SP1.

Every now and again whilst using the Project Server Demo and Evaluation pack, I run into an ‘File Not Found ‘ error when clicking on a risk or issue in a project workspace.

On investigation in the ULS logs, the actual error is:

The important part of the error message that gives away what the problem is is the ‘http://moss.contoso.com/pwa’, which is not the site we are using, but it is the site the workspace is looking at to get the risk or issue form.

Fixing the problem is relatively easy thanks to Project Server’s Bulk Update Project Sites. This capability replaces the WSSSiteRelinker tool that was one of the key tools of a Project Server consultant with the 2007 release. When project workspaces are restored from a different machine it is necessary to repoint them at the new PWA instance under the covers.

To run the Bulk Update Project Sites tool, navigate to Server Settings > Bulk Update Project Sites.  Once in the screen select Previous Site Path (this should be populated with all the relevant options), in our case http://moss.contoso.com and http://project.contoso.com. Enter the site URL, in our case PWA (not there is no proceeding /, this is added automatically. Then in the new site path, choose the relevant web application, in our case http://project.contoso.com and the site path, PWA.

The really important option is the Update Content Types section that says:

When migrating content to a farm that did not contain Project Server, the content types of Project Issues, Risks, and Documents may be altered such that item links are broken. If you notice that item links are broken after migration, you should update content types.

This is what is causing our error, so it’s important it is checked. Once this is all done, click on Update and let Project Server do its magic. Once it’s completed, I did an iisreset, I am not sure it’s strictly necessary, but I did it anyway.

Finally, all that is required is to test the risk or issue list again…

and voila, it’s working again. Of course, as this is your demo image, make sure you backup or snapshot the VM image so you don’t need to fix this again in the future. Now of course this error can also occur in non demo images if you have done a upgrade / migration, in which case all of the above steps still stand.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce I will be presenting alongside SharePoint MVP Brian Farnhill at Tech.Ed Australia 2011 a session entitled:

‘A 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.

We are hard at work on some cool demo’s to show and it is shaping up to be an excellent session.

Tech.Ed Australia 2011 is on the Gold Coast between the 30th August and the 2nd September, registrations are now open. Find out more at http://australia.msteched.com/

I recently had a customer ask me how to use the Skip to Stage functionality of Nintex Workflow for Project Server. Now I know I have done a few Nintex posts recently, but I promised them I would post this for the greater good of the EPM community  (and will lay off Nintex for the next few months).

In case your not aware, the Skip to Stage capability of Project Server allows an administrator to skip a workflow to a particular stage, usually as a result of modifying the existing workflow, or swapping to a different workflow and needing to skip over some of the business logic or steps.

Sam Chung wrote an excellent blog post on this over at the Project Programmability blog back in February 2010, and the same concepts apply to Nintex. Consider the flow chart below which outlines a simple Project Server workflow scenario.

Should the administrator wish to skip this workflow to the the execution stage, and skip the approval, it is not possible as the workflow has not been coded to allow it. This is where the Skip To Stage information comes into play. When an administrator chooses to skip to a specific stage using the Server Settings > Change or Restart a workflow, the workflow is initiated with two pieces of information:

• the Skip To Stage parameter set to ‘True’;
• the Stage UID of the desired stage to skip to is passed through.

In the workflow, if logic is added to check for this, then it is possible to bypass the business logic for the stage and skip over. The Project Server workflow engine is clever enough to determine if the stage being skipped to is the stage in the StageUID and will stop the skipping there (however the same caveats that apply for a Visual Studio workflow apply and if the required fields for a stage being skipped are not completed, the workflow won’t skip).

Now to incorporate this into a Nintex Workflow for Project Server couldn’t be simpler, all that is required is to use the ‘Set a condition’ action to do a check on the Skip To Stage context variable, and then branch to the approval / flexi task (as below) if the value is no, or to skip over the approval logic if the value is yes. In the screenshot below, I have also added a ‘Set Status Information’ so I can log to the workflow that the skip is happening.

The Skip To Stage information is stored within the Workflow Context, so when setting up the ‘Set a Condition’ action, make sure you pick the Workflow Context.

Finally, as mentioned in Sam’s original blog post, you need to ensure you have selected the Always Wait option in your Set Stage actions.

If you don’t do this, the workflow may continue to skip past the requested stage.