I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming inaugural Project Virtual Conference, a free global online conference that is dedicated to Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online that will be running for 24 hours. For those of you that may have missed it, the Project Virtual Conference is a completely free, virtual conference that has been organised by members of the Project community (Prasanna, Cindy, Treb, Ben, Rod, Paul, Julie and Vadim) in their spare time.

Earlier today Microsoft announced the release of the SharePoint Server 2016 IT Pro Preview, our first introduction to the 2016 wave of on-premises products. Obviously a new drop of SharePoint is exciting enough, but this release is doubly exciting as it also includes the IT Pro Preview of Project Server 2016. With 2016 there are some massive changes to Project Server, the first and most obvious one is that the Project Server bits are included in the SharePoint 2016 binary.

Back in December I wrote about the ability to customise the App Launcher, or Waffle as it lovingly known. The options were relatively limited unless you built your own app in Azure and deployed it to the organisation. However one request came up again and again, the ability to create a shortcut tile to a specific site or location inside the Office 365 tenant. Imagine being able to have a dedicated waffle link for the Marketing site, or perhaps a dedicated link through to a specific PWA instance.

At Ignite a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced the public preview of the Office 2016 clients for you to download and start testing some of the great new capabilities these products include. At the time I was a little disappointed as the preview did not include Project ( or Visio) Today however Microsoft have finally added Project and Visio to the public preview for you to try out Now you can not only try the new versions of Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Word which have already replaced Office 2013 on my daily driver laptop, but now you can also start to use the new version of Project including cool new features such as:

For the past few days I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago to hear about all the new stuff coming from Microsoft and I have to tell you, it’s pretty exciting. The conference itself was massive, over 23,000 attendees as a result of merging Tech Ed, Microsoft Management Summit, the SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, Exchange Conference and Lync Conferences together. If I had to think about it, I would say it was a little too big and Project looked to suffer for it, but their was some great content.

Just a quick post to highlight a couple of exciting new capabilities for Project Online that have appeared in the Office roadmap, that you may have missed.  The following two items have been added under the launched category. The first Bulk updates in Project Online Workflow creators in Project Online can bulk update project custom fields with a single service request. Previously, each custom field update required a separate service request.

One of the highlights of the 2014 SharePoint conference were the App Awards for the Office and SharePoint apps, well it seems that the Appies are being run again, this time for the upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference in July. There are six categories you can nominate your apps in: Best User Interface – App for Office or App for SharePoint Highest Performing App – App for Office or App for SharePoint Most Business Value – App for Office or App for SharePoint Best International Developer – App for Office & SharePoint Best Office 365 App Best Mobile App The last two are the most interesting as you can now submit Office 365 / Consent Flow apps and Mobile apps that extend and augment Office 365 in any of the mobile ecosystems.

Whilst looking into a workflow issue today on my Office 365 tenant, I noticed a new feature that appears to be quietly rolling out into Office 365, the Workflow Health screen. Dee over at DDLS also noticed it a few weeks back and blogged about it, but I thought I would dig in a little more. From the surface it looks like the feature addresses some of the issues in Office 365 when the Workflow Manager instance your tenant is attached to is down or unavailable or you want to see aggregated status of workflows in a site or list without clicking into each workflow instance.

A little late, but I thought I would post information about this great resource from Brian Smith. If you’ve ever had to hunt for details of which CU contained a fix for an issue and had to sit there in Google and Bing aggregating results, hunt no more, Brian has created a single page that contains details of all the Cumulative Updates for Project and Project Server 2013 on-premises in a single location over at the Project Support blog.

A while back Microsoft announced the release of the App Launcher in Office 365, also lovingly christened the Waffle by many due to it’s resemblance to the popular food. In the last few weeks the Waffle has started to appear across Office 365 tenants providing a much cleaner way of navigating to the various bits of Office 365 you care about. However, even with this cool new capability, I miss the old Projects and OneDrive links that used to be on the Navigation Bar and often find myself cursing having to go over to the top left and clicking on what I want.