When: Monday, September 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM – Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 5:00 PM (GMT) Where: Technology House Shottery Brook Office Park Timothy’s Bridge Road CV37 9NR Stratford Upon Avon United Kingdom Hosted By: Technology Associates International Ltd Technology Associates International ( www.techassoc.com ) is an Approved Training Organisation (ATO), accredited by the APM Group – the leading accreditation, certification and examination body – to deliver PRINCE2® courses.    As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have over 18 years experience of delivering training solutions.   Our PRINCE2® trainers are skilled experts who take pride in guiding delegates through the PRINCE2® methodology and help them understand how the material applies to their specific personal and organisational circumstances. Register for this event now at: https://taiprince2f120911-rss.eventbrite.com Event Details: The course provides a balance between a learning experience about structured project management and PRINCE2®, and maximising the delegate’s chances of passing the Foundation exam. This exam is the first of two required to achieve Registered PRINCE2® Practitioner status. The course starts with a period of directed self-study commencing approximately 2 weeks before the classroom event. This brings everyone up to a common standard of basic familiarity with the language and underlying principles of PRINCE2®, and ensures that the course gets off to a smooth start. Delegates should plan their time for this self-study to ensure that they gain maximum benefit from this essential element of the course. A minimum of 10 hours should be scheduled. The course covers the full PRINCE2® Foundation syllabus, following the lifecycle of a project, explaining the use and benefits of the PRINCE2® processes, themes and techniques, and how these can be adapted to suit a variety of project types and scenarios. Approximately 30% of the course is spent on practical work and discussion using a “continuous” case study as a basis for exercises that help to reinforce delegate learning. Evening work is provided (approximately one-hour) to enable revision and practice of what has been learnt each day. Terms & Conditions of Booking: Payment is due on booking.   Cancellations and Transfers More than 20 working days notice before course commences – £50 cancellation fee is payable From 0 to 20 working days inclusive before course commences – 100 % of the course fee is payable   VERY IMPORTANT: If you are unable to complete a course due to illness or any other reason, you will have to pay the full course fee to attend a future course. No refund will be offered for failing to attend any part of the whole course.   A full copy of our terms and conditions of sale is available on request.                 PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.

When: Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:00 AM – Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 5:00 PM (GMT) Where: Technology House Shottery Brook Office Park Timothy’s Bridge Road CV37 9NR Stratford Upon Avon United Kingdom Hosted By: Technology Associates International Ltd Technology Associates International ( www.techassoc.com ) is an Approved Training Organisation (ATO), accredited by the APM Group – the leading accreditation, certification and examination body – to deliver PRINCE2® courses.    As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have over 18 years experience of delivering training solutions.   Our PRINCE2® trainers are skilled experts who take pride in guiding delegates through the PRINCE2® methodology and help them understand how the material applies to their specific personal and organisational circumstances. Register for this event now at: https://taiprince2f150811-rss.eventbrite.com Event Details: The course provides a balance between a learning experience about structured project management and PRINCE2®, and maximising the delegate’s chances of passing the Foundation exam. This exam is the first of two required to achieve Registered PRINCE2® Practitioner status. The course starts with a period of directed self-study commencing approximately 2 weeks before the classroom event. This brings everyone up to a common standard of basic familiarity with the language and underlying principles of PRINCE2®, and ensures that the course gets off to a smooth start. Delegates should plan their time for this self-study to ensure that they gain maximum benefit from this essential element of the course. A minimum of 10 hours should be scheduled. The course covers the full PRINCE2® Foundation syllabus, following the lifecycle of a project, explaining the use and benefits of the PRINCE2® processes, themes and techniques, and how these can be adapted to suit a variety of project types and scenarios. Approximately 30% of the course is spent on practical work and discussion using a “continuous” case study as a basis for exercises that help to reinforce delegate learning. Evening work is provided (approximately one-hour) to enable revision and practice of what has been learnt each day. Terms & Conditions of Booking: Payment is due on booking.   Cancellations and Transfers More than 20 working days notice before course commences – £50 cancellation fee is payable From 0 to 20 working days inclusive before course commences – 100 % of the course fee is payable   VERY IMPORTANT: If you are unable to complete a course due to illness or any other reason, you will have to pay the full course fee to attend a future course. No refund will be offered for failing to attend any part of the whole course.   A full copy of our terms and conditions of sale is available on request.                 PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.

I want to take the opportunity to point you to a review of Project Server 2010 from CapGemini – a strong global partner building a strong Project 2010 practice.

In case you missed it, as announced by my colleague Jan Kalis last week: The Project 2010 Desktop Exam 70-178 is LIVE!! As mentioned there are plenty of content available today (see official Microsoft Project Train and Learn site ) to help you successfully pass this exam so don’t wait and take it!

This post rounds up a few of the more common issues that customers run into – either when provisioning a new Project Server 2010 Project Web App (PWA) site – or more commonly when provisioning a site against a set of existing databases (either 2007 or 2010 databases).

One of the options when setting up a custom field is to allow it to have multiple values selected from the lookup table.

The Project Web App Help content, available on Office.com, is now also available on TechNet.

While the Help system within Project Web App continues to point to Office.com, this content has been made available on TechNet for those who may have an easier time browsing through content in the TechNet Library.

IDC’s most recent MarketScape positions Microsoft as a leader in the Enterprise IT PPM and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) views. You can download an excerpt taken from the “IT Project and Portfolio Management 2010 Vendor Analysis – Four Views to Enable Effective Evaluation” from https://idcdocserv.com/225802E_MSFT .

Following the recent release of the December 2010 Cumulative Updates for Project, Project Server and SharePoint 2010 , I have decided to update my demo VM. Please find below a quick step by step procedure to install this CU and others yourself and ensure you are using the latest and greatest version of our favorite products (as usual plenty more content, recommendations, recorded webcast on TechNet on applying software updates: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/projectserver/gg176680.aspx ). Create a snapshot in Hyper-V before applying any updates Download the hotfix package: Project Server https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2459258 & Project Professional: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2466263 Execute the server package ( office2010-kb2459258-fullfile-x64-glb ), will take a few minutes, then run the SharePoint Configuration wizard. After you run the wizard once you might get errors in the upgrade logs saying something like this (lets ignore these for now): OWSTIMER SPContentDatabaseSequence INFO 1/25/2011 3:29:28 PM: SPContentDatabase Name=PWA_WSS_content_80 OWSTIMER SPContentDatabaseSequence ERROR 1/25/2011 3:29:28 PM: Found a missing feature Id = 367b94a9-4a15-42ba-b4a2-32420363e018, Name = Report Server Integration Feature, Description = Enables rich reporting using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services., Install Location = ReportServer OWSTIMER SPContentDatabaseSequence INFO 1/25/2011 3:29:28 PM: SPContentDatabase Name=PWA_WSS_content_80 OWSTIMER SPContentDatabaseSequence ERROR 1/25/2011 3:29:28 PM: The feature with Id 367b94a9-4a15-42ba-b4a2-32420363e018 is referenced in the database PWA_WSS_content_80, but is not installed on the current farm. The missing feature may cause upgrade to fail. Please install any solution which contains the feature and restart upgrade if necessary. OWSTIMER SPContentDatabaseSequence INFO 1/25/2011 3:29:28 PM: SPContentDatabase Name=PWA_WSS_content_80 OWSTIMER SPContentDatabaseSequence WARNING 1/25/2011 3:29:28 PM: WebPart class 8d6034c4-a416-e535-281a-6b714894e1aa is referenced 15 times in the database PWA_WSS_content_80, but is not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature/solution which contains this web part. (…) Re-run the Wizard, and it should be successful the second time;

Some of you are asking how and who builds the Solution Starters. The Solution Starter specifications were done by the same group of people who design new components of Microsoft Project – the Program Managers inside of Microsoft. The specifications (“specs”) were then handed off to external company who coded, tested and released them into the MSDN Code Gallery. The company is called Internet Commerce Corporation (ICC) ICC is one of the first companies that started working with Microsoft Project Server 2010 as part of Microsoft’s TAP program and continues to gain experience being involved in the development of a number of solution starters for Project Server 2010. Since then, ICC has built strong expertise in building EPM solutions based on the Microsoft Project Server 2010 Platform. Major focus areas in Enterprise Project Management for ICC are: EPM Solution Implementation Project Server 2010 deployment and configuration Project Server 2010 customization and custom report development If you plan to do a coding project for Project 2010 and you need great developers with vast experience , feel free to consider them too! Jan