Almost caught up with my list of to-dos before the end of the year, I wanted to step back and do one last blog post looking back at the 12 months of this milestone 2010 year. Looking back at the exact same period a year ago, what has changed? Well in December 2009 Jan Kalis and I were half way done with our Project 2010 Ignite worldwide tour back from Mexico and Brazil and were having a quiet restful holiday to prepare for trips to Singapore, Australia, Renton, Seattle, New Orleans… A year ago we had just released the Public beta for Office, SharePoint and Project and Project Server 2010… So what has changed 12 months later, well in a nutshell we LAUNCHED 2010 (or another way to describe it in Microsoft term: we Released to Manufacturing/RTM) ! Last May was when all the fireworks lit up the EPM sky! You might think it has been a quiet time for us since last spring; well on the contrary it has been non -top talking to customers, partners, journalists, and analysts. It’s amazing to see the excitement and interest for Project and Project Server 2010 (not to mention SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010). As recently as last month we had a very successful event in Barcelona

The Object Link Provider (OLP) in Project Server 2010 enables the management of the Project-specific lists in a project site (issues, risks, deliverables, documents, and custom lists) and integration of the SharePoint lists with Project Server. The OLP

Excited to announce the release of the following diagrams (a sample below) on TechNet thanks to Sonia’s great work: Time and task progress workflow diagrams (Project Server 2010 ) Plenty more content got published recently as well: Project Server 2010 backward compatibility mode (BCM) Create a PWA site in backward compatibility mode (Project Server 2010) Testing a Project Server 2010 deployment (white paper) To stay up to date on content publication go here (RSS enable): Newly published content for Project Server 2010 And last but not least let us know if we are missing content on our site!

The Project Professional 2007 TimeScaleValue object can result in a COM exception, or other crash, if used several times in quick succession.

I wanted to echo Brian Smith’s latest post over on the Project Admin Blog about the release of the Project Server 2010 and 2007 CUs being live: Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint 2007 and 2010 December CU 2010 are (mostly) Live! Brian Smith 15 Dec 2010 12:23 PM Great News!

Following this post from Arpan Shah Project Momentum 2010 EMEA about the recent event we held last month in Barcelona, I wanted to provide pointers to the technical content that was delivered. Recordings : Deploying Microsoft Project Server 2010 by Christophe Fiessinger (check out video at 2:45…) Project Server 2010 Upgrade and Migration by Raphael Ax, Jan Kalis, and Bishan Ruder Best Practices: Troubleshooting Project Server 2010 Deployments by Brian Smith Project 2010 Development for SharePoint Developers by Jan Kalis Light Up Your Project 2010 with SharePoint Server 2010 BI Capabilities by Jan Kalis Continuing Innovation in Project 2010 by Eric Zenz Hitchhiker’s Guide to Demand Management by Steven Haden Slides : Project Momentum 2010 (EMEA) Event Slide Presentations: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8bfe4f93-eb06-4104-bbc7-ee962d408e2b&displaylang=en As a reminder there are plenty more videos from that event, including customer case studies on our dedicated Project video channel: https://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/channels/microsoftproject/results?sf=ActiveStartDate

Last month, the Project team hosted Project Momentum 2010 EMEA in Barcelona, Spain – a 2-day event focused on our Europe, Middle East and Africa customers and partners. It was a great opportunity for us to learn from the Project community as well as an opportunity for the community to share best practices with each other. Thank you to everyone who participated and made this event a tremendous success! With over 240+ partners and customers from 28+ different countries, we had a very diverse audience! While it’s just a small part of our worldwide 20 million user Project community, it provides a unique and intimate environment for learning. I personally had the opportunity to connect with many different people through sessions, networking events and side-meetings. Truth be told, it’s what I learn from our customers and partners that makes these events so special. It was especially nice hearing about how customers & partners are deploying Project 2010 in their organizations and gaining business value today and not waiting for SP1. It’s great to hear since the team put in a lot of effort to make sure Project 2010 is a high quality release. Some examples of customers who talked about their Project 2010 experiences at Momentum include Volvo ( session , written case study ), NATO ( session ) and Kudelski ( session ). For those of you who weren’t able to make it to the conference or for those of you looking to share content with your teams, I recommend taking a look at some of the conference content here . I recommend starting with the keynote below (from the 5:05 mark after the conference welcome) that I had the honor to kick-off followed by Ludovic Hauduc, General Manager of the Project engineering team, who did a great job providing his personal insight into the Project 2010 release. I especially recommend watching the keynote demos at around the 43:10 mark. Eric Zenz, a Senior Program Manager Lead on Ludo’s team, does three great live demos: Office 365 and Project Professional 2010 demo that highlights SharePoint Online tasks sync with Project Professional 2010

We have published preliminary version of the Scrum Solution Starter for Project 2010 on MSDN Code gallery https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/P2010Scrum please participate actively in the Discussion to notify us about any issue you may encounter or post any feedback! This solution starter focuses on the Project 2010 desktop client, and on the individual Scrum team experience. Scrum is an iterative, incremental methodology for project management often seen in agile software development. Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach. There are 3 main items in Scrum: Product backlog: A product backlog is dynamic—Items may be deleted or added at any time during the project. It is prioritized—Items with the highest priority are completed first. It is progressively refined—Lower priority items are intentionally course-grained. Sprint backlog: A sprint backlog is a negotiated set of items from the product backlog that a team commits to complete during the time box of a sprint. Items in the sprint backlog are broken into detailed tasks for the team members to complete. The team works collaboratively to complete the items in the sprint backlog, meeting each day (during a daily scrum) to share struggles and progress and update the sprint backlog and burn down chart accordingly. Burn down: The sprint burn down chart is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work in the sprint backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the sprint progress. It also provides quick visualizations for reference Supported Scenarios: A Scrum Master wants to use Project for the basics of running a sprint, including: Collecting and tracking status Managing the product backlog Managing the sprint backlog (and initial iteration planning) Viewing a burn down chart Easily exporting Scrum data to email/other apps Enjoy!

Very excited to announce this key milestone today on the main Project blog today: Announcing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta . Following all the interest and excitement heard as recently as last month in Europe at Tech.Ed and at Project Momentum, its great to have bits out that you can now use to test this out. As usual this is journey and expect more announcements on the topic of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Microsoft Project 2010 and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010, Better Together in the coming months. In the meantime start your download and happy testing!

We are excited to announce the release of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscribers. Integration between Project Server and Team Foundation Server is a huge leap forward for organizations that want to bridge the gap between the Project Management Office and software development teams using Team Foundation Server. The feature pack further strengthens Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management Solution by enabling these teams to work together more effectively while not getting distracted or overwhelmed by each other’s’ detail. It enables teams to work together more effectively by: Providing executives with insight into portfolio execution, alignment with strategic objectives, and resource utilization of their software development projects by leveraging the quantitative data stored in different systems. Bridging the impedance mismatch between the Project Management Office and Application Development by facilitating better coordination between teams using disparate methodologies , like waterfall and agile, via common information and agreed upon metrics. Enabling development and project management teams to use familiar tools to collaborate and communicate project timeline and progress such as Microsoft Project, Project Server, SharePoint and Visual Studio. Please check out Brian Harry’s post: Portfolio Management: TFS Project Server Integration in Beta for more details on this exciting new solution and try it yourselves ! Key resources Product documentation Recent demo at Tech.Ed Europe last November: Application Lifecycle Management – Microsoft Project 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, Better Together Ask a question: Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Forum Questions and Answers Q. How does this Feature Pack differ from the out-of-the-box Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Project add-in? A. The Microsoft Project add-in allows project managers to use Microsoft Project to connect to Team Foundation Server to collaborate and participate in the planning and execution of software development projects. The Feature Pack enables integration between Team Foundation Server and Project Server and allows planning and status information to be synchronized between the two systems. Q. Are there any prerequisites or dependencies for this Feature Pack? A. Dependencies are: Team Foundation Server 2010 + SP1 beta Visual Studio 2010 + SP1 beta Project Server 2010 or 2007 For a detailed description of dependencies and prerequisites go to MSDN: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=207133 Q. Do customers need to apply this Feature Pack to Team Foundation Server or Project Server? A. The Feature Pack must be applied to Project Server (2010 or 2007). The Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1 beta must be applied to Team Foundation Server 2010. Check out the documentation for more details. Q. What MSDN Subscription level is required to download the beta? A. This Feature Pack will only be available to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscribers (go to your MSDN download center , you should find the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack as an available download). An organization must own at least one license of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN. With that one license, the software can be downloaded and installed and then all users with access to either the Project Server or the Team Foundation Server products that are integrated can benefit. Q. Can I use this release in production? A. The beta comes with a “go-live” agreement. If the user agrees to the terms in the pre-release license agreement then they are eligible to use the environment in production. As usual we recommend testing out this beta release in a test/staging environment prior to any product rollout. Q. When will the final version be ready? A. Pending your validation, it will ship sometime in the first half of next year (2011). Christophe Fiessinger Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Project https://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie