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Earlier this month our friends on the Office 365 team shared a link via Twitter to an article by technology writer Will Kelly . Entitled ” Microsoft Office 365 for Project Managers “, the article surfaced the project management potential in Office 365 and an interesting theme–the “democratization of project management data”. Read more about it here . Today, we’re excited to share a special series on how Office 365 adoption can transform your existing project management capabilities. Microsoft Office 365 provides an infrastructure for collaboration and information sharing. It offers a cloud solution for an organization of any size, whether that organization involves a small business or a small team with members spread across the globe. But best of all, it offers the ease and familiarity you’d expect from Microsoft and its Office products. Many enterprises have already had a great deal of success implementing a PPM solution via Project Server 2010. But how about options for smaller organizations or departments just getting started? Microsoft Project is perfect for helping project managers organize schedules and manage budget, resources and dependencies, but what about the rest of the team?  Effective project management begins with team collaboration.  It necessitates a secure and central location for all project documents and artifacts like a site provisioned in SharePoint Online, demands ease of mobile communication you’d find in Exchange Online and Lync Online,  and the great user experience provided by Microsoft Project and Office 2010 when working with project schedules and documents. By themselves, these tools are just tools, but together it opens the door to a unique collaboration experience that any organization can benefit from. And because we’ve built these products with the user in mind they just work, even across multiple platforms and devices.  We’ve called out a number of common pain points tied to project collaboration–document storage, effective communication, sharing a project schedule, and visual reporting for stakeholders just to name a few. But this represents a small sample of all the great possibilities Office 365 enables for project management and we’d love to hear more from users like you in the comments below or via Twitter and Facebook . Download the paper and accompanying video here. You can view the full video series on our YouTube channel as well. We’ll be featuring a great session  around this very topic this March at Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix, AZ. Don’t forget to register!

Now we all know that the finish date a project is automatically calculated by Project and might not necessarily be the due date. If the finish date is before the due date, you have some buffer, if the finish date is after the due date, you have a problem. Let’s assume you are in the first case – it is important to track this buffer and I’ve found manually scheduled tasks are useful for this since they won’t automatically move but they’ll warn you when there is a problem. Let’s say you have this project (this will work for all projects, just make sure you have a milestone representing the project finish that all task chains are connected to): My project finish date is January 9th but I actually don’t have to be done until the 13th so I have a few days of buffer. To represent that I add a new manually scheduled task with the Project Finish milestone as the predecessor and the end date as 1/13: You can now easily tell that you have 4 days of buffer. Now say that task 4 takes 3 days instead of 1 day. Your schedule will look like this: Notice how the buffer tasks didn’t move but you get a warning that there is an issue. Now go in and for the Buffer task, right-click and select Respect Links. This will push the task out. Now you need to decrement the duration until the finish date is once again the 13th: So you can now tell from task 4 slipping that you only have 2 days left of buffer. I find that manually having to update your buffer task helps to make you more aware of when you are using up buffer. You can use this same technique on individual task chains, etc., if you want. Additionally, if you want to make sure you remember the deadline, you can set a deadline on the buffer task to make sure you always adjust the buffer back to it. Learn more about this and other scheduling tips by attending the Microsoft Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix, AZ March 19th-22nd.

Happy new year! Yes I’m sure you are all actively making travel arrangements to attend Microsoft Project Conference in Phoenix next march, specially after this key announcement today: Microsoft Project Conference 2012 Full Session List Announced! Since I know you love to plan and budget I have put together a list of upcoming events Microsoft PPM will participate in (sessions, demo booth, etc.) in the next few months (yes there are plenty of other regional events as well) but these are the ones the corporate marketing team will be involved in. If you have any interest to present and or help with these feel free to contact me via this blog. Stay tune for more information on each event in the future! Event Start Finish Location URL Project Conference 2012 19-Mar 22-Mar Phoenix https://www.msprojectconference.com Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 21-May 23-May National Harbor https://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/program-management/ TechEd North America 11-Jun 14-Jun Orlando https://northamerica.msteched.com Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 19-Jun 20-Jun London https://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/emea/program-management TechEd Europe 26-Jun 29-Jun Amsterdam https://europe.msteched.com/ Worldwide Partner Conference 8-Jul 12-Jul Toronto https://digitalwpc.com

OK so I’m building a Project 2010 addin using Visual Studio 2010 (VSTO) and I got tired of the clickonce deployment option. I added a Visual Studio installer project to my solution and went about following the advice on this page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/ff937654.aspx It was mostly pretty good. A bit confusingly worded in a few places but I wrote that off to me not having enough real development background to pick up on the flow as I might if I was an experienced dev. In the section on registry entries it made mention of this page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386106.aspx . It also showed sample registry entries settings and how to set them up in your installer project. I followed these to the letter and matched mine up with their screenshot to make sure they matched. For the Manifest entry mine was: “[TARGETDIR]ADDINNAME.vsto|vstolocal” I used this and my addin installed the proper ribbon tabs and buttons which meant that the system was able to interpret my entry enough to install my code into Project 2010. But some of my code was not quite working properly. Two of my dialog boxes should have read in a default value from an Application setting but the combobox controls that should have contained these defaults were blank. Click events for buttons were not firing off the code connected to them. The load event of a graphing control did not fire so while the graph control was there with the right visual settings it contained no data. I spent most of last night and much of the early part of this morning trying to figure out what was going wrong. I rebuilt my setup project from scratch. I double checked dependencies and looked to make sure I was building my setup project based on the right output, etc, etc. No Joy. I then checked in with old friend Colby Africa, one of the resident developer geniuses over at forProject to see what I was doing wrong. He had seen some roughly similar oddities in one of his projects and his research with his contacts suggested that I needed to add ‘file:///’ to the beginning of my registry setting in my Manifest key. It had something to do with the way the system interpreted the entry. I was skeptical but did it anyway. My Manifest entry was now “file:///[TARGETDIR]ADDINNAME.vsto|vstolocal”. I rebuilt my setup project and reinstalled my addin and poof! It worked! As always, having smart friends is at least as important as being smart yourself! 🙂

Microsoft Project Conference 2012 Sessions Announced We’re excited to announce that all session content including titles, abstracts, speakers and learning objectives have been posted to www.msprojectconference.com ! Microsoft Project Conference 2012 is your only opportunity this year to see over 90 sessions focused on Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010 in addition to other key products that integrate with our Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management such as SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics, Team Foundation Server and more! Let us know what you’re looking forward to most on Twitter using our new hashtag #mspc12! Project 2010 Sessions This year’s conference will cover a variety of in-depth topics across three tracks: Business Value & Insights, Product Sessions, and Deployment, Administration & Developer, delivered by customers, industry experts, partners, Project MVPs and the Microsoft product team. Here are just a few highlighted sessions. Detangling project demand, resource supply and capacity with Project Server Isabel Merlano, AMD Corporation Pearls and Pitfalls – Realizing Real Business Benefits with Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint Mike Bullard, AT&T Business Services Best practices for implementing a successful Enterprise Innovation Program Simon Floyd, Microsoft Unleashing the Value of Earned Value: Applying Schedule and Cost Controls to Measure Project Performance Andrew Lavinsky MVP, UMT Leveraging Project 2010 with Office 365 for Project Management Success Dux Raymond Sy, Innovative-e Resource Management – Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together! Collin Quiring, PMP Specialists View the full agenda on the website for details on all 90+ sessions. Hands-on Project 2010 Training There will be valuable computer-based and instructor-led training opportunities on-sight at the conference. Make the most of your investment by attending one of the sessions below. Managing your Projects: Come find out how to save over 3 hours a week using Microsoft Project? Jacques, MS PROJECT NOW! Goupil YJTJ (Your Job Tool’s Job)™ – Working in Concert with Microsoft Project Dan Renier, Milestone Consulting Group Core concepts: Business Intelligence Reports Treb Gatte, msProjectExperts Microsoft Project: Inappropriate practices (Level 300) John Wagner, Versatile Task Types (Level 300) John Wagner, Versatile Designing with Project’s new manual scheduling type (Level 300) John Wagner, Versatile UMT Project Essentials Pro – Comprehensive Financial Governance for Project Server 2010 Ben Chamberlain, UMT Sponsor & Exhibitor Momentum At Microsoft Project Conference 2012 (remember, #mspc12 on Twitter) you will not only attend rich sessions, participate in hands-on training and network with your peers, but there is a lot to look for in the exhibit hall! You can review the list of Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management Partner companies who will be demonstrating industry leading products and services. Check back weekly as we are updating the list as new exhibitors and sponsors join! If you are interested in the sponsoring, exhibiting or marketing & promotional opportunities please contact projconf@microsoft.com . Join us for a special webcast event with Microsoft Project Director Arpan Shah and hosted by our partner at Innovative-E, Inc., Dux Raymond Sy, next Wednesday at 9 AM PST. More details available on our Facebook events page . We’ll be doing a live Q&A about the conference, tweet @ProjConf and include #MSProjectChat.

Right before the holidays and following these two recent announcements from Jan Kalis: Project 2010 Demo Pack Version 2 NOW available to Microsoft Partners! and Brian Smith: Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint Server 2007 and 2010 December 2011 CU Announcement . I decided to upgrade my demo environment to showcase the latest and greatest of Microsoft “strong positive” PPM offering with SP1 and the December 2011 CU. After about one hour I had my demo VM up and running with the latest Service Pack 1 and December 2011 CU for Project and Project Server 2010 as shown below. The new Project Server 2010 version number for the December 2011 Cumulative update is now: 14.0.6114.5000 . Happy demoing and selling! Two ways to check the version number (please refer to TechNet for CU deployment guidance): run the following query in the Reporting database go to the farm central admin page Don’t forget to attend Brian & Adrian’s webcast next Tuesday January 10th at 8am PST to get an overview of this latest update: TechNet Webcast: Information about Microsoft Project and Project Server December 2011 Software Update SELECT * FROM VERSIONS ORDER BY TIMESTAMP DESC See you in Phoenix for #PC12!

One of the questions I get fairly often is that people want to show their project schedules and get feedback on them without including real dates since their project hasn’t been officially scheduled yet. You know once you show someone a schedule with dates, that’s all they can think about and then you don’t get the feedback you want. You have three ways of doing this: Timescale The default timescale setting has it showing real dates. You can update this though by right-clicking on the timescale and selecting Timescale… Then in the dialog, for the tiers that are being displayed choose one of the circled items that uses relative time (ie. the first week of the project is Week 1) instead of calendar time: This will update my timescale to look like: The only other step you’ll need to do is to hide the start and finish date columns Date Format For date format (what controls how dates are displayed in the task sheet and throughout Project), Project doesn’t support a relative time format so you have two options which I’ve circled below. To update the date format, go to File – Options: You can select to just show time when how tasks line up is important to show. Alternatively you can choose one of the W4/4 formats. This date isn’t relative to the first week of the project but instead is based off the calendar (so the first week of January is week 1). Doing this format plus the timescale formatting I mention below will still essentially hide real dates from the people you are reviewing the schedule with. Just make sure to temporarily set your project to start on the first week of the year. Then when you know the actual start date of your project, you can use Move Project to adjust the schedule. Timeline View Last but not least, you can use the Timeline View. Say I have the following Timeline: To not show the dates, you need to go to the Format tab – Date Format and un-check Task Dates, Today and Timescale. This will get you: Now you still have dates on either ends, to remove those you can either crop the image or paste the Timeline into PowerPoint and delete them there. The only problem is that while you aren’t showing dates anymore, now the timeline is kind of meaningless if you want to show anything more than order and relative size of tasks. To get around this you can create dummy tasks to represent generic time intervals. For example, if I create a bunch of week long tasks I can get this: I also changed Text Lines to 2 since I just think that looks better. And here’s what I added to my project plan: You can choose whatever time interval makes the most sense for your project. Also, don’t forget to include weekends or else you’ll have gaps.

Decided to make this post as we have been getting quite a few questions about this dialog – Operation still processing. It can occur in various places within Project Web App and in my case I have made it appear in Project Center by creating a new project based on an Enterprise Project Type (called “Large”) that is using a project template which has around 2500 tasks.  In this case the full text says “The Create operation has been queued, but is taking longer than expected to process.  To check the status of the creation queue job, visit the My Queue Jobs page. Once the job has completed, the new Large will be listed in the Project Center. Click OK to close the project and return to Project Center.” This isn’t an error – I wouldn’t even go so far as to say it is a warning – merely an informational dialog that we programmed to appear in cases where whatever you are doing is taking a little while to happen – usually around a minute or so.  It could be that something has gone wrong – more likely it is just taking a while – so have a look in the queue.  Possibly by the time you have read the message the job has completed.  It could be that you are creating a quite large plan from a template – or perhaps there are other jobs in the queue that mean yours is just waiting.  So this shouldn’t be treated as an error – unless when looking in the queue you find a bigger problem – like I did when writing this posting….  Possibly more on that in another posting if a reboot of my abused server doesn’t make my issues go away.

I’m working on a toolkit for Project 2010 that will at several tools and utilities that people have asked me to write for them in VBA.   I’m looking for feature suggestions from the crowd. What do wish there was a button for in Project 2010? do you want to run a series of checks against your project to make sure your tasks and resources abide by a set of standard rules? Do you want to create a logfile of all the new tasks, task deletions, resource assignments, etc for that project? How about a tool to remove rates and costs from a schedule before you send it to a client or partner? What about one that lets you prepend or append some text to the Task Name of a set of selected tasks? Well my toolkit has these already. What would you like to see? Send me an email at brian.kennemer@projectified.com and tell me what you wish there was a button for and I will try to add it to the toolkit.

Just a quick post to get this into the search engines for the next person. If you have an Administrative Task in Project Server 2010 that has either any of the following characters in the task name you cannot manually add that task to a timesheet. & There are likely others but these are the 3 I know of for sure. When you add one of these tasks to a timesheet you get the error “An unknown error has occurred” as shown below. The odd thing is that you can set one of these tasks to “Always Display” and the task will display with no problem but it cannot be manually added to the timesheet.