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Written by Divya Gunasekaran, Microsoft Online Services PM Updates to two existing PowerShell cmdlets are now available to use with Microsoft Online Services.  The updates to Get-MSOnlineUser and Set-MSOnlineUserPassword give admins more visibility into password and alternate recipient settings, and more control over password expiration. 1. Get-MSOnlineUser : This cmdlet can be used to retrieve the properties of a specified user in Microsoft Online Services.  Three properties have been added to the output of this cmdlet: PasswordLastSetDate: Returns the date that a user last set their password.  If a user is set to change their password on next logon, the default date of “1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM” will be returned. ForwardingAddress: Displays the forwarding address (a.k.a. alternate recipient) that has been set for a user’s mailbox.  If no forwarding address has been set, an empty string array will be returned. DeliverToMailboxAndForward: Returns a Boolean indicating where messages are being delivered when a forwarding address has been set. If a forwarding address has been set and messages are being delivered only to the forwarding address, this property will return False. If a forwarding address has been set and messages are being delivered to both the user’s mailbox and the forwarding address, this property will return True. 2. Set-MSOnlineUserPassword : The Set-MSOnlineUserPassword cmdlet has been updated to make the “Password” parameter optional.  This ability allows admins to force users to change their passwords after logging in with their current credentials, rather than having to first assign new passwords to the users.  Admins can also continue to use the cmdlet as they did before to set a user’s password to a specified value and optionally require them to change their password on next logon.  Please note that requiring a user to change their password on next logon will reset the “PasswordNeverExpire” setting to False for that user. To use the updated cmdlets, admins must download the latest 32-bit or 64-bit version of the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools.  

Free Instructor-Led Project 2010 Training Sessions for Conference Attendees We are excited to announce Instructor-led training sessions by our three validated training partners : Milestone Consulting Group Global leaders in providing Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) services, Milestone Consulting Group can help your organization gain visibility, insight and control across all work.  With the launch of Project 2010, Milestone expanded their training offerings to include Microsoft’s Certification exams, had them validated by a third party, and made them available through your local software training center.  Make plans now to attend Project Conference and deepen your knowledge on Project 2010 desktop and prepare yourself to take the Microsoft Project 70-178 exam. MSProjectExperts MSProjectExperts is a Microsoft Certified partner and the global leader in Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010 training, courseware and reference books. MSProjectExperts maintains both the Gold Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management and Silver Microsoft Learning Systems competencies, a rare combination that certifies both its depth in Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010 and its ability to deliver quality training, eligible for Microsoft Software Assurance training benefits. The Versatile Company The Versatile Company provides expertise in project management, Microsoft Project and Project Server, delivering training, consulting and Project Server deployment. Company founder Eric Verzuh is recognized worldwide for his bestselling book, The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, the fourth edition which was just released last December.  Sam Huffman, a Microsoft Project Most Valued Professional (MVP), will integrate proven best practices, industry standards, and hands-on learning to create high impact learning experiences. We’ve got Over 110+ hours of Sessions! We’ve added more content since our last blog post – more customer-led sessions! To recap, here are some content highlights over the three tracks (Business Value & Insights, Product Sessions, and Deployment, Administration & Developer): 19 customer-led sessions (representing 10 industry verticals) where customers share personal success stories using Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), and upgrading to the latest 2010 solutions from prior PPM versions and competitive solutions. Project desktop best practices for scheduling, program management, Earned Value, and more. Project Server best practices for Demand Management, Portfolio Analysis, Resource Management, Time Management, Business Intelligence, and more. Key solutions overviews and case studies for Application Lifecycle Management, Innovation Process Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Dynamics AX integration, ERP integration, and more. Technical best practices for IT Professionals and Developers. A full list of session titles and abstracts will be available in mid-January on the official conference website . Wednesday Event at the Arizona Science Center Spend an unforgettable evening at the Arizona Science Center!  Take a trip to the stars in the state-of-the-art Dorrance Planetarium, soar high above the ground on the exhilarating Sky Cycle, climb your way to adventure on the Rock Wall, and immerse yourself in over 300 hands-on exhibits while nestled in the picturesque setting of Heritage and Science Park in historic downtown Phoenix.  Do your own star-gazing on any of the beautifully situated terraces as you sip handmade specialty cocktails and dine on an array of mouth-watering gourmet fare all while you explore the wonderful world of science! This will be a fantastic venue to connect with other Project Conference attendees!   Tell us what excites you about the event on Twitter or facebook .

This will be the first of a couple of postings about some changes in behavior that you might see once you install the December Cumulative updates .  This one is specifically about the client, and the Project Information dialog.  In the past if you changed a field value within the Project Information dialog then this would not raise the ProjectBeforeTaskChange or ProjectDeforeTaskChange2 events.  The values in Project Information relate to the project summary task (Task 0) and in Project 2007 these events would fire regardless of where the change was made.  Now, with the December CU these events are available to you.  However, there are a couple of things you need to be aware of: 1.  Firstly the event will fire once for the complete dialog, so unlike if you were changing values in the Project Summary task you may need to allow for and have your users prepared for multiple pop-ups (depending what you code does) once they click OK on the Project Information dialog. 2. If you cancel then you will lose all your changes – so make sure users are aware they may need to go back and check the values if for some reason your code rejected one of the changes.  For example if you popped up a dialog for each change and accepted a couple then rejected one the values that had been accepted get cancelled too. 3. There appears to be a bug which we are investigating whereby the Project Department field will always raise the event even if it has not been changed. I know that we didn’t have the issue with the Department field in 2007 – I will double check the behavior of the second bullet and see if that has also changed since 2007 – and if that should be considered a bug too. *** Update – looks like this wasn’t the behavior in 2007 – you could cancel any of the individual events and not roll back other changes – so I’d consider this a bug in 2010.  No promises on any fix dates though. One workaround to avoid cancelling if you thought the Department field had been changed would be to check if the value has actually changed – something like: If ((Field = FieldNameToFieldConstant(“Project Departments”)) And (NewValue = vOldValue)) Then Exit Function should help. *** Update – you may also see this same issue with the Notes field.

I found out this week that the technical session DeltaBahn proposed was accepted for the Project Conference in March. I will be giving a talk titled “Planning and Executing a Multi-Instance, Multi-Version Project Server Migration” about the process required to merge a Project Server 2007 instance and a Project Server 2010 instance into a new Project Server 2010 instance. Hope to see you all there!

Dear readers I wish you all a restful and peaceful holiday break! Since it’s a quiet time of the year and a great opportunity to catch up on recent product updates and announcement I wanted to provide you a list of tasks to keep you busy if you have spare cycle in the coming two weeks Register to Microsoft Project Conference 2012 next march in Phoenix Arizona.Yes you can’t miss it! We have great content and speakers, plus it’s a very unique opportunity to network with Microsoft, customers, partners and MVPs. More information on our site: https://msprojectconference.com Update your farms/servers with the latest software updates (SP & CU), for 2010 we released Service Pack 1 (SP1) last June and this week the December 2011 Cumulative Update (CU) below. We have shipped a number of updates based on your feedback and ensuring your users/customers experience the latest and greatest from Microsoft is a great holiday gift ! As usual please read the best practices and guidance documented on TechNet on how to deploy software updates. Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint Server 2007 and 2010 December 2011 CU Announcement Announcing The Release Of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010 Read the latest product documentation and guidance – yes there is a lot of valuable content we have published throughout the year and continue to do so based on your feedback so please ensure you are on top to optimize your usage or our stack. A great tool to start catching up on documentation is the Enterprise Project Management Content Pivot Viewer . A sample of recent documents for instance are listed below (and yes there are a few more on TechNet and our main product site: https://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/articles-white-papers.aspx ) Actual Work Best Practices Documentation Now Available Best practices for managing a large number of resources in Project Server 2010 Testing Project Server 2010 deployments Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide for Project Web App Catch up on recent Project news announced on our main product blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/project . For instance: Microsoft is Rated in the Gartner Project and Portfolio Applications MarketScope Announcing SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 Microsoft Project for the masses Deploy our latest Project 2010 Demo Pack V2 as announced by Jan Kalis: Project 2010 Demo Pack Version 2 NOW available to Microsoft Partners! and yes it contains Project Server and scenarios and data to showcase our full PPM functionalities. Read our recently published customer case studies : https://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/customer-success.aspx . For instance in the past few months we released these: Revlon – IT Department of Global Cosmetics Company Cuts Time in Meetings by up to 30 Percent Nagra – Digital Security Firm Makes More Efficient, Data-Driven Decisions About IT Projects Intel – Intel Will Save Annually While Making Project Management More Flexible Purchase Project and or Project Server 2010 books – yes another testament that 2010 is an awesome release, is the quantity of books available today listed on your favorite online site. In addition check out our Training and Learning site . Test out our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Innovation Process Management (IPM) solutions. A lot more information can be found below: New Feature Pack from Visual Studio Improves Project Management and Software Development Team Collaboration Innovation Management and Ideation Solutions with SharePoint and Project Server Ramp up on Windows 8, SQL Server 2012 and System Center 2012 , key links below: Building Windows 8 SQL Server 2012 System Center 2012 Sign up for an Office 365 trial , yes its landmark release for our cloud offering and it keeps getting better on a regular basis: official Office 365 site . Buy a Windows Phone and feel the love! Could not resist to add this 11th task… Seriously test out the Office 365 integration for instance or more fun application like the Skydrive app or the XBox Companion app to name two. It’s a great OS and it has improved by professional and personal productivity a lot. A lot more information here: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone . PS: please find above a poster we used internally recently thanks to a similar campaign done by the Microsoft Germany subsidiary

In order to follow up on our promise to provide you with more Project Server 2010 role guide content, we are pleased to announce the recent publish of the Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide for Project Web App . Much like the Project Server 2010 Administrator’s Guide that we released earlier this year, this guide was created with great consideration given to the great customer feedback we’ve received.  In putting together this guide, our writing team addressed the three big asks customers had for this content: It is graphical.  We’ve Included a lot of screenshots of the user interface, making it easier to see where you are at within a procedure. It is customizable.  We have it in Microsoft Word format to make it easier for customers to customize parts of the guide to train their own users. It is downloadable in .docx, .pdf, and .xps file formats.   Feel free to print it off and read it at your convenience. The Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide for Project Web App provides detailed information about how to use Microsoft Project Web App (PWA) to work with Microsoft Project Server 2010 data and to perform project management-related tasks. This guide helps project managers in your organization to better understand elements of project management in PWA, such as projects, resources, tasks, approvals, updates, and notifications. It includes many step-by-step procedures and accompanying user-interface screen shots of Project Web App.  It is important to note that although Microsoft Project Professional 2010 can be used with Project Server 2010 to perform many project management tasks, this guide only covers procedures done through PWA. The Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide to Project Web App contains the following seven chapters: Introduction Chapter 1, “Navigating Project Web App” Chapter 2, “Managing projects in Project Web App” Chapter 3, “Managing resources” Chapter 4, “Managing task updates” Chapter 5, “Managing issues, risks, and documents” Chapter 6, “Managing status reports” Chapter 7, “Configuring e-mail notifications and reminders” File size: approximately 3 MB Download the guide as a .docx file Download the guide as a .pdf file Download the guide as a .xps file

We’re happy to announce the publish of a new white paper by Chris Vanderluis of HMS Software for the “From the Trenches” column in the Project Server 2010 TechCenter and the Project Server 2007 TechCenter . This latest white paper –  “They Say They Want a Resolution” – describes some common challenges you may face when scheduling projects. It describes coming up with the best approach when you try to determine how long tasks should be and how many tasks there should be to optimize a project schedule. It discusses how different industries typically require different types of schedules (for example, software development, EPM (engineering, procurement, and construction), and plant shutdown).  It also discusses several factors in choosing project resolution (for example, length of project, resources involved, management or division of resources, speed and effort required in collecting data, and data update schedule).  Here is some bio information about the author: Chris Vandersluis is the president and founder of Montreal, Canada–based HMS Software , a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. He has an economics degree from McGill University and over 27 years’ experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and helped found the Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec chapters of the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUGA). Publications for which Chris has written include Fortune , Heavy Construction News , Computing Canada magazine, and PMI’s PMNetwork , and he is a regular columnist for Project Times . He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University and often speaks at project management association functions across North America and around the world. HMS Software is the publisher of the TimeControl project-oriented timekeeping system and has been a Microsoft Project Solution Partner since 1995. Chris Vandersluis can be contacted by e-mail at: chris.vandersluis@hms.ca . If you would like to read more Enterprise Project Management related articles by Chris Vandersluis, see his blog: EPM Guidance .

One of the most important aspects of any Project Server implementation is the ability to accurately record and report on actual work values when they are submitted by resources. The desire to ensure that the integrity of actual work, or “actuals”, is maintained within Project Server is one of the most critical customer requests. When implementing a Project Server based solution for time tracking and progress reporting there are a lot of questions that come up like: What’s the best way to have my resources report time for their assignments? How do I make sure that the resource-reported value and the project plan stay in sync? Where should I retrieve data from if I want to integrate Project Server with an external billing or ticket tracking system? Admittedly the breadth of configuration options available in Project Server can create some confusion and lead to solution configurations that are not optimal for the maintenance of actual work values. To help ease the process of recording and reporting on actual work we’ve created the Best practices for submitting and reporting on actual work (Project Server 2010) documentation. To give you a sneak preview of what the document contains here are the primary tenets of best practices for actual work integrity: Use single entry mode Protect user updates with protected actuals Use submitted work from timesheets, instead of project plans, for timephased reporting Use administrative time categories to track non-project work You can find more details for each of these best practices in the linked document.

Take a look over at https://blogs.technet.com/b/projectadministration/archive/2011/12/14/microsoft-project-server-and-sharepoint-server-2007-and-2010-december-2011-cu-announcement.aspx for the full details.  Also don’t forget the webcast in January giving you the inside scoop on what we are delivering in these Cumulative Updates. TechNet Webcast: Information about Microsoft Project and Project Server December 2011 Software Update (Level 200) https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032493964&culture=en-us A couple of my favorite fixes – the correction of an earlier problem that saw many non-English sites having English headers on the Project Center, My Tasks and Resource Center pages, and a change to single entry mode behavior so that you do not see unexpected changes to your timesheet entered data.  More about these and all the other fixes on January 10th Webcast with Adrian Jenkins and me.

Good news for all the Visio enthusiasts out there! Did you know that you could visualize, edit and even create a new project plan in Microsoft Office Visio 2010 (Professional or Premium) and then export it to Microsoft Project? Courtesy of the Visio product team, the Visio 2010 Add-in for WBS Modeler enables effective integration between Visio and Project by offering the ability to manage project elements in a graphical view, as well as capabilities to layout a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in Visio. The Modeling process in WBS Modeler offers a wide variety of options to manipulate the WBS data and layout. Custom ribbon elements enable intuitive import and export between Visio and Project. Sibling and Child tasks can be added to existing tasks at every level within the project plan. Shape data can be defined and assigned for every element within Visio and this data binding remains in place when exported to project. Download the add-in today and get more out of your Visio and Project investments.