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Latest Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack videos & webcast

We have released recently a number of videos on the recently released Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack, providing an overview of the solution and demonstrating its key capabilities: Top-Down Planning of Business Requirements within an Enterprise Project using Team Foundation Server and Project Server Managing Project Details in an Enterprise Project Plan Mapped to a Team Project in Team Foundation Server Making Agile Team Progress Visible to the Project Management Office Managing Field Mappings for Integration of Team Foundation Server and Project Server Application Lifecycle Management: Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010, Better Together (Tech.Ed session delivered last week) Last but least, please book your calendar for this upcoming webcast on the subject on June 8, 2011 at 8:00am Pacific Time : TechNet Webcast: Implementing Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack from Siddharth Bhatia and myself.

Announcing SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010

I am excited to announce the release of SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 produced by Jornata . Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides a vast number of capabilities that empower both business users and IT to create solutions quickly. For this reason, many organizations consider implementing SharePoint as a central platform to address a wide array of business solutions. For those organizations, it is likely that they will need a good way to track, manage, and prioritize those business requests. The SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 provides a framework and guidance for managing SharePoint business requests and includes two white papers and a sample dataset. This no-code solution includes: Business Decision Maker/Technical Decision Maker white paper containing a business evaluation of how Microsoft Project Server 2010 can be employed to help manage your SharePoint Lifecycle through enhancement requests and project proposals. Technical white paper contains step-by-step instructions on how to install and customize the SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution, along with basic instructions on how to use it. Project Server 2010 sample databases and templates that can be used to illustrate concepts. The sample dataset requires a farm that has a working installation of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with Project Server 2010 fully configured (please refer to Project Server 2010 Tech Center ); and the Dynamic Workflow and Workflow Visualization web part solutions from Microsoft Project 2010 Solution Starters . For an overview of the solution, please watch this recent recording from Tech.Ed last week: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP202 Last but not least do not forget to check out other existing white papers on Microsoft Project Portfolio Management offering on our Project site at https://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/articles-white-papers.aspx Christophe Fiessinger Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Project https://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie

Project 2010 SP1 – Improvements to Project Scheduling in Project Web App

In Project 2010, we added the ability to create and edit project plans through Project Web App ( blog post ). One of the limitations though was that the only way to edit projects that contained Fixed Work or Effort Driven tasks was to use Project Professional 2010. We knew this was a shortcoming when we shipped and from the feedback we’ve received, we know this shortcoming puzzled many of you. Let me explain, essentially as we were getting late into Project 2010 development we realized that we weren’t able to stabilize editing projects that contained those kinds of tasks in the web environment. Rather than risk project plans getting corrupted, we chose to block the functionality and then stabilize it for SP1. I’m happy to announce that with Project 2010 SP1 you can now edit project plans containing Fixed Work tasks and Effort Driven tasks in Project Web App. Before SP1: After SP1: And proof that I can actually edit the plan: You can learn more about task types and effort driven tasks here . You can learn more about SP1 here .

This Week in BPOS News 5/20

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. For this week in BPOS news we learn five things that every CIO should know, and we watch some great videos on how people are more productive with the Cloud. 1. Five Things Every CIO Should Know About the Cloud and Office In our first BPOS story we analyze five things that every CIO should know about the Cloud and Office 365. The Microsoft Future of Productivity blog has a special guest blog post from Office 365 Group Manager, Andrew Kisslo. Microsoft Office 365 recently released its public beta, and there is no one better than Andrew Kisslo to walk you through the top five talking points from Microsoft’s Cloud. The five things every CIO should know are listed on the blog in the following order:

Project 2010 SP1 – Timephased Support for Manually Scheduled Tasks

In Project 2010 we introduced a new concept called “User-Controlled Scheduling” which is a collection of features designed to give you more control over how tasks are scheduled. Project’s powerful scheduling engine is still there if you want to use it but you also have the flexibility to override it. Click here for the original post. One of the key features in User-Controlled Scheduling is manually scheduled tasks. These tasks, just as the name implies, are not affected by the scheduling engine and they will only move if you manually update them. This gives you more control over your schedule but one of the areas you didn’t have control was editing timephased data for them. For example, you couldn’t edit work values in the Task Usage view or report timephased data in task statusing for manually scheduled tasks. Based on your feedback, with Project 2010 SP1 you can now edit timephased data for manually scheduled tasks on the Project Client and Project Server. Prior to SP1, the circled areas are read-only for manually scheduled tasks: With SP1, you can now edit the timephased values for Manually Scheduled tasks just like you can for Auto Scheduled tasks. This is being demonstrated in the My Work view on Project Server and Task Usage view in the Project client: Key Takeaways: Project Server – If you are using timephased tracking (Hours of work done per period) in My Work or Single Entry Mode (a setting on Timesheets), all tasks can be tracked this way, not just auto scheduled tasks. Project Client – You can edit work contours for all tasks now. You can learn more about Project 2010 SP1 here .

Project 2010 SP1 – Enhancements to Sync to SharePoint Task List

Back in October of 2009, we introduced you to a new feature in Project Professional 2010 that allows you to synchronize tasks from a project file with a SharePoint task list called Sync to SharePoint (see the original post for details). One of the caveats of the feature was that you were limited to sync’ing manually scheduled tasks. Based on your feedback, we enabled synchronization of automatically scheduled tasks in Project 2010 SP1! Let’s see how this works. Here’s the initial task list: When you sync it to SharePoint you get the following. The tasks look manually scheduled here since essentially they are because SharePoint doesn’t have a scheduling engine like Project does. So if you update Task1 to be on Thursday instead of Wednesday, the other tasks won’t move out in SharePoint even though they are linked: But once you sync the task list back into the Project client, the schedule will get updated as one would expect: If you aren’t familiar with manually scheduled tasks versus automatically scheduled tasks, see this post . You can learn more about Project 2010 SP1 here . Thanks again for sending all the feedback and we hope that this update helps improve your SharePoint Sync’ing experience.