GREAT ULS Log viewing tool
February 5th, 2010
Someone on the SharePoint team took some time and built a VERY cool application for viewing ULS Logs. It lets you filter by any of the ‘fields’ in the log and format certain lines based on filter criteria.
Of course it lets you point the viewer at any ULS log file but it even lets you stream in the live ULS Log activity as it is happening and have it color code lines on criteria you determine.
If you find yourself looking at ULS logs for any reason then you will want to download this application
Get it here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer
Originally by Brian Kennemer from Information Worker Structured Collaboration on January 12, 2010, 5:06pm
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Coverage of Business process, configuration and user best practices
February 5th, 2010
I’m Brian Kennemer and I am a member of the Microsoft Consulting Services World Wide EPM Center of Excellence\ Rangers (WW EPM COE\Rangers). I too will be blogging here and covering topics related to the end user use of Project Server, the integration of organizational business and project management processes into the tool and the configuration of the tool that goes along with that integration as well as best practices around the use of the tool.
I have been with Microsoft for 4 years and have been working with Project Server and the world of enterprise level project management software since 1998 and have mainly focused on the design of project management processes and the configuration of Project Server to support organizational business needs.
I am working on a post now that will cover some sample reports and some best practices that deal with the use of Deliverables.
Originally by Brian Kennemer from Information Worker Structured Collaboration on January 6, 2010, 5:05pm
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Tips and Tricks: Saving an MPP File to Access
February 5th, 2010
A lot of folks ask in the newsgroups how to save a Project file to Access. This may be done for a number of reasons:
- Connecting to a reporting structure. (See an old article by Neville Turbit on project reporting in Access)
- Connecting to a SharePoint front end. (Richard Fennell’s take on Access Services in SharePoint 2010, a video demo of Access Services 2010)
- Interacting with homegrown or third party systems.
- Exporting to a Microsoft Project viewer product.
- Reverse engineering some of the quirks in Microsoft Project.
For instance, once I had an end user ask me why the Predecessors are listed in the order they are in Microsoft Project. I did a quick dump into Access and identified the table where Predecessors are stored. We quickly were able to determine that each Predecessor link represents a UID, and the order in which they are displayed in Microsoft Project is sorted by Link UID.
In Microsoft Project 2003, it was relatively easy to save to an Access MDB file. Just select File > Save As, and then pick the Access option. In fact, as I recall, 2003 had this cool (but little understood option) to control how timephased data was exported to other file formats.
In 2007, that feature remains, but it got moved, and that has confused a number of people through the years. To access the feature in 2007, select Reports > Visual Reports and then look at the bottom of the dialog box for the Save Data option.
In the resulting dialog box, select to Save as a Database.
And there you are, an Access database with all of your project reporting data. As far as I can tell through some preliminary testing, that feature remains the same in 2010.
Originally by Andrew Lavinsky from EPM Team on February 3, 2010, 2:02am
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Goodbye KAPOW! Hello New World
February 5th, 2010
I’ve seen this question show up a couple of times in the forums for Microsoft Project 2010….whatever happened to the Copy Picture to Office Wizard tool? – or as I like to call it, the CPOW (pronounced KAPOW).
Here’s the tool in 2007. If you squint your eyes, it looks kind of like a camera with a blue lens:
…or it can be found in the Reports menu.
And here’s what it looks like in 2010. The two overlapping documents.
Logically enough, In the Copy Menu, you’ll find it as the second option…
The long and the short of it is that the camera icon has gone the way of the mullethead icons in 2002. (or was it 2000?) That’s when the Hall & Oates icon got a haircut to become the Resource Assignment button we all know and love now. One can just imagine the discussions around that singular event back in the halls of Redmond. Someone, somehow, decided that mullets were so “90s.”
Now, call me a Luddite, but I am not sure that I am comfortable with the fact that the CPOW is now tucked away somewhere few people can find it. I like the Ribbon/Fluent UI, and I think the Product Team did a great job highlighting key functionality in it, but I still want the CPOW out in the open where I can easily access it.
Luckily, it’s relatively easy to modify the Ribbon so it works for an ornery curmudgeon such as myself (or actually my colleague Peter, who is our official curmudgeon in residence. Compared to him, I’m just a curmudgeon in training).
Right click on some spare real estate on the ribbon, and choose one of two options: add to the Quick Access Bar, or add it to the Ribbon. Let’s take a look at those two options.
The Quick Access Bar, for those of you who may not have noticed it in Office 2007, is the thing at the top, above the Ribbon – or below if I so choose.
You’ll note that it comes with only a couple icons displayed, which in my world means a whole lot of wasted screen real estate that can be better utilized. In this case, I’ll add the CPOW to the Quick Access Bar:
I can also add the command to the Ribbon. In this case, I select “Customize the Ribbon,” and get the following dialog box:
I simply can add a new Group under the Task Tab. Add the Copy Picture Command. I can modify the icon, but unfortunately it looks like the odd grey square blue lens camera-thingy icon isn’t in the approved list for 2010. Perhaps someone in Redmond decided that cameras were so 20-‘naught, and not ready for the 20-teens.
…and I now have the command on my Task Tab in the Ribbon.
So I guess the lesson is that even as things change, we can still modify them to remain in our comfort zone….
Originally by Andrew Lavinsky from EPM Team on February 5, 2010, 3:30am
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Tags: Sociology In A Virtual World
February 5th, 2010
This a very early draft of the introduction to Tags: Living In A Virtual World. I use this blog as a notebook for drafts, so you can provide me with feedback in an early stage. Comments are, as always, appreciated.
If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know how to spell, I would say you have some challenges.
Think about this Project Manager as a person in a huge network of interacting people. The PM can interact only with a few of them (his team, the stakeholders). The stakeholders interact also with others. People the PM knows, but more likely with people invisible to the Project Manager.
Because of the size of the network, because of limited visibility on the network, because of the complexity of the network, the PM is getting partial information, always.
For the same reasons the PM has only partial influence. He cannot interact with “everyone”. He has no “power” over everyone.
How do you get your job done?
The same problems arise when you operate on the internet. Lots of people you don’t know, huge amount of partial information. By looking at how this works in the virtual space, we get insights that can guide us in our projects.
Well, on the Net it’s all about Tags. And the things people think they represent.
Tags. Yes, Tags!
People can catalog almost everything on the Internet. You can add words to photos on Flickr that describe the picture. At Amazon, users can put labels on the products, labels they associate with the object. It’s called “tagging”.
Users from the bookmarking site Delicious add tags to the webpages they find interesting. If they put “project management” and “best article ever” to one of my webpages I’ll be delighted. If their tag reads “this sucks”, well, that sucks.
Image by dominiekth.
Tags are the little labels we put on everything on the web. There is no overall top down structure. Everybody can add tags. The tags can be any word or couple of words. Whatever your association is, it’s your tag.
A collection of tags describes a picture, book, products or blogger in a short and effective way. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false. It’s about the perception of community.
After three years creating The Project Shrink, blog, podcast and persona, that’s how I view living online: a struggle with tags.
On Twitter I exchange short messages with other Project Managers. We have a secret handshake. Every message contains the letters PMOT, which stands for Project Managers On Twitter. By using these letters, you label yourself as a PM. And a cool one. One that is On Twitter.
The blog Project Shrink started out about “Project Management”. But I experienced that under that label humans don’t play a role. (At least, that’s what I’m told.) In “general management”: yes. In “human resourcing”: yes.
So I adopted “Project Leadership”. Now that is a lovely area in which you can throw any human topic you can imagine. The drawback is, nobody really knows what it is exactly. It may be a safe tag, but it’s not an effective one.
If you use a tag, you want it to be clear. You use a word, a word that means something to you. Agile approaches are getting more and more in fashion. Therefor more and more approaches are getting the label “agile”. To piggyback on the success.
Brian Marick believed Agile is being dumbed down. So he created Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. Just to be sure no one would take that name and create it into something else. I am pretty sure that this tag wasn’t taken already.
Tags, or labels, are the social currency in the virtual world.
It’s the stuff we want to collect, get rid off or give online. This is not typical for online interactions. Labeling is a concept from sociology. According to Wikipedia “… is (sociology) the study of the social lives of humans, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions.”
Online. Offline. Society. Project. Doesn’t matter. The kicker in the virtual space is, you actually use real tags. We see them. We use them as keywords in our filters. We use them in our one sentence pitch on LinkedIn. But still. Always the same principles. It’s about group affiliation and identity.
During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by force. I am a Dutch white male, member of a no-child double income household, Project Manager, author and web aficionado, to name just a few of my own treats. The Dutch white male is something that I am by birth, by default. All other affiliations are more or less done by choice.
The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. Actually, we have more than one identity. We can choose, we can switch depending on the situation. I like to see myself as a blogger and writer. Within the professional world I emphasize the software project manager affiliation. You have been dealt a lot of memberships, you can emphasize or down play each affiliation to create your identity.
As an identity is how we see ourselves within the ultimate large group of humans, it not something that can be seen on an individual level. It is a group thing. Without groups, the whole concept of identity wouldn’t make sense. We are shaping identities by combining three mechanisms: categorization, identification and comparison [Wikipedia]. Although broadminded people like to think they do not put everyone in boxes, everyone does.
We always put people in categories, we label them. This is done by looking for signs that we associate with a certain group. These signs are the mentioned use of icons, rituals or speak. To be able to associate yourself with a group, we first have to divide society into groups. Identification is the part where you affiliate yourself with a group.
The affiliation is done by taken on the social groups norms and other aspects which are used by humans to label an individual to a category. With the identification you label yourself to the group. To be able to do this, you take on the marks that cause the label. Comparison is looking for differences between groups. With the group affiliation you create your identity, your place in society. For this to work you are also indicating where you are not standing. It is always a comparison between groups.
A Short Writing Project: Tags.
It has been three years already since I launched The Project Shrink. I wanted to see if basic sociology could help me understand problems in projects. As DeMarco and Lister put it in their classic “Peopleware”: “The major problems of our work are not as much technological as sociological in nature.” So, it only makes sense to look at the social sciences.
Writing, discussing, interviewing and being active online provided me with some great experiences. The information and knowledge I acquired from running The Project Shrink form the basis of a small book I am working on: Tags (working title).
The information is applicable to offline situations. The information is incredible relevant for running virtual projects.
The table of contents:
1. Augmented Conversations
2. Trusting People You Don’t Know
3. What’s Your Beef?
4. Living In Networks: If You Build It, They Will Come
5. Transparency: Turning History Into Tags
6. What Happens If You Only See A Part Of Your Network?
7. Do Introverts Rule The Tag Game?
8. Why Your Company Should Help You Tag
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink” video podcast.
Tags: Sociology In A Virtual World
Originally by Bas de Baar from Project Shrink on February 4, 2010, 5:01pm
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About My Big Important Words.
February 5th, 2010
I started this year explaining why I like the word “awesome”.
“I like to use the word “awesome” instead of “felicitous” as I like to appeal more to people who like passionate words over expensive sounding ones.”
Couple of days later, I tell you
“Although writing in a style that sounds authoritative (“You must do this!”) attracts a larger audience, providing advice that respects the comfort zone of the other is more effective in real life.”
So. True.
And than. In my previous posting I go all “Reputation Space / Project Space” on you.
Big Important Words. Yeah. I know.
So, I am no exception to the social mechanisms discussed 
This “Spaces” thing is about how we operate in a world where online and offline are influencing each other.
Instead of Spaces, I’ll talk about “Stadium / Living Room“.
Ok?
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink” video podcast.
Originally by Bas de Baar from Project Shrink on February 3, 2010, 9:10am
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Availability of Post Project Conference session recordings has been extended
February 5th, 2010
|
Project Conference Attendees, We are pleased to announce a recent update of your post-conference experience. MyProjectConference the main hub of online activity for post-event conference information and session details availability has been extended by an additional 150 days until June 30, 2010! Project Conference 2009 attendees now have access to view all PPTs and session recording files until June 30, 2010! If you should have any questions regarding your MyPC access, please contact Microsoft Project Conference 2009 Customer Service during the hours of 8:00am – 5:00pm (PST), Monday through Friday at: +1 (800) 528-1668 – Toll Free (US & Canada) +1 (360) 253-2971 – Direct (International) +1 (360) 254-1667 – Fax We look forward to seeing you at the next conference!
The Microsoft Project Conference 2009 Team | projconf@microsoft.com |
Originally by Doug McCutcheon from Project business blog on February 5, 2010, 10:51am
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Data Differences between the Timesheet Cube & MSP_Project_Timesheet Cube in Microsoft Project Server 2007
February 5th, 2010
The fact that Project Server has two different "Timesheet" cubes, alone, is an understandable source of confusion for many users, but when people then discover that in most Project Server implementations where both of these contain actual work data, that most often these contain very different data they get really puzzled. This can be particularly noticeable when you look at the data summarized by resources or projects. While much of the task and assignment line-level data may appear to be identical, even this data can vary widely. Not only is this a source of confusion, it’s rather disconcerting to many new Project Server users who immediately become suspicious of all the data in Project Server 2007.
To get comfortable with the data differences you first have to understand that the data for these two cubes originate from different data sources. That’s why the Microsoft product team created two distinct cubes in the first place. The Timesheet Cube shows actual work reported through the timesheet system in Project Server 2007, which is completely isolated from the actual work record recorded in the project other than the fact that data entered through the timesheet system can be pushed through the My Tasks page and into the Project Plans themselves. The SP_Project_Timesheet shows the actual work record as it is recorded in the Project file. Because the product team wanted to make the configuration of Project Server 2007 as flexible as possible, you can choose to configure your system to collect time in the Timesheets without ever sending the information to project, or you can choose to send some information to the project, or you can configure Project Server 2007 to force all users to enter all time (Time entry by Timesheet only. Users will sync to update tasks option) through the timesheet and you can mandate that the actual work record in Project 2007 always be equal to the time collected in the Timesheets (Restrict updates to Project Web Access option). Of course, you can also choose to disable the Timesheet system, but then this data duplicity issue doesn’t apply.
There are numerous reasons why the data in these cubes are not always in sync, including some obscure bugs in the project client that caused alteration of actual work and that have just recently been resolved in the December 2009 CU. With that said, bugs are the least common reason for discrepancies unless you’re using the Restrict updates to Project Web Access option, which locks down the system rather tightly. Without applying that setting, project managers can update the project plans directly, which can cause actual work to change in many ways. For example, suppose a PM updates a task status directly in the project plan where a resource is assigned. This action causes the system to impute actual work for the assigned resource that will never show in the timesheet cube. As this is a very common practice, in many, if not most cases, you are very likely to see more actual work registered in the project plan than in the timesheets, unless of course, your PMs are also in the habit of deleting completed tasks, which has the exact opposite impact. Using the more restricted setting, however, puts the system into a very rigid and unforgiving state in its effort to maintain integrity between the Timesheet record and the Project record. Unless organizations have very experienced Microsoft Project practitioners operating a high-level of maturity with the tool, this setting is not practical because it causes most novice users untold grief in managing their plans.
Remember, also, that the Timesheet cube may contain actual work entered against Administrative task classifications and that this data shows only in the Timesheet cube and never makes it into a project record. If you use the Administrative time feature, you need to exclude this data in your analysis views in order to begin to compare roll-up data between the Timesheet cube and the SP_Project_Timesheet cube, which remains a problematic challenge unless you are willing to commit to the restrictive system options.
Originally from Project Server Help Blog: Posts on February 5, 2010, 10:24am
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CustomReportingCustomFieldMetadataChangeMessageFailed
February 5th, 2010
Originally from Colby Africa on February 5, 2010, 6:45pm
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DB Connection Library on Code Gallery
February 5th, 2010
Originally from Colby Africa on February 5, 2010, 6:45pm
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