Archive for February, 2007
What happened to the URL at the bottom of my alerts?
27 February 2007They’re gone? Yes, it’s true. They’ve been removed in the 2007 release from all alerts and reminders.
Why? We had several reports where providing this link to the end user to navigate to PWA was creating problems. The base issue was which url is correct for a given user?
For example, you have a system with both intranet/extranet access or are using a mixed authentication methods (windows, forms, etc.). For each access or authentication method, you would use different urls for access.
Add the additional example of one user forwarding an alert to another user, who uses a different url for access. As you can see, the potential for a messy situation was high.
So, we removed putting the URL by default for those customers who had these situations.
For customers who do not have a mixed environment, you have a painless way to put the PWA url back on the bottom of the alerts.
To add the link to the bottom of the alert, as Project Server administrator, navigate to Settings, Alerts and Reminders. You will see the screen below. A link to PWA can be added within the email footer. When the alert is mailed, it will be treated as a hyperlink.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Project Server Jobs
26 February 2007
Ok, with the help of Indeed I got the Job Roll working on the right…
Project Server expertise is very rare which can be good thing - if you know who’s look for Project Server expertise. The flip side is, it is rare enough that it’s hard to find where the opportunities are. So check out […]
Popularity: 10% [?]
New Site Features
26 February 2007This experiment is turning out well, and I’ll continue to add some functionality of interest to people that work with MS Project Server. On the left sidebar you’ll notice I added some Amazon books (hopefully I’ll get to review some of them soon when I get a copy). Not sure if I’ll rotate others in, […]
Popularity: 10% [?]
Managing Cross Project Dependencies with Deliverables
25 February 2007Deliverables is a new feature that shipped in Project Professional 2007. Deliverables provides the ability to publish key dates to a SharePoint site and for others to consume these keys dates within their project plan. This feature helps you to manage cross project dependencies. A project manager can define deliverables within their project plan using Project Professional and have the dates automatically published to a Deliverable SharePoint list within the Project’s workspace. This allows other project manager to take dependencies on the published deliverables within their own Project Plans. When there is a change with a deliverable, such as a change in the finish date, all the project managers who have taken a dependency on the deliverable get informed of the change with the deliverable when they open their project plan. Deliverables provide a way to loosely tie projects together.
This diagram illustrates deliverables at a high level:
When a project manager creates a deliverable or a dependency on a deliverable they have the option to link it to a task. When a deliverable or dependency is linked to a task, it shows an icon beside the task name and displays bars on the Gantt chart. It is important to note that the dates of the task are not tightly coupled with the dates of the deliverable. This is to allow the project manager to work with his/her schedule without altering the dates of the deliverable. It is by design that the project manager needs to explicitly update the deliverable dates. The below screen shot is a project plan with deliverables and dependencies:
So know that you have an idea what Deliverables are, let’s work through an example. The example that I like to use is the release schedule of large software development project, such as Microsoft Office, which has several beta releases before the actual shipment of the product. The overall schedule is managed in a single project plan, but there are many teams, such as Project, Excel, etc, that adheres to the overall schedule, but requires their own detailed schedule that is specific to them. An Office schedule that is just an example that I made up and has no meaning what so ever, may look like this:
Product teams are very interested in the Beta 1, Beta 2 and RTM dates and they want to be able to easily keep track of these dates. In order for this to happen, the project manager for the Office schedule must create deliverables for these tasks. Before the PM creates deliverables, they are going have to publish the project to Project Server and create a workspace for the project. To do this:
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Click File à Publish…
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On the “Publish Project” dialog make sure the “Create a workspace for this project is selected”:
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Click Publish
t is published and the workspace is created for the project, the PM ready to create deliverables. To create a deliverable the PM will have to follow these steps:
- Click on Collaborate à Manage Deliverables:
- Click on Add Deliverable:
- First, Select the task you want to link to the Deliverable, then click on “Link to selected task” and click done:
Note: The PM can change the start and finish dates for the deliverables without affecting the dates for the tasks. The deliverable name and dates are loosely coupled with the task name and dates. This allows the PM to publish different names and dates from what is in their project plan giving them greater control.
The PM for the Office schedule would repeat these steps for each deliverable they want to create. Once they have completed creating the deliverables for Beta 2 and RTM the schedule should look like this:
As you can see from the schedule, there are red bars on the Gantt chart that represent each deliverable. There are also informational icons beside each task indicating that there is a deliverable linked to the task. Now that the PM has created these deliverables, other PMs can view these deliverables from the workspace for the project:
Since the deliverables are published to a SharePoint list, there are many built in benefits. Users can easily setup alerts, create RSS feeds, add additional columns, etc. It is important to note that if you change a deliverable from the SharePoint List, it will give the PM the option to sync the change next time they open their project in Project Professional.
PMs can also now consume these deliverables as dependences from within their own project plans. Going back to our example, the Excel team will want to take dependencies on the Beta 1, Beta 2 and RTM deliverables from the Office schedule. This time I am only going to create a very simple project plan with three tasks that represent the Excel team’s project plan. To create a dependency on a deliverable, the PM does not have to publish the project or create a workspace. They only have to do the following steps:
- Click Collaborate à “Manage Dependencies on Deliverables”:
- Click “Add new dependency”:
- Select “Office Schedule” from the Drop Down
- Select the task to link the dependency to, click on the deliverable, check the “Link to selected task” and click done:
Now a dependency has been created that has been linked to Task A and is dependent on the Beta 1 deliverable from the Office Schedule. These steps will have to be performed for each deliverable, which in this example is Beta 1, Beta 2 and RTM. If you have a large number of deliverables to create from already existing tasks, I suggest you read my programmability post on deliverables:
http://blogs.msdn.com/project_programmability/archive/2007/02/19/working-with-deliverables.aspx
You will notice that the dependency dates and the task dates are not aligned. The dependency dates are also loosely coupled with the task dates. This is shown in the below image of the Excel project where the yellow Gantt bars show the dependency dates are much further out then the task dates shown by the blue Gantt bar:
Now that we have two projects, one with published deliverables and the other with dependencies on the published deliverables, let’s work through an example where one of the deliverables change. Within the Office schedule there is a deliverable, Beta 1, which has a finish date of March 20th 2007. To change the finish date to March 30th 2007:
- Click Collaborate à “Manage Deliverables”
- Select the “Beta 1” Deliverable
- Click “Edit Deliverable”:
- Change the finish date to 3/30/2007 and click Done
Now go to the Excel team Project to see how this change has affected the dependency:
- Click Collaborate à “Manage Dependencies on Deliverable”:
The red exclamation mark indicates to the PM that the deliverable has change. If you hold your mouse over the dependency the follow information windows will pop up showing in red what has changed:
- Click on the drop down arrow and click “Accept Change from Server”
Note that the dependency date is now 3/30/2007 and is back in sync with the Beta 1 deliverable.
Hopefully that gives you an idea on how deliverables feature works. This feature truly provides a flexible way to loosely couple projects together that are not affected by the scheduling engine. I have only given a short overview on how to get started with deliverables. Once you start to play around with them, I am sure you will find great uses for the feature.
Chris Boyd
Popularity: 6% [?]
Creating Deliverable Reports
25 February 2007I have had many questions with regards to the Deliverables feature and reporting. If your not familiar with Deliverables, I suggest you take a look at my blog post on the Project blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/project/archive/2007/02/24/deliverables.aspx
Just like all other project data, when a project plan is published, the data makes it way to the reporting database. This allows you to create some very useful reports on deliverables and dependencies. To get started with reporting, you may want to read through this post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/project_programmability/Default.aspx?p=2
In this post, I am only going to provide some background information on Deliverables and a couple of queries to get you started with creating your own reports. To begin with, these are the views and tables that are most commonly used for Deliverable reports:
| MSP_EpmProject_UserView | ||||||||||
| This view shows all the projects. Commonly you will join the Project UID in this view with the Project UID or the Relationship UID from the other views. By doing this you can get information about the project the deliverable or dependency is associated with, such as the name of the project. | ||||||||||
| MSP_WssDeliverableToProjectLinks_UserView | ||||||||||
| This view lists all the published deliverables, not the dependencies. In this view you can get information such the UID for the project a deliverable is associated with and the start and finish date of a deliverable. | ||||||||||
| MSP_WssDeliverableToTaskLinks_UserView | ||||||||||
| This is the same at the MSP_WssDeliverableToProjectLinks_UserView except that is has additional fields for deliverables that are linked to tasks. This allows you to report on task details for the associated deliverable. For example, you could use the task information to write a report that shows all deliverables where the deliverable finish date is before the task finish date. | ||||||||||
| MSP_WssListItemAssociation | ||||||||||
| This view shows all the different associates with risks, issues and deliverables. Here you are going to want to look at the relationship type ID. The relationship type ID tells you if it is a deliverable or a dependency and if it is linked to a task or not. It is also where you can find if a dependency exists. | ||||||||||
| MSP_WssRelationshipType | ||||||||||
This table lists the different types. These types refer to risks, issues and deliverables. For deliverables and dependencies, the following types are important:
|
There are a set of common queries that user tend to want when creating a report for deliverables. This first query is a simple list of all the deliverables and what project they are associated with:
SELECT ProjectName As ‘Project Name‘, Title As ‘Deliverable‘, StartDate As ‘Start Date‘, FinishDate As ‘ Finish Date‘ FROM MSP_WssDeliverableToProjectLinks_UserView Inner Join MSP_EpmProject_UserView On MSP_WssDeliverableToProjectLinks_UserView.ProjectUID = MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectUID
The following query lists all the projects that have taken dependencies on a deliverable for given project. For the query to work, you need to set ProjectSelect.
SELECT DeliverableProj.ProjectName AS SelectedProject, DependancyProj.ProjectName AS DependentProject, DeliverableLinks.Title, DeliverableLinks.StartDate, DeliverableLinks.FinishDate FROM MSP_EpmProject_UserView AS DeliverableProj INNER JOIN MSP_WssListItemAssociation ON DeliverableProj.ProjectUID = MSP_WssListItemAssociation.ProjectUID INNER JOIN MSP_EpmProject_UserView AS DependancyProj ON MSP_WssListItemAssociation.RelatedProjectUID = DependancyProj.ProjectUID INNER JOIN MSP_WssDeliverable AS DeliverableLinks ON MSP_WssListItemAssociation.ListItemUID = DeliverableLinks.DeliverableUniqueID WHERE (MSP_WssListItemAssociation.ProjectUID <> MSP_WssListItemAssociation.RelatedProjectUID) AND (DeliverableProj.ProjectName = @ProjectSelect)
This last query lists all the projects that a given project is dependent on. Again, you need to set ProjectSelect for the query to work.
SELECT DependancyProj.ProjectName AS SelectedProject, DeliverableProj.ProjectName, DeliverableLinks.Title, DeliverableLinks.StartDate, DeliverableLinks.FinishDate FROM MSP_WssListItemAssociation INNER JOIN MSP_EpmProject_UserView AS DependancyProj ON MSP_WssListItemAssociation.RelatedProjectUID = DependancyProj.ProjectUID INNER JOIN MSP_EpmProject_UserView AS DeliverableProj ON MSP_WssListItemAssociation.ProjectUID = DeliverableProj.ProjectUID INNER JOIN MSP_WssDeliverable AS DeliverableLinks ON MSP_WssListItemAssociation.ListItemUID = DeliverableLinks.DeliverableUniqueID WHERE (MSP_WssListItemAssociation.RelatedProjectUID <> MSP_WssListItemAssociation.ProjectUID) AND (DependancyProj.ProjectName = @ProjectSelect)
To take a look at the last two queries in real reports, check out the Project Give and Get Reports in the Report Pack:
This should be a good start with creating Deliverable reports. If you come up with some interesting queries for creating Deliverable reports, please share them by posting them as comments!
Chris Boyd
Tags: Project Server Reporting Deliverables
Popularity: 5% [?]
Project Blog Search…or Why Treb Gatte Kicks Ass
24 February 2007Treb is a genius (or he has way, way too much free time) because he poked around with creating macros within the Microsoft Live search engine to create a special Live search page that searches just the blogs and other community sites that revolve around Project and Project Server. You can find it here.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Monitoring Tools for Project Server 2007
23 February 2007I’m just playing around with both the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 Management Pack for MOM 2005 and also the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Nothing much to report just yet, but I’d love to hear comments on how you are finding these tools. The Best Practices Analyzer does have quite a few specific rules for Project Server 2007 - and the plan is that we will extend the rule sets for both of these products as we come across new “gotchas”. Let us know if you think we are missing stuff already.
A couple of early “gotchas” that might also get you are:-
- MOM 2005 Workgroup SP1 doesn’t play nicely with SQL Server 2005 - you need to do an unattended install and then all is well - otherwise you can spend a long time clicking Next on the SQL Server instance selection page of the wizard… See KB 925480 for more details.
- The Best Practice Analyzer has an issue getting to SharePoint and Project Server databases that happen to be in named instances - a fix is in the early part of the pipeline. Let me know if you run into this one.
There are evaluations available for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 SP1 .
Once I’ve had these running for a while I’ll report back on how they worked for me.
Technorati Tags: Project Server 2007
Popularity: 5% [?]
Live.com Project Search Page
23 February 2007I can’t imagine there are too many people who read my blog that don’t also read Treb’s postings from the Project product group - but just in case you missed it Treb has done some really cool stuff with Live.com’s macros for search. Take a look and try it out at http://search.live.com/macros/tggprojectserver/projectsearch
Enjoy!
Technorati Tags: Project Server 2007
Popularity: 5% [?]
Project Search Page
23 February 2007Previously, you received an OPML file to help you read all of the great content being created by our community. Probably, soon after, you wished you had a way to search for posts related to a specific topic.
Now you can. With the help of our Live.com’s search macro functionality, I created the following custom search engine.
http://search.live.com/macros/tggprojectserver/projectsearch
It will search across all of the Project Community web sites for a given topic. To learn more about search macros, visit http://search.live.com/macros
Enjoy!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Added - newsgroups
22 February 2007
Made some edits in the template… you can now sign up for updates via email (on the right) and add RSS with some feedburner feeds. Also, on the left column you’ll see links to Microsoft Newsgroups supporting Project Server. They are slow, but it’s an important resource.
In the near future I hope to add a […]
Popularity: 10% [?]