Archive for April, 2008
100 Posts Today!
30 April 2008According to my blog dashboard this is my 100th post! So to celebrate I thought I would be totally self-indulgent (so nothing new there) and ignore Project and talk about something else. It has been fun keeping the blog going and also great to have communication with so many of you – either through the blog (600+ comments, and rising) or on support cases or at the Project conference. Keep the comments coming – and the answers too, as I will sometimes post questions I don’t have the answers for.
If you didn’t already know I am from the UK, but moved to the Seattle area about 5 1/2 years ago and live on the Snoqualmie Valley. My journey to and from the office gives me the chance to see some of the great beauty that the Pacific North West has to offer – and even this time of year when it has been known to rain we still get great mountain views at some point on most days. One of my other interests is photography – and in fact my first career was in the research labs formulating developers and fixers when photography was still “wet”. I knew that wouldn’t last – so on to computers and digital! I was recently very fortunate to visit Hawaii for the first time – so took lots of photos – but it is testament to the beauty of the local countryside that for my desktop wallpaper I have chosen recent local pictures I have taken over the Hawaiian paradise.
This first one is looking East from my house just before sunset. The second one was last Friday evening – when a tree that will regularly have Bald Eagles perched in it had 7! So back out with my camera to get some pictures – including this one of an immature bald eagle in flight.
I know we have other keen and very capable photographers in the Project community and Jack Dahlgren has posted some spectacular ones too http://zo-d.com/blog/archives/architecture/bay-bridge-at-sunrise.html.
So posting 101 will be back on topic, but I might just post the occasional photo too…
Popularity: 1% [?]
Microsoft Project PSI FX
29 April 2008
Popularity: 1% [?]
Project Fields and Their Descriptions
28 April 2008Modifying your Project views just got a little easier. Deciding on what field (column) to add is sometimes a hit or miss proposition. Many of the fields sound the same. After all, you don’t want to confuse the BCWS field with the Budget Cost field. Now with a new Help article that lists all the fields in one place with useful descriptions, you can make better decisions about the kind of information you want to display in a view.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA102369301033.aspx?pid=CH100788901033
Popularity: 1% [?]
Enable Project Pro Client Side Logging
27 April 2008"WinprojLog"=string:"c:\\temp\\"
"DebugCategory"=dword:ffffffff
"DebugLevel"=dword:ffffffff
"DebugLoadSerCategory"=dword:000003ed
Popularity: 1% [?]
Include Project Summary Task by Default
27 April 2008
Popularity: 1% [?]
Beware of April hotfix.
25 April 2008The april hotfix KB950816 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;950816&sd=rss&spid=11388 changing the way how project workspaces are synchronized.
In post SP1,
- Users permissions were removed when admin edited resource(Bug 1),
- When permission synchronization is disabled and project is published(FullPublish) from PSI user permissions are also synchronized (Bug 2 ) ,
but because permission were synchronized correctly( user permissions were not removed from objects which do not inherit permission. ) i didn’t escalated this bug.
===========UPDATE =============
We tested this synchronization again there wasn’t difference between Sp1, post SP and April hotfix, user premissions were removed from document library, I have no idea why user permission were not removed from DocLib when i tested this bahavior first time.
result:
Behavior of project server 2007 without april hotfix isn’t better.
=============================
I escalated first issue(bug 1) to premier support (SRZxxxxxxxxx), but Microsoft told me:
With regard to the original problem, we also see in our test build the behaviour which you describe in your case.
Our current view is that this software is working as designed.
"By design", does not necessarily mean that a particular feature has been explicitly designed in such a manner as the way in which it behaves. It is a more generic term. It may be better put by stating that, due to the inherent design of the product, the behaviour of a particular feature is behaving as expected, ergo it is "By design". As is with each and every piece of software, every eventuality cannot be accounted for in the design stage. So, similarly, for something that may not have been accounted for in the original design of the product/feature, but is still behaving as would be expected, this would be deemed as being "by design".
For something to not be by design, then this would mean that a feature had been explicitly designed in a certain way and that the subsequent behaviour does not match that design requirement.
So it means that I have to wait until same important customer in US will have the same problem.
As result of this incident we disabled permission synchronization everywhere but now i tested April Hot fix and it’s a catastrophe.
Repro steps:
-
Disable permission synchronization.
-
break security inheritance on Document Library
-
Publish project plan from PSI(fullpublish)
After this steps, user permissions are removed from documents, document libraries and folders which do not inherit permissions, and there is no way how to disable this Feature 
===========UPDATE============
There isn’t difference in synchronization between april hotfix and Sp1, in both cases permissions are synchronized when synchronization is disabled.
============================
Take a look WMV, AVI (xvid) .
Popularity: 2% [?]
Microsoft Launches WorldWide Simulated Robotics Competition
25 April 2008Un-related to EPM 
but very cool: http://www.robochamps.com
Today Microsoft unveils RoboChamps (www.robochamps.com), a simulated robotics league that is open to academics, hobbyists and developers from around the world, that demonstrates the power of the Microsoft platform to enable a broad range of developers to explore new ways to use .NET for robotics programming.
RoboChamps is built on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio(MSRDS) 2008 CTP, and uses that product’s robust, physics enabled simulation environment to remove the barriers of entry that exist for many today. This simulated league provides individuals with immersive 3-d environments, simulated versions of robots, and compelling scenario-specific challenges where they can win real robots. Environments range from a maze to the surface of the planet Mars to downtown driving to robot rescue to soccer. The top four finalists will be flown to PDC, where the competition moves to the real world and participants apply their code to real robots.
The audience for this is breadth, including professional, hobbyist, and academic developers – and all are eligible to compete and win real robots. MSRDS 2008 is .NET based, so between people having pre-existing .NET skills and simulation reducing the costs of entry, this is available to most people. For those that don’t see the connection to the Enterprise, MSRDS is being picked up and used in compelling scenarios by the likes of MySpace, WalMart, Tesco, and others (all but MySpace is Microsoft confidential)
More information:
- Website – www.RoboChamps.com
- Channel 9 video – http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=399952
- .NET Rocks Podcast – http://perseus.franklins.net/dotnetrocks_0336_marc_mercuri.wma
- On10.net video – http://www.on10.net/blogs/tina/Robo-Champs-My-robot-is-bigger-then-your-robot/
Popularity: 1% [?]
Changing the Project Manager
24 April 2008
During the lifetime of a project it is sometimes necessary to change the Project Manager (due to a leave of absence). The process to do this has changed between 2003 and 2007.
There are three areas to be concerned with
1. Changing the Project Manager; Changing the status manager; replacing any PM resources.
Before you start on any of the above, make sure any updates to the project have been accepted, and that any changes have been fully published. This results in lots of emails too, so worth making team members aware of what is happening.
1. Change the Project Manager
This is done in PWA. Select the project and Edit the Project Properties, and change the Owner to reflect the new Project Manager.
2. If necessary, change the Status Manager.
As the new project manager, open the project in Project Professional. Insert the Status Manager Column, and change the status manager for each task to be the new project manager.
Note that it is not possible to change all the tasks at once, but it is possible to use CTRL-D to copy the changed status manager field down.
3. If the old PM has assignments on the task, then these need to be changed too. There are 3 scenarios for the task
a. The task is completed and has zero remaining work - these tasks will not be effected.
is partially completed, therefore has Actual Work and Remaining work values associated with it.
c. The task is not yet started.
evrkw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1puCOdCyzDKtHDW1SbxsSQZGJgsG98Z-KaSe5vXUTtuz1IZSFLKLe2-NtZSLg4Md85Y-Nb5IoCpwPM9A4cguMbEn-GDo6WlwrD?PARTNER=WRITER”>
The approach to replacing resources for all three scenarios is the same, and this should be done by using the Replace function within the Build Team from Enterprise Tool.
Here we are going to replace Ralls Kim with Allen Tony, by highlighting them both and clicking on the Replace button. If Ralls Kim already has actual work associated with a task, then the following information box appears.
If a task is 100% complete, Project asks if you want to move the work to the new resource. Note it doesn’t tell you which task, and the correct answer is Cancel.
For Task 1 which already had actual work on it, Project assigns the remaining work to the new resource. This is shown in the split lower split window for the Task 1. (in our system here Allen Tony has limited availability so the task has been been split and automatically rescheduled). The actual work completed by Ralls Kim has remained in place.
Finally, Save and Publish the project to make Team Members aware of their new responsibilities.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Beware of April hotfix.
24 April 2008The april hotfix KB950816 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;950816&sd=rss&spid=11388 changing the way how project workspaces are synchronized.
In post SP1,
- Users permissions were removed when admin edited resource(Bug 1),
- When permission synchronization is disabled and project is published from PSI user permissions are also synchronized (Bug 2 ) , but because permission were synchronized correctly( user permissions were not removed from objects which do not inherit permission. ) i didn’t escalated this bug.
I escalated first issue(bug 1) to premier support (SRZxxxxxxxxx), but Microsoft told me:
With regard to the original problem, we also see in our test build the behaviour which you describe in your case.
Our current view is that this software is working as designed.
"By design", does not necessarily mean that a particular feature has been explicitly designed in such a manner as the way in which it behaves. It is a more generic term. It may be better put by stating that, due to the inherent design of the product, the behaviour of a particular feature is behaving as expected, ergo it is "By design". As is with each and every piece of software, every eventuality cannot be accounted for in the design stage. So, similarly, for something that may not have been accounted for in the original design of the product/feature, but is still behaving as would be expected, this would be deemed as being "by design".
For something to not be by design, then this would mean that a feature had been explicitly designed in a certain way and that the subsequent behaviour does not match that design requirement.
So it means that I have to wait until same important customer in US will have the same problem.
As result of this incident we disabled permission synchronization everywhere but now i tested April Hot fix and it’s a catastrophe.
Repro steps:
-
Disable permission synchronization.
-
break security inheritance on Document Library
-
Publish project plan from PSI
After this steps, user permissions are removed from documents, document libraries and folders which do not inherit permissions, and there is no way how to disable this Feature
Take a look WMV, AVI (xvid) .
Popularity: 2% [?]
Creating or Viewing Views in Data Analysis can cause Analysis Services to become unresponsive
23 April 2008At a previous client, I encountered an issue where, when creating or viewing certain views in Data Analysis, the Analysis Services service would spike in processor/memory utilization and become unresponsive.
I have recently discovered tghat this is a known issue in environments that have an interaction between Office Web Components and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services with Service Pack 2 (which means Project Server).
Although I’m not 100% sure, I believe the KB that covers this issue is KB936251. The symptoms seem to fit.
At any rate, I have been told that the resolution was included way back in SQL Server 2005 Cumulative Update 2. I recommend that you install the current CU, which is CU7, due to the number of fixes it contains.
Discuss this post on the EPMFAQ Forums
© Stephen Sanderlin for EPMFAQ, 2008. | Permalink
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