Archive for October, 2009
Some useful Microsoft Project links to find content
30 October 2009
Been doing some documentation recently and collected a group of links relevant to the Project business. Thought I would share this with you. Let me know if you have any others.
Microsoft Blogs
- Brian Smith - Project support
- Project Programmability - Project API programming
- ITPRO – Christophe Fiessinger blog
- Project - Project engineers blog
- EPM Content - Technical content focused on EPM
- Doug McBlog - Project partners blog
- SharePoint Team - SharePoint teams blog
- MPUG Blog – Microsoft Project Users Group blog
Other
- Virtual PC Guy - (Hyper-V, Virtual PC and Virtual Server)
- John Howard - - (Hyper-V, Virtual PC and Virtual Server)
Sites
- Project Developer Portal - MSDN
- Project Server TechCenter - Technet
- Downloadable content for Project Server 2007
- Project 2007 (Office Online)
- Project Portfolio Server 2007 TechCenter
- www.microsoft.com/project - Main Project marketing site for 2010 and 2007
- Find a partner – Worldwide, find the location of a Microsoft EPM Specialized partner near you.
- EPM in market solutions – Find in-market partner solutions
- Corp sponsored solution scenarios – Discover IPM, PPM, CPIC and ALM
- Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solutions online tours
- Become a Microsoft EPM/PPM Microsoft Partner – Link to the Microsoft Partner Portal
Video Channels
- www.youtube.com/MSFTProject - Popular landing spot for Project videos
- www.microsoft.com/video - The Microsoft.com , coming soon, mirror site for video
- Project on Facebook Project Facebook presence, become a fan!
- http://twitter.com/MSFTProject Project Twitter account
Community
- http://www.mpug.com/ Microsoft Project User Group
PROJECT 2010
Popularity: unranked [?]
ANNOUNCING the launch of Project 2010 technical resource centers at TechNet and MSDN and Forums!
30 October 2009Public announcement (customer and partner ready)
We are pleased to announce the availability of the following Microsoft Project 2010 technical resources:
1. Project 2010 TechCenter
At http://technet.microsoft.com/projectserver/ the following areas are covered:
- Planning, Deploying and Operating Project 2010 Environment
- including Project 2010 hardware and software requirements and deployment guidance
· Upgrade and Migrating to Project 2010 through a brand new “Upgrade and migration” resource center
2. Project 2010 Developer Center
At http://msdn.microsoft.com/project/ developers will find growing list of resources including Project 2010 Beta Software Development Kit (SDK) as we move closer to Project 2010 Beta in November.
3. Project 2010 Forums
Get all your Project 2010 end-user, IT Professional and Developer questions answered by product experts from Microsoft and the community (Project MVPs):
- Project Professional 2010 General Questions and Answers: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/projectprofessional2010
- Project Server 2010 General Questions and Answers: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/projectserver2010
- Developer related Questions and Answers: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/projectprofessional2010,projectserver2010
Questions & Answers
Q: Great content! Is there a plan to grow it?
A: Yes, this is the first milestone of a journey, will be continually publishing new content with the upcoming Public Beta in November and until Project 2010 is released in the first half of 2010.
Popularity: unranked [?]
ANNOUNCING the launch of Project 2010 technical resource centers at TechNet and MSDN and Forums!
30 October 2009We are pleased to announce the availability of the following Microsoft Project 2010 technical resources, save these bookmarks!
TechNet Project 2010 TechCenter
At http://technet.microsoft.com/projectserver/default.aspx the following areas are covered for IT Professionals:
- Planning, Deploying and Operating Project 2010 Environment, including Project 2010 hardware and software requirements and deployment guidance
- Upgrade and Migrating to Project 2010 through a brand new “Upgrade and migration” resource center
MSDN Project 2010 Developer Center
At http://msdn.microsoft.com/project/ developers will find growing list of resources including Project 2010 Beta Software Development Kit (SDK) as we move closer to Project 2010 Beta in November.
Get all your Project 2010 end-user, IT Professional and Developer questions answered by product experts from Microsoft and the community (Project MVPs):
- Project Professional 2010 General Questions and Answers: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/projectprofessional2010
- Project Server 2010 General Questions and Answers: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/projectserver2010
Please not this is the first milestone of a journey, new content will continuously to these sites.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Announcing the release of the Microsoft Project and Project Server 2007 October 2009 Cumulative Update
30 October 2009Same guidance, resources and best practices as this: Announcing the release of the Microsoft Project and Project Server 2007 August Cumulative Update
Check out Brian’s blog post for more information: Project Server 2007: October 2009 Cumulative Updates (CU) are Available as well as this from the SharePoint team: October 2009 Cumulative Update Packages for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
| Title | ID | KB Url |
| Description of the Project 2007 hotfix package: October 27, 2009 | 975923 | http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975923 |
| Description of the Project Server 2007 hotfix package: October 27, 2009 | 974990 | http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974990 |
| Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Cumulative Update Server Hotfix Package: October 27, 2009 | 975002 | http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975002 |
| Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 Cumulative Update Server Hotfix Package: October 27, 2009 | 974988 | http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974988 |
Popularity: unranked [?]
SharePoint and Project Server ULS Viewer Tool Released
30 October 2009Just saw this tool reading this post: UlsViewer released – Available on MSDN Code Gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer
This rocks! written and tested by the best office developers, will help you troubleshoot your 2007 and 2010 farms!
ULSViewer allows users to open a ULS log file and display its contents in a user friendly format. Users can then perform advanced functions such as filtering, sorting, highlighting, loading logs, appending logs, etc in order to single out the data that is important to the user. This information can be used to diagnose problems with machines running ULS services, or to monitor machines and the events they create in realtime.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Microsoft Project vs Excel
29 October 2009BY: Tanya Foster
Two great products… each one has its own specialty, but so many people try to use them interchangeably. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people using Excel to schedule their projects. Don’t get me wrong, Excel is a great tool, but not necessarily as a scheduling tool. Project can do so much more for you regarding scheduling, resource management, cost, etc. than Excel can. And I’ve also seen people using Project no different than an Excel spreadsheet. Both of these products has their own special bells and whistles. Project has so many bells and whistles it’s hard to even know where to start with a list!
One of the things that Project can do that Excel can’t is reschedule your work for you. You tell Project how long the task should take, who will do it, and the actual start date, and it will reschedule that task if it needs to be. Now… could you do that in Excel? Sure… but it’s manual, whereas Project does this automatically. You can create an entire work breakdown structure with dependencies in Project. Can you do this in Excel? You can create a work breakdown structure, but the dependencies would be more difficult. Once you have your work breakdown structure in Project, all you do is determine which task is dependent on another one and click a button. Maybe you really like the reports that Excel gives you. You can do some of those same types of reports in Project. Or if you have an Excel formatted report that you just can’t live without, you can even export your data from Project into Excel and then create the same reports that you’re used to. That way you can let Project do the scheduling and use Excel to view and report on some of the data.
I’m all about keeping it simple! If I try to use Excel for any type of scheduling I typically spend more time and energy doing manually what Project can do for me automatically. Save yourself some time, energy and money! If you currently schedule with Excel, take a trial run at Project and see what you think. I think you’ll be glad that you did!
Popularity: unranked [?]
Description of the Office Project 2007 hotfix package (Project-x-none.msp): October 27, 2009
29 October 2009
Popularity: unranked [?]
Expand Your EPM Practice—Fast-Track Your Business with Practice Accelerator for Microsoft SharePoint and get ready for 2010!
28 October 2009
Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 (SharePoint) is the fastest-growing server product in Microsoft’s history. With more than 85 million licensed users, SharePoint is the market’s leading portal & collaboration server. As organizations around the world deploy SharePoint, they consider engaging deeply skilled Microsoft Partners to assist with their planning and deployments.
Practice Accelerator for Microsoft SharePoint is a service designed to build your practice around SharePoint solutions. Practice Accelerator focuses on building your capacity by enabling Partners to service the mid-market space at scale and delivered via Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Practice Accelerator provides a comprehensive framework consisting of customer-ready methodology, tools, and skills. This ensures that you are able to provide great experience to your customers on a consistent basis.
Practice Accelerator will help you jumpstart your SharePoint practice. Leverage Practice Accelerator to increase your revenue stream and enhance market positioning.
Upon completion you will be able to successfully identify customer requirements and scope, analyze, plan, and deploy SharePoint. This offering provides you with a detailed delivery framework covering every step from pre-engagement to post-delivery stages, including materials that you can leave with the customer. It also includes a series of tools, templates, best practices, hands-on labs and guides. This material will help provide architecture design as well as post-deployment maintenance and monitoring recommendations.
The Practice Accelerator for Microsoft SharePoint covers the following components:
Customer Engagement
Tools to elicit customer needs
Effectively scope the engagement
Design a solution that maps to customer needs
Customer leave-behinds for ongoing maintenance and governance
Architecture Guidance
Easily customizable reference architecture documents for you to design and provide to your customer
Project Guidance
Guidance and templates for planning and managing your customer’s projects
Planning & Design
Planning guides for providing guidance around decisions to be made regarding:
Physical and Logical Designs
Capacity Planning
Taxonomy and Information Architecture
SharePoint Security
Portals and Collaboration
Enterprise Search
Delivery Details
Cost: $4,000 US (or equivalent) per Partner
Duration: 16 hours total; 4 hours per day over 4 days
Number of attendees: Up to 4 consultants
North America
Time: 9:00 A.M.–1:00 P.M Pacific Time, Monday–Thursday (four days, four hours each day)
Upcoming dates:
- November 9-12
- November 16-19
- December 7-10
- December 14-17
United Kingdom
Time: 9:00-13:00 UK time. Monday–Thursday (four days, four hours each day)
Cost: £2400 plus VAT – GBP per partner (Up to four partner consultants per partner organization can attend for this fee.)
Upcoming dates:
- October 26-29
- November 23-26
- December 14-17
- January 25-28, 2010
- February 22-25, 2010
To register, https://partner.microsoft.com/40114791?msp_id=practiceaccelerator
For more information, contact pasales@microsoft.com .
Popularity: unranked [?]
Using Yammer For Frictionless Communication
27 October 2009In this episode of the Project Shrink podcast Hal Macomber explains how he and his colleagues are using Yammer at Lean Project Consulting (LPC). They are creating “frictionless communication” with this tool that is similar to Twitter. He puts the use of this tool into perspective with the other tools used and currently in use at LPC.
You can click here if the episode isn’t displayed below.
This recording is part of a session “Why Should You Care About Social Media?” at PMI Global Congress 2009 by the PMI New Media Council. Other parts of this session can be found here:
Collaboration With Skype, Vyew and Google Docs
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink” video podcast.
Using Yammer For Frictionless Communication
Popularity: unranked [?]
PMI Global Congress 2009
27 October 2009BY: Tanya Foster
I was able to attend the PMI Global Congress this year. I always enjoy this conference. You get to network with so many people and it’s nice to get to see some of the faces behind newsletters, blogs, etc. that I read. One thing I did this year that I haven’t done at this conference in the past is to “tweet”. Yes, you read it right… I said “tweet”. For those of you who don’t know what tweeting is… it’s updating your status on the ever popular social media site Twitter. You basically just type in what you’re doing, in 140 characters or less, and send your tweet to your followers. They can read your tweet, send you direct messages, etc. So Collin and I were playing dueling tweets this year. We were only in the main sessions together, but whenever we were, it was a race to see who could tweet the fastest! Usually he won, but that’s ok. It’s the content that counts, not the speed! J
After the first night of the conference was over, I logged onto Twitter from my trusty laptop and searched for some others that were tweeting from the conference. I found several, so I started following them (on Twitter, not at the conference! I’m not a stalker!). During breaks in the conference, I would read everybody’s tweets from my phone. I got to where I really looked forward to reading some of them and finding out what other people were doing at the conference. Then it just so happened, that I attended one of the sessions and low and behold, there were several people whose names I knew, but had never met. This session was on social media and there were several presenters, one was a fellow tweeter, one wrote a blog that I read all the time, the other does a podcast that I listen to. It might sound kind of silly, but it was almost like they were famous! I wanted to go up and meet them and tell them how much I enjoy their tweets, blog and podcast. If I’d have been thinking clearly I would have had them sign my autograph hound!
I really enjoyed most of the sessions that I went to this year. There were a couple that were just outstanding, but all in all, I think I was able to learn something in every one that I attended. I like to go through the exhibit hall and see the different things that are set up. I also take a free pen from all of the booths that have them so that I don’t have to buy any for next couple of years! Hey… it might sound silly, but some of these pens are awesome! This was a very good conference and I’m really glad that I was able to attend.
Popularity: unranked [?]