Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Shout what YOU need. but not too loud!

Hello everyone

Microsoft announced last week the availability of a community site to submit and prioritize ideas for the future of Project and Project Server.
This is a very good news which is using the same crowd-ideation system as Power BI and I really feel that this is beneficial to all the community to contribute to such idea listing and voting.

So please, have a look to:

While you are on the web site, you can either submit ideas:


Or you can vote for ideas. you have 10 available votes per email address and your vote are released as soon as the idea you voted for is implemented.

It's time to shout your ideas!

Enjoy!
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Thursday, April 2, 2015

Active Directory Tip 1 - Group Timer Job : Be Careful of the Save Button

Hello Everyone,

Today I will treat a strange behavior that causes me headaches.
While doing my Project Server 2013 configuration, I came across the configuration of the Active Directory Resource Pool and Group Synchronization.
I then configured the two timer jobs to execute the Resource Pool synchronization THEN the Group synchronization.
Here was my configuration in the central administration:

Project Web App: Synchronization of AD with the Enterprise Resource Pool job :
Project Web App: Synchronization of AD with security groups job :


But, after some days, I see that the group synchronization timer job changed its starting time to 12:00AM.

I finally found that it's NOT an automatic process which is causing the timer job to change change.

In the below screenshot that is available in the ACTIVE DIRECTORY GROUP SYNC OPTIONS  in the  PWA Server settings, you may be used to manually push the save or the save and synchronize buttons.
Be careful, starting from 2013, if you have the Enable Scheduled Synchronization set , this will RESET your Project Web App: Synchronization of AD with security groups timer job to the following:
This new setting may cause some issues as the group synchronization may start before the resource synchronization (I will explain what type of issue in my next post).

You may now to communicate the impact of the action to all people who have the capability of manually launch a group synchronization.

Hope this helps!

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Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Want to know more about what's in the reporting Database

Hello all

Long time no see!

Really short blog today, I wanted to report on specific information from the Business drivers and Portfolio priorization.
I used the Database Reference Schema to help me find where to find the data in the Reporting Database.
So, I would like to remind all my colleagues who want to access to Reporting Database that you can use the schema reference that can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/project_programmability/archive/2013/01/28/project-server-2013-reporting-database-rdb-schema-reference.aspx 


Hope this will help your report programmings

See you!
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014

No More Project1 !

It is with a lot of emotion that I discovered today that Project1 is no more automatically created in Project 2013 where it was always showing up at Project 2010 start-up!

2010 opening window:



2013 opening window:

For sure, if you're not selecting any project or pushing ESC in the backstage, Project 2013 will create a Project1 for you. But I see as a great improvement to be now able to open a project without always having this Project1 to close before!

I hope you share my enthusiasm!


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Thursday, October 9, 2014

Your Enterprise Global Doesn't Want to Save my Macro to Project Server 2013?

Hello everyone

Sorry with this blackout period.But, I'm still  happy to share interesting things I found.

Currently in a 2013 configuration, I wanted to upload to Enterprise Global two written macros to the EGlobal.
After a lot of trial to save the EGlobal after transferring the macro using the organizer, nothing is uploaded to the server.

Thanks to an old blog written by Pieter Veenstra, I managed to save my enterprise global.

Two possibilities :
Install the HotFix proposed by Microsoft or follow the below process to hack the system!


1- Open your Enterprise Global either using MS Project ( it has moved from PWA settings in 2010 to MS Project menu in 2013)
2- While the Enterprise Global is opened, go to the organizer


3-  Copy the content to the checked-out Enterprise Global

4- Create a dummy task in the enterprise global gantt chart view (be sure to not change the view, it can corrupt in some way your fragile Enterprise Global) 
 5- Delete the same task!

6-Close, save and check-in the Enterprise Global

Final- The Enterprise Global is now well saved to the server


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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Delegation in 2013 - Don't Misundurstand the Project Pro Message

One interesting feature Project Server has introduced in 2010 is the capability to substitute yourself to someone else using the delegation.
By the way, you cannot use it while in SharePoint Permission mode

One of the drawback is that this is only working in PWA interface (except for the Business Intelligence part).
Consequently, Project Professional will not allow you to connect to a server while you have an ongoing delegation session.
So now, let's imagine you're in a delegation session in the name of this famous John.

Then, you try to open your MS Project Pro connected to your server and, Surprise, a misleading message appears.

It's not that wrong message as you do have inadequate permissions but not really explicit!

So, next time a user call you with this kind of message, make sure they are not using the delegation in the meantime before trying to check network or permissions to the server!

Regards!
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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Manage Calendars using Recurrence Pattern

One of the challenge of planning with MS Project is to be accurate in the dates and vacations.
Though, statutory holidays coming every year needs to be taken into account!

Let's take the example of the 4 of the US holidays found in Wikipedia:
Official Name Date
New Year's Day January 1 (Fixed)
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Third Monday in January
Inauguration Day First January 20 following a Presidential election
Good Friday The Friday before(western) Easter
Interesting in those holidays is that they happen every year. Some can be set recurring, some not:
January first is always the January first (hopefully for those who are partying all New Year eve).
Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday is the 3rd Monday of January. Strange for an anniversary but still, the public holiday is like that.
For the Inauguration Day, this is not possible to predict when it will happen, recurrence will not help in that case
The Good Friday is arriving before Easter, which is again unpredictable and though, the recurrence will not help either.

MS Project and though Project Server is proposing a nice feature in setting recurrence to exceptions in calendar. 
You will first have to go to the Calendar setting:

After creating an exception, while clicking to the details detail button, you will get the following window:

Now, see how to set the above defined recurring and not recurring holidays.
January first:

Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday:

Inauguration Day:

Good Friday:


Now you can declare enterprise calendars with mostly recurring statutory holidays. Some will still need to be entered one by one.
Obviously, this can be configured for Project Server calendars in going to enterprise calendars in the PWA settings

In the next future, I will share with you some calendars until 2020!


Additional note thanks to Gary Chefetz comment:
While creating recurrence, you will have to identify exceptions such as first of January falling on a Sunday. Then a creation of a specific calendar exception will be necessary. The easy way to identify such case would be to check each calendar exception year after year and verify which day it falls.

Furthermore, try to limit your calendars horizon to your projects horizon to not overload the server and the database with unnecessary information


Hope you will love to avoid defining calendar exceptions every year!
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Monday, May 26, 2014

Master the Multiple Choice Custom Fields in your Excel Reports!

It happens sometime that there is a need to report information stored in a Multiple Choice Custom Field:

If this happened to you, you must have seen that the custom field is not part of the standard views such as MSP_Project_UserView.
You will have instead a specific view for each Multiple Choice Custom Field named MSPCFPRJ_<CustomFieldName>_AssociationView.

Then, you will have to write down a clever request giving you the list of choices made by projects.
Don't worry, you can find this clever information right below!
SELECT Proj.ProjectName,
       lt.MemberFullValue AS 'VLookupField'
FROM dbo.MSP_EpmProject_UserView AS Proj 
LEFT OUTER JOIN [dbo].[MSPCFPRJ_<YOUR_CUSTOM FIELD NAME>_AssociationView] AS MVassoc -- view for multi value field 
ON proj.ProjectUID = MVassoc.EntityUID 
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.MSP_EpmLookupTable AS lt 
ON MVassoc.LookupMemberUID = lt.MemberUID 
order by    ProjectName asc

I would recommend to do the post treatment in the excel itself. it would be possible to link the below request with the one that will gather all your project information but, be careful, it will multiply the number of lines per the number of choices made on projects.

Then, I recommend to create a specific tab in your excel report to show the information
This will return you something like this while rendered in an Excel pivot table with data connection:
Be sure to have checked the "Repeat All Items Label" check box

Now, you may want to return these information on another sheet gathering other project information.
To do so, I will create a one cell concatenation of the selected project.
First step is to gather the information based on the project on several cells

The formula to gather several lines of a specific project is quite ugly:
{=IF(ISERROR(INDEX($A$1:$B$5000,SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$5000=$G$4,ROW($A$1:$A$5000)),ROW(1:1)),2)),"",INDEX($A$1:$B$5000,SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$5000=$G$4,ROW($A$1:$A$5000)),ROW(1:1)),2))}

$A$1:$B$5000 = Where to search
$A$1:$A$5000 = Where are the project names
$G$4 = The project name to search
1:1 = The line number you want to fetch
Be careful, this is array formulas, that means that you will have to click on CTRL+ENTER to validate your formula!

Here is the overall list of formulas, as you can see, only the parameter number changed (I return here a maximum of 12 entries)

To finish, the easiest part is to put all that in a single cell with the following formula.
To render it nice, I created a second column containing the separator so that a separator is only created while a value is returned. I then concatenated the overall in a cell


Separator cells are looking if there is a value after the current one and if yes displays the separator:
=IF(G6<>"",$H$19,"")

Result cell is a concatenation of the entire table:
=CONCATENATE(G5,H5,G6,H6,G7,H7,G8,H8,G9,H9,G10,H10,G11,H11,G12,H12,G13,H13,G14,H14,G15,H15,G16)

Tips: you can use =CHAR(10) as separator to render in a cell on several lines

You are now able to render multi-choice custom field in your excel services report!

Find here an example of all I just said in an excel file!

Help from Microsoft : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee767688.aspx
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Monday, May 12, 2014

Multilines administrative time categories in PS2013 timesheet

Most of the timesheet improvments brought by Project Server 2013 are for the end users. But anyway what's a good for the end user is obviously good for the administrators, isn't it? Since we do like those "win-win" new features, we will go in this new post through the multiline administrative time categories. Note that in PS2013, the administrative time has been renamed "non-project activities".

A common need from our customers is the ability to manage in their timesheets tasks that are not personal tasks, neither on a specific project. That's why the administrative time was introduced since 2010 version. As it is a pretty straight forward and simple feature, you might ask "what could be new with the administrative time feature?".

So let me ask how do you manage support activities with tickets? The best solution is obviously an integration with Team Foundation Server, but you might not have it in your organization or you might not have to budget for the PS/TFS integration. Thus the common way to manage tickets in previous version was to manage a specific support project, which was tedious due to the project's granularity.

The new multiline feature expands the administrative time categories to take into account this type of work allowing multiline to be added to an administrative category in a given timesheet. Below is the procedure to implement multilines administrative time.

The first step is to define your new administrative categorie (non-project activity) in the server settings, checking the "Allow Multipe Lines" checkbox. In this case, it is adviced to flag the ticket activity as "approval required". Note also that the administrative time categories can now be department specific.
Figure 1: new multiline administrative time category creation

Then when the user goes to his current timesheet, he'll be able to insert one or more tickets activities not related to any project, giving a custom name.
Figure 2: current user timesheet
Figure 3: inserting a noin-project activity in the current timesheet
Picking up the "ticket" category, the user will be able to enter a specific name for the ticket activity.
Figure 4: entering a custom name for the "ticket" activity
 After entering as many tickets as required, the timesheet will look like this:
Figure 5: timesheet with 3 "ticket" activities
Grouping by billing category will give to the user a clearer view of the ticket activities in the timehseet versus the other administrative lines and the standard (project) lines:
Figure 6: timesheet grouped by billing categories
As another nice improvment, we can mention that the non-project lines are now carried forward to timesheets for future periods, supporting in the best way possible this new multiline administrative time categories.

Hope you'll try and enjoy it. I'll be pleased to hear from you other use cases than the ticket use case presented here in this post.
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Friday, May 9, 2014

Do not open Projects in Edit Mode unexpectedly in Project Server 2013


If you are used to open projects in Project Professional in 2010 by double clicking on a project in the open window, you should know that the project is by default opened in edit mode and though checked-out.
Project Server 2013 is bringing here a nice improvement that I, as administrator, am really happy to welcome.
All Projects in Project Professional are by default opened in read-only mode and can be opened in edit whenever you want.


Then, while opened in Read Only , as for Office in 2010 and 2013, Microsoft introduced the "Notification bar" in Project 2013 allowing you to check-out the file.



I already hear you saying: "What about my modifications made while in read-only?". Don't worry, Project is clever enough to just check-out the project without reloading it. Any modification made in read-only mode are kept while checking out the project file


What if a co-worker changed the project in the meantime? Project will ask you to save you changes.


if you choose yes, it will ask you to find a place to save it before checking-out the file


You will have to pay attention while using the "Recent Projects" opening, by default, it will check-out the file for you!





From PWA the options are still the same : while clicking on the little workplan icon, the project will open in Edit mode to your computer MS Project and clicking the project link will open in Read only in PWA.

If you want to open in another manner, you'll have to select the line (not clicking the project link but next to it, this, I guess you're familiar) and select the proper open option from the rubban

You will never again lock a file without noticing it!
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