Move entreprise calendars between instances

New week, new blog post! I guess most of you are back from holidays so I'm impatient to share this new post with you and have your comments!

My last Project Server implementation was quite a large and complex project since it involved thousands of users and gateways with HR and financial systems. Thus we needed to have many Project Server environments such as development, test, integration, training, pre-production and production. You can imagine that there are a lot of configurations required and it could be really time consuming to manage those environments. For example calendars might be tedious to manage with 6 environments, particularly in Canada where each province has its own days off. I guess it is pretty the same for the US or Australia...

So let me share share with you a trick to quickly and easily move calendars from an environment to another. 

Let's say that I have an enterprise calendar on my instance 1 and I want to copy it on a destination instance. Here is what you get in the server settings for enterprise calendars:

Figure 1: enterprise calendar to copy

Copy the calendar locally

The first step is to copy the calendar in a local file. Open Project Pro connected to instance 1 and open a blank new project. Click on Save-As and save the project locally selecting the second option: this is important since it will save in the project the enterprise calendars which are part of the global.

Figure 2: save the project locally with the global items

Just to be sure, you can open the project locally (not connected to any instance) and check in the project information dialog box that you do have the given calendar.

Figure 3: calendar imported in the local file

Configure the server settings for local calendars

Before importing the calendar to the destination instance, you have to enable the option for projects to use local base calendars from the server settings, additional server settings.

Figure 4: allow projects to use local base calendars

Import the local calendar

Open MS Project Pro connected to the second instance and open the project file with the local calendar. A procedure which might make sense would be to open the enterprise global and use the organizer to copy the calendar from the local file to the enterprise global. If you try to do so, you'll get the following error message which tells you that you have to use PWA to manage enterprise calendars..

Figure 5: message when trying to use the organizer to copy calendar to enterprise global

The trick here is to go to the Project tab, then "change working time". You can now select any calendars other than the standard one and add it to enterprise giving it a new name.

Figure 6: copy the local calendar to the destinnation instance

Of course you have to belong to a security group which has the correct global permission:

Figure 7: manage enterprise calendats global permission

Then if you go to the destination instance, you can see in PWA that the calendar has been added.

Figure 8: new calendar added to the destination instance

As you can see, in case you have many calendars to maintain between many PWA instances, this can be an easy way to proceed. This also allows keeping history and back-up of all enterprise calendars.

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!