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:

https://microsoftproject.uservoice.com

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!

PowerBI Now Available on Windows Phones 10

It is my turn to wish all a joyful 2016.
I've been quite quiet for the past year but one of my 2016 wish is to share my knowledge with you all.
One of my point of interest since I moved from Canada to Australia is the great revolution is pushing in data analytics and more especially Power BI

So let's start now!

Just before NYE, The Power BI team announced Power BI for Windows 10 Mobile devices. I was waiting for a while as I have a Windows phone myself. Unfortunately, it is not working on my Nokia Windows 8 phone :(.

You can find the article here from where I extracted some screenshots
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/12/30/announcing-the-power-bi-app-for-windows-10-mobile.aspx

As of now, Power BI Application is available for 

• Windows 10 PC, Tablet and Phone
• Apple iPhone and iPad
• Android Phone (4.4+) 

  

Enjoy

Project ID available!

Hi and welcome back in the Project world after the holidays! First of all, I wish you all a very good year and to achieve all the success you deserve in your professional and personal life!

Just a quick post for starting the new year about the project ID. This new feature which has been requested for years by customers is finally available. It has been annouced in the Office blog.

This new feature is quite straight forward. You can define a prefix, a postfix for the ID which is related to a specific EPT.

Just a couple of comments:

• You still can manually update the ID by adding it to a PDP. When editing manually the ID through the PDP, there is no validation versus the ID's mask.
• The ID will be applied to newly created projects, not to the ones created before the ID.

Try it and post your feedback here!

E-Mail alerts and reminders for Project Online!

Another great day with Project Online! Why am I so excited? I've just been rolled out with another nice new feature on my Online tenant! No installation, no testing, no migration to prod environnement, no testing again, nothing! Microsoft did all those steps for me and I can just start using the new feature. Still don't have Project Online??

So, what are we talking about today?

We are often asked about the benefits of Project Online versus Project Server on-prem.. Usual question, usual answer... Immediate start, no deployment, automatic upgrades... But what about the alerts and reminders? euhhh, yes you're right, there are no alerts and reminders with Project Online whereas this is available for Project Server. Of course, Brian Smith who is our brilliant escalation engineer at Microsoft for Project is always a great support for partners and brought us a nice workaround, using alerts on the task list on the project site.

But this was before...

Do you remember a while ago when I blogged about the O365 roadmap for Project? At this time, there was no evidence that such a feature was under development.

If you now come back to the O365 roadmap, you see that:

So we now have the task notifications in Project Online! At least when you'll be rolled out as well.. This is definitely a good news for organizations who are relying on this mode of communication for tasks and projects.

Now let's see how to use it.

First of all, to activate the feature, go to the "additional server settings" and turn the notifications service on.

Now if you go to the server settings, you'll see 2 additional items under the personal settings:

Every user will be able to set alerts and reminders for his own tasks and status report (also queue job failure). 

Project managers (more precisely project owners) will also be able, using the 2nd link, to set alerts and reminders for their team members. Note that this feature also includes resource request from engagements notifications.

Try it, it is actually very convenient that every single user and project owner can do his own settings.

Power BI content pack for Project Online available!

Hi Power BI fans!

Didn't I tell you that Microsoft was putting a lot of efforts on Power BI and Project Online? Here is the lastest evidence: a Power BI content pack for Project Online was released this morning. So what are we talking about? Let me test it for you.

First of all, connect to Power BI and navigate to the "get services" menu. Now you'll see that you can select a Project Online service.

Once done, enter your Project Online tenant URL and logged with your admin account. The content pack will be imported and you should get this message which tells you more or less "operation successfull, your Project Online dashboard is ready!".

You'll see that in the left menu your Microsoft Project dataset, report and dashboard.

Done! Note the different tabs allowing you navigating through the dashboard. You can know navigate in the various precreated reports, and of course customize them adding filters and so on.

Finally, don't hesitate to play around with the Q&A:

Hope you'll like it!