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!

Power BI new visuals

Hi,

To continue on the PowerBI serie which is so far a great success, here is a quick post about the Power BI Desktop new visuals. A couple of weeks ago was announced the availability of a new visuals gallery. See here: https://app.powerbi.com/visuals. 

It allows you, assuming you have an up to date version of Power BI Desktop, it is as simpler as downloading the visuals and upload it to Power BI. Then just us it!!

Here is how to proceed: 

1 - Download the visuals 

2 - Import the visuals

Once you download the visuals, you can open in Power BI desktop application a new or existing file. You'll see the 3 little dots (I heard it is called an ellipsis, better than "3 little dots"...). From there, just pick-up your new visuals one by one.

3 - Use the visuals
Finally just select a visual and add data, dimensions, measures to have a nice and unseen graph!

Hope you'll enjoy all the effort Microsoft is putting on the PowerBI solutions and you'll take some time to play with it!

Project Virtual Conference 2015: view my session in replay!

You couldn't attend my session on cost management at the Project Virtual Conference?? All sessions are available on-demand. Just log in with your credentials and enjoy!!

Here is the abstract of my session and the replay below.

"In this session, I’ll make a focus on cost management in MS Project. Intended to give to the end-users an overview of the various cost management features provided by the latest versions of MS Project, I’ll go through (among others) the cost resources, the budget resources, the cost rate tables and the reporting features for supporting cost management in MS Project.The objective of this session is to give clues to the day-to-day challenges project managers and PCOs face in terms of cost management while scheduling theirs projects, with the constraints of setting, tracking and reporting on costs."