User productivity: Achievable goal, or mission impossible?

Some interesting survey results;

EPM2010 – Creating Cross-Project Links without saving Master Project

I had a user request about the process for creating links across projects without saving master project. Here are the steps;

• Firstly, create your projects as normal. In my example figure below, I have two projects ‘001_P1’ and ‘001_P2’.
• Select the projects in PWA > Project Centre and choose to edit in Project Pro. Alternatively, you can open a blank project and insert the projects.
• This will open the selected projects in a new blank container project (i.e. master project). Follow best practices e.g. ensuring that the selected projects are in checked-in state prior to opening them in the blank container project.

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• Create cross-project dependencies as you normally would in a standard project. Follow best practice for linking tasks and milestones.

• Once, this is done, close the project and select the ‘Discard Changes’ option. This is so that the blank container (master project) is not saved back to the server. See figure below.

• Next, you will be prompted to save changes to the other embedded/inserted projects. Choose Yes for individual project or Yes to All for multiple projects.

• To check/confirm the changes on individual projects, open the project in Project Pro. Notice the ghost task links (external project task links) in example figure below.

Now that the cross-project dependencies have been created, you may wish to publish the individual projects.

Hope this helps.

EPM/SP2010 – Adding PDF iFilter

Here the steps from Microsoft KB for adding iFilter for SP2010, summarised for clarity.

1. Install PDF iFilter 9.0 (64 bit) from http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025 (http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025)

2. Download PDF icon picture from Adobe web site http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html (http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html) and copied at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\

3. Add the following entry in docIcon.xml file, which can be found at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
<Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdf16.gif" />

4. Add pdf file type on the File Type page under Search Service Application

5. Open regedit

6. Navigate to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension

7. Right-click > Click New > Key to create a new key for .pdf

8. Add the following GUID in the default value
{E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

• Restart the SharePoint Server Search 14
• Reboot the SharePoint servers in Farm
• Create a Test site (with any out-of-box site template) and create a document library upload any sample PDF document(s).
• Perform FULL Crawl to get search result.

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EPM2010 SP1 - How does it impact you? And, the Mystery behind Patching Process.

If you missed my last webinar, here is the link to download the PPT copy. Hope this helps.

Topics covered;

• The key fixes and enhancements include in SP1.
• Practical things you should consider and have in place before taking the leap towards patching.
• Approach and best practices for patching your EPM/SharePoint environment.
• FAQs

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SharePoint Usage Survey Results from OpenText.com

Over 2100 people participated in their survey: how are Businesses Using SharePoint?

Some of the more interesting results include:

• #1 Challenge is End User Adoption
• 44% of companies lack a training program
• 35% considering or using SharePoint in the Cloud

These results aren’t unexpected! I will share my take and field experience of this in a following post.