What Are My Project Costs by Resource Type for Next Period? Part 2

Refer to earlier post for details on how this information can be delivered via Resource Usage view.

In this post, we will look at how this information can be delivered via Visual Reports.

1) Open existing project from the server.

2) Navigate to Report > Visual Reports and launch the ‘Resource Cost Summary’ Report under ‘Resource Usage’ Tab

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Ensure time period selected is weekly.

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3) Select the Resource Usage Tab in the Excel work-book.

4) Update the Fields List for Column, Row and value fields as per example in figure below.

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5) Review the report and adjust/format (for timescales) as necessary.

Visual reports provide a powerful way to analyse project data using Microsoft Excel.

What Are My Project Costs by Resource Type for Next Period? Part 1

I often get asked by Project Managers about ways of extracting project data and this one seems to top the list. This information can easily be obtained via;

1. Resource Usage View
2. Visual Report

Let’s review how this can be done using Resource Usage view.

1) Log in to project Professional. Ensure that ‘Load Summary Resource Assignments’ is un-checked if you just want to view individual project data.

2) Open your existing project from the server.

3) Navigate to ‘Resource Usage’ view.

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4) Select Project Grouping ‘Resource Type’.

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Note: Collapse assignments, as required, to show summary by Resource Type e.g. Work, Material or Cost. Right-click in the timephased area of the view and add ‘Cost’ field (remove ‘work’ field if not required).

The figure below illustrates an example of the view showing weekly costs split by Resource types > Resources.

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The above changes can be made in Enterprise Global so that all users can benefit from standardisation. Alternatively, individuals can create their own local view. Refer to earlier post for creating local views.

Saving Project 2007 Project in other formats – what is lost?

If you save a Microsoft Office Project 2007 project to other older formats such as Microsoft Project 2000–2003, you
can lose data in areas where Office Project 2007 contains enhanced functionality. In particular;

Budget information	Information contained in the new budget (budget: The estimated cost of a project that you establish in Project with your baseline plan.) fields will be lost.
Deliverables and Dependencies	Information contained in the new, cross-project deliverables (deliverable: A tangible and measurable result, outcome, or item that must be produced to complete a project or part of a project. Typically, the project team and project stakeholders agree on project deliverables before the project begins.) and dependencies fields will be lost. Information contained in task links will not be lost.
Cost resources	Information contained in the new cost resource (cost resources: Resources that don't depend on the amount of work on a task or the duration of a task, such as airfare or lodging.) fields may be changed, converting cost resources into material resources. Information contained in other cost fields will not be lost.
Background cell formatting	Sheet cells that have background formatting applied to them will lose their background formatting. Information in these fields will not be lost.
Assignment owner information	Information contained in the new assignment owner fields will be lost.
Calendar exceptions	New exceptions (exception: An instance in which a task or resource calendar differs from the project calendar. An example is a resource that must work on Saturdays, but for which the project calendar does not include working time to cover these instances.) that have been added to project and resource calendar functionality (such as monthly exceptions, yearly exceptions, and those with arbitrary dates) will be lost.
New fields and custom fields	Information within new fields, or any formulas relying on new fields, will be lost. New options set on custom fields created in Office Project 2007 will be lost, such as the new roll-down setting for calculation of assignment rows. Task assignment custom field values will also be lost.
Enterprise custom fields	Any enterprise custom fields created within Office Project 2007 will be lost.

Something to bear in mind when downgrading your project format.

SharePoint 2010 - Key New Features & my favourites

Here is a high level summary of the key new features of SharePoint 2010 along with my comments and favourite features in RED.

1.	A new ribbon user interface and Rich Web Editing that makes end users more productive and customization of SharePoint sites easy.
2.	Deep Office integration through social tagging, backstage integration and document life-cycle management.
3	Built-in support for rich media such as video, audio and Silverlight, making it easy to build dynamic Web sites. In plain English, it is easy to simply add videos and picture with easy editing/re-sizing capabilities within the web interface.
4.	New Web content management features with built-in accessibility through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, multilingual support and one-click page layout, enabling anyone to access SharePoint Server sites
5.	New SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, giving developers a premier experience with the tools they know and trust.
6.	Business Connectivity Services, which allow users to connect to other line-of-business data or Web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client, i.e. show data from another database within a list in SharePoint. Imagine being able to pull in data from an external database within SharePoint list without coding knowledge!
7.	Rich APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), to help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint platform
8.	Enterprise features in SharePoint Online such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, which make it simple to use, share, secure and manage interactive forms across an organization. The capabilities of Forms services is, in my view, the most powerful offering which mortal users without coding knowledge can make use of. Being able design rich data entry and view forms for use within SharePoint.
9.	The addition of two new SharePoint SKUs for Internet-facing sites, including an on-premises and hosted offer.
10.	Large List support! Yes, SharePoint 2010 supports extremely LARGE lists…the numbers that are being battered around are massive!   SP2010 can support something like 50 million items in a list now. You obviously do not want users to go wild and will want to control the limits via the admin settings (default: 5,000 for normal users and 20,000 for super users).
11.	3rd Party Browser support Finally users of other browsers such as Firefox etc will be able to work in the SharePoint environment using the tools of of their choice! I personally use IE8 and combined with Windows 7, is brilliant!
12.	SharePoint Workspace Ever wanted to take SharePoint workspaces/site/content offline. Well, now you can using the new client application that is SharePoint Workspaces (formerly known as Groove).

There are some other features that administrators will find really useful;

1. Visual Upgrade. This means you can upgrade from 2007 to 2010 without impacting or changing the user interface.
2. Unattached Content. Imagine the power of this!! being able to recover data from another content DB without having to recovery the whole farm. Wow!
3. Enhanced Usage reporting and logging
4. Large List throttling to maintain system performance. Mortal users will be prevented from deleting LARGE lists (millions of items) which could affect the system performance at peak times. This capability is retained with the Administrators.
5. Advanced workflow management capabilities with SharePoint Designers
6. Visio Services - Visual representation of data-linked diagrams for users without Visio
7. and more….

I am personally excited by the fact EPM2010 lives on SharePoint 2010 i.e. uses this as a platform. With the combination of the two, I am like a child eagerly waiting to open my Christmas present!

Hope this helps you in understanding the key features and aids in the decision making process for moving to SharePoint 2010. Let me know your thoughts on what your key feature are, what you think is still missing from 2010 and could be enhanced. I would be interested in hearing from you.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009! continued…

In my previous post I mentioned that there is a Microsoft Project 2010 stand at the SharePoint Conference. Well, guess what? I came across some enthusiastic and friendly faces manning the booth! Some of you may who they are…..

Christophe Fiessinger and Jan Kalis proudly presenting Project 2010!!

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009!

The Microsoft SharePoint conference this year is at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas! The unveiling of SharePoint 2010 takes place today at the key note.

The SharePoint partner exhibitors’ booths were just as busy as it was outside in the streets of Vegas!

 

The number of folks attending this year is phenomenal. Good job I registered in the morning when it was not as busy! Some had to wait a long time for registration and to get their ‘giveaways’.

 

Some of the exhibitors at the show.

Here is EPMLive’s booth at the conference.

Microsoft Project and Visio also have booths at the show.

More to come. Stay tuned…..

EPM2007 Aug 2009 CU – Services not starting!

When recently setting up a new development environment (with SP2 + AugCU) I noticed that I was not able to save, publish or checkin projects. On investigation, I found that the project server services were not running. If you ever encounter a similar situation, it may be as result of services timing out when starting project server. There are couple of registry changes that can be applied to resolve this issue. Refer to earlier post ‘New EPM2007 Deployment with SP2 – Issues with Services not starting’ for details.

Hope this helps.