Duplicate projects appearing in categories?

if you have a requirement for users to be able to access projects within their division/department regardless of their location on Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS), i.e. projects added to custom Categories (division, departmental or location), then please read the following carefully. If not, this does not concern you.

 

You may encounter an issue of duplicate projects i.e. projects with the same name appearing in Categories. This is the behaviour of Project Sever 2007. You will see the same behaviour whether you use the manual approach of adding projects to categories or automatic i.e. programmatic.

Remember there are four Project Server Databases and you may be retaining multiple copies of projects in the Archive DB. When deleting projects you must consider deleting project (including versions) from the Archive DB, if not required. For example test projects or projects being re-created using the same name.

Note: Deleting projects from Draft & Published DB does not delete from the Archive DB, by default.

The ‘available projects’ section in Categories will show all projects in the system as they are permission objects/entities. Where you may be seeing multiple projects with the same name it may be as result of a project having been deleted and recreated with the same name in the Draft & Published without affecting the Archive DB. See example screen shot below of archived projects within PWA > Server Settings > Manage Categories > Custom Category.

(click picture to enlarge)

Consider the following scenario;

1. Project1 created.
2. System archives new/updated project overnight as this is a new project. Project1 now exists in Archive DB with its unique Project GUID. Note: This may be setup as automatic with say 1 or more retention copies.
3. User deletes Project1 from Draft and Published (but not from the Archive database)
4. User re-creates new project with the same name as before i.e. Project1.
5. System archives new/updated project overnight as this is a new project. Project1 now exists in Archive DB with its new unique Project GUID. See example screen shot below of archived projects within PWA > Server Settings > Administrative Restore.

(click picture to enlarge)

Note: The end-users will only be able to see projects in Draft and Published (as per PWA permissions).

You can also review the list of archived project via PWA > Server Settings > Delete Enterprise Objects > Delete projects only from Archived database.