Project Conference 2009 – Work hard & play hard

After an intense couple of days we were treated to a night out at a rodeo show. Thanks to EPMLive & Microsoft.

WOW! what a night!

(Some of the partners learning to rope)

Here is me getting ready for the show. Strong drink to muscle up the courage to mount the bull!

 

NOOOOOO it’s NOT me riding the bull…….you kidding! Check out how Apple Mac compares with PC.

PJ Mistry @ Project Conference Rodeo

Now, need to get back to work.

Author: PJ Mistry

EPM2010!! – Check this out

Wow! the key note was exciting. The product has moved on from strength to strength over the past few versions. And, this new version is AWESOME!

Reference: Project Server 2010 and Project Professional 2010

Here are some of the key features;

1. Demand Management (‘Pipeline and Project Initiation’ as we call it back in UK)
   • Unity of Project Server & Portfolio Server.
   • Top Down Portfolio management and Bottom Up
   • Total work management: SharePoint list/activities, Project Pro, Proposals or incidents.

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   • Flexible project capture and initiation.
   • Powerful portfolio section analytics
2. Project Workgroup Collaboration and Reporting
   • Improved reporting via Excel Services
   • Publish Project schedule directly from Project Professional to WSS site and collaborate with Team Members on Task status. Ideal workgroup collaboration solution with or without Project Server.
3. User configurable Workflows to manage your project lifecycle
   • Enhanced governance through workflow
4. Enhanced Timesheet and Task Statusing (Tied mode included!!)
5. On-line web based project editing/scheduling! How cool is that!
   • Create and manage projects using PWA i.e. without Project Pro
   • Edit even projects created from Project Pro

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   • Assign multiple resources to tasks
   • create simple task/milestone dependencies
   • Multi-level undo on web edits
6. Easier deployment and rollout of client apps.
   • No more ActiveX controls.
   • Backward compatibility. Use Project Pro 2007 with EPM2010!!
   • 32 and 64bit client applications available.
   • Exchange server integration; enabling outlook web access task updates incl via Mobile devices
7. Improved usability of client applications.
   • Ribboned toolbars
   • User Interface (UI) similar to other Office 2007 apps (Excel, Word etc)
   • Grouping of macros
   • Improved copy and paste from Excel! setup your work structure in Excel and simple copy and paste in to Project 2010…and Voila! it retains the hierarchy.
   • Simplified administration; unity of Project Server and Portfolio Server
8. Delegation
   • Delegate your project(s)/responsibilities to another user say when you are on leave.
9. Departmentalisation
   • Manage your business projects, resources and reporting by department/division/unit!
10. Better planning capability in project professional
    • Use Manual/Automatic scheduling of Task. Be in control of how your tasks are scheduled. Setup tasks as manual scheduling to prevent them from being affected by drivers.
    • Task Inspector. 
    • Team planner! Easily resolve resource over allocation allocation on single of multiple projects. 

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    • Timeline view. Easily view high level timeline, with user selected tasks and milestone

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There are many other features and improvements.  Stay tuned for further updates.

Project Conference 2009

Sorry about the radio silence over the past couple of days. I am in Phoenix at the Microsoft Project Conference. WOW! some really exciting stuff coming up!

Stay tuned…….for tomorrow’s update.

Critical tasks – how can I review this quickly? (part 2)

This is a follow on from the previous post regarding Critical Tasks.

Ok, so we now we know the various ways of reviewing critical tasks on our project.

How can I quickly view which incomplete critical tasks my team needs to focus on this week? I have my project meeting every Monday morning with my team and this information will really help my team focus on the key activities in the current week. 

Here are the general steps to getting this information;

First, create a custom Group to collate critical tasks and group them by start date. To do this let’s copy the built-in group ‘Critical’ and name as appropriate for example ‘Critical Tasks by Week’. 

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Next, edit the newly created group and add the start date grouping with an interval of 1 week. See steps in the example fig below.

Finally, create your custom view with the newly created group ‘Critical Tasks by Week’ and built-in filter for ‘Incomplete Tasks’. Refer to recommended approach for creating local project views in earlier post. You may wish to incorporate this view in your enterprise global.

The result should like the example in fig below.

Hope this helps!

Checkin My Projects?

Yes, Project Managers (Owners/ Status Managers) can check in projects themselves rather than waiting for Administrators to do this for them. This is done via PWA > Project Centre > Go To > Check in My Projects. See example fig below.

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You will be able to check in any project that you have access rights to whether they have been published or not i.e. existing only in the draft database.

PWA Export to Excel 2003 error

Unable to export list of projects from Project Centre using Excel 2003? 

Resolution

copy the EXCEL.EXE file from the Program Files/Office11 folder to the Program Files/Office12 folder, creating the folder if necessary.

Note: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Outlook2003 – EPM2007 integration issue for (UK English language)

Yes, there are still some folks using outlook2003. And, often this issue of outlook 2003 integration with Project Server 2007 is experienced. The reason maybe as result of the office 2007 compatibility components are not installed.

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To fix the issue, a change needs to be made to the registry.

Create a text file (.txt) and copy the code from below. Then, change the file extension to .reg and double click on the file to apply the change. Note: Take a full backup of your registry prior to making any changes to the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\ProjectServer.12] "Language"=dword:00000409

Note: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.