Sunday 26 October 2008

Assignment Owner

There are situations where the team members that are doing the actual work on tasks do not have ready access to a computer. This makes their use of Project Server Web Access to report status on their task assignments impossible or at least highly unlikely. In the past situations like this would require assigning the tasks to a supervisor and then having the supervisor submit status for the resources. But this was not a great solution as it obscured the usage levels of the actual resources and was confusing for the supervisor to keep track of who was assigned to any given task. Project Server 2007 adds a feature that makes this kind of situation much easier to handle.

Every Assignment on a project in Project Server has a property called "Assignment Owner" that contains the name of the Project Server user that will be entering status updates for that assignment. If the Assignment Owner for an assignment is "Brian Kennemer" then it will show up on my "My Tasks" page in PWA. Every resource in Project Server has a property called "Default Assignment Owner." This property defines the default name that is put into the Assignment Owner field when that resource is assigned to a task. By default it is the name of the resource but you can put any active user into the field for a resource. So in our situation above the solution would be to put the name of the supervisor into the Default Assignment Owner field for each of their team members. Then whenever a task is assigned to one of the team members that assignment will show up on the My Tasks page of the supervisor.

With this solution the tasks are assigned to actual team members so their usage and availability can be accurately tracked and the assignments show up on the supervisors My Tasks page for easy status updates (the name of the assigned resource shows up in the view to help the supervisor keep track.)

Monday 13 October 2008

SQL Server and database collation

The SQL Server database collation must be configured for case-insensitive, accent-sensitive, Kana-sensitive, and width-sensitive. This configuration is used to ensure file-name uniqueness consistent with the Windows operating system. For more information about collations, see "Selecting a SQL Collation" or "Collation Settings in Setup" in SQL Server Books Online.

  • Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS

Thursday 2 October 2008

Microsoft Project 2007 specifications

If you are interested in knowing the limitation then read on….

The following specifications are supported when you run Microsoft Office Project 2007 on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista, although actual limits and performance speed depend on your computer's configuration.


Note   Out-of-memory errors may occur before you reach the listed limits.

Attribute

Maximum

Resources per project

700,000

Resource units per assignment

60,000,000 units or 6,000,000,000%

Resource availability dates

100

Tasks per project

400,000

Task dependencies per project

No limit

Predecessors per task

50,000

Successors per task

50,000

Outline levels per project

65,535

Consolidated projects

998

Open project files per consolidated project

998

Sharer files connected to a single resource pool

997


(That is, the maximum number of open project files, minus 1 for the resource pool itself.)

Open windows

50

Base calendars

Tested to 30,000+

Calendar exceptions per calendar

Testing was able to add more than 15,000 exceptions to a base calendar.

Rate tables to support varying pay scales and rates

5 per resource

Variable rates per rate table to support rate increases and decreases

25

Cost value in a currency field

999,999,999,999.99

Work value

1,666,666,666 hours

Assignment work values for work assignments

999,999,999 hours

Assignment work values for variable material assignments

999,999,999 units

Assignment work values for fixed material assignments

60,000,000 units

Custom cell formats

64,000

Print scaling adjustment range percentage

10%-500%

Page header text

5 lines

Page footer text

3 lines

Page legend text

3 lines

Page legend text box width

5 inches (12.7 centimetres)

Filter tests per filter

40

Filter tests per AutoFilter

2 per column

Earliest date allowed for calculation

January 1, 1984

Latest date allowed for calculation

December 31, 2049

Discontinuous selections in a sheet view

10

Baselines

11

Characters in a text field

255

Characters in an outline code field

255

Values and characters in an Enterprise Resource Multi-Value (ERMV) field

255 values, each of 255 characters

Value in a number field

9,999,999,999,999.99