Thursday, 13 October 2011

Project 2010 – strange scheduling behaviour to be aware?

While working on a master program I modified a sub-project. Chose to save the changes etc. I then opened the sub-project and noticed that the schedule was not at all what I had seen or saved in the master project.

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Checked everything, and all looked ok. The Tasks were set to ‘Auto-schedule’ and Calculation was set to ON.

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Then, simply hit F9 to force the calculation and Voila!! things changed. image

So, something to be wary about. If the scheduling seems odd, go for the F9 key. Obviously, there is a hidden baguette/issue in Project 2010.

BTW, the version is SP1 + June 2011 CU.

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

EPM/SharePoint 2010 – How to display farm version?

use the following PowerShell command to display the Farm version.

Get-SPFarm | Select -ExpandProperty BuildVersion

If you have deployed Service Pack1, then your result should looks like this.

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If you have deployed June 2010 CU, then your result should looks like this.

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Hope this helps.

Microsoft EPM 2007/2010 - Don’t Trash the Cache!

Here is a good reminder and advice from Brian Smith (Microsoft Product Team) which I think every should be aware of….

By Brian Smith - MSFT

I was going to use the title asking ‘why are people still deleting the cache?’ until my colleague Corrie came up with this much better one!  Rather than asking why you are still doing it – I am telling you not to!

I know there is a lot of history behind this one, and for those of you that used Project Server 2007 in its early days there were some challenges such as the ‘check-in pending’ saga that got people in to the habit of deleting the project cache.  We fixed the problem, then we fixed it again (and again) and you should not generally be seeing any issues with leaving your cache alone to do its job.  However, many customers I talk to are routinely deleting the project from the local cache before they open it and then again after they close it! Why!?!  Its job is an important one – it saves you having to pull that data from the server again – which will reduce network traffic, the hit on both the web services and the database, which means they can be getting on and doing useful stuff.

I’ll also address a miss-conception here that I have heard from a number of customers – the choice of where to load the project from – cache or server?  You don’t have a choice – Project will load it from the cache if it is there, and then load any incremental pieces it needs from the server, to get you the current version of that plan.  In the screen shot below:

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the line actually reads ‘Retrieve the list of all projects from Project Server’.  It does not also read – ‘…and open any I might choose after clicking this link from the server and ignore the local cache’.  You don’t get the choice and you don’t need to choose.

I’m sure many of you will not have read this far before clicking the comments option to tell me of all the problems you are having.(and I’m sure some of you are still having problems).  First check that you have the latest cumulative updates and service packs.  If you are still really having issues unless you delete the local cached copy then we certainly need to hear about it so we can fix the problem rather than have you waste your time and system resources doing things that you should not need to do.

I will admit that there can be times when as support engineers we will ask you to remove your local cache to troubleshoot specific scenarios.  The cache itself also has intelligence that allows it to decide that it may have some bad stuff – and it will get a new clean copy of data from the server (symptom of this will be several files in the cache directory with 1,2,3 etc. at the end).  There have also been a few bugs we have worked on recently which ONLY surface when the user has cleared their cache!

So please, if you have been deleting your cache as a matter of routine, then either stop – or speak to your PMO or IT people and ask why they have you do this – and if we need to fix something else then we can take a look.

View this post online.

Thursday, 18 August 2011

Book: Office 365 - Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime

News from Microsoft Press…….

Good content for working with SharePoint online.

1537.9780735656949f_24D9CACF

Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime (ISBN 9780735656949), by Katherine Murray, as a free eBook.

For details on this book, including the Table of Contents , see here.

To download your free PDF eBook, click here.

Thursday, 4 August 2011

SharePoint Library – How can I change/reset the URL?

Best practice when creating a SharePoint Library is to create the Library with a title which has no spaces i.e. gaps between words. For example you wish to create a document library for your admin team. And, you want the UI to reflect the full name ‘Administration Team’.

Recommended steps you should take (using the above scenario) are;

  1. create the library with the title ‘Admin’ which is nice and short.
  2. then, change the title, as you want it to appear in the UI, within the library settings.

What is the benefit of this you may ask? Well, firstly the URL part is short i.e easy to remember and secondly, as the title does not have any gaps you can easily map your available network drive, within windows explorer, directly to this library. You can even setup an AD policy to roll this out to users very much like any other network drive share.

Now, here comes the tricky part. You have already created some libraries which have gaps in the titles. How do we overcome this issue without re-recreating the libraries and moving the content?

The solution is to use SharePoint Designer! Within SPD, open your site and select All Files > Lists and find the library you want to rename.

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Right click and rename the URL Part. Note: you will need admin/owner rights to connect SPD to the site to do this.

There you have it!! Let me know if this helps.

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Thursday, 21 July 2011

Un-Publish Completed Tasks - Add-in for EPM2007/2010 (FREE Download)

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Refer to earlier post regarding ‘My Tasks – Why do I see completed Tasks/Assignments in Current View?

Get this free add-on for P2007/2010 NOW!!

Business Benefit

  • Get your Project Team focused on incomplete tasks.
  • Manage Tasks by exception by reducing the clutter of completed tasks in team Members' views and reminders.
  • Improve end-user adoption of your investments in Microsoft EPM Solution.

(click image link below to lead you to the solution gallery where you can download this Add-in)

 

Hope this helps. Enjoy!!

EPM/SharePoint + Office Better Together!!

Key feature that often gets overlooked when selling benefits of EPM/SharePoint internally to end-users.