Project Online with Project Pro for Office 365 > Hello World!

A historical day! Yes Project Online is live in our Office 365 data centers and you can now purchase our latest and greatest project portfolio management (PPM) solution. We have also published the very first Project Online case study, stay tune for a lot more going forward: Marketing Agency Improves Efficiency, Communication with New Project Solution Buy Now!  

Yammer Momentum – February 2013

Exciting press release published yesterday as well as a set or articles on Yammer’s momentum, also please check Yammer’s newly designed customer success page: https://www.yammer.com/customers   Yammer Accelerates Momentum Following Microsoft Acquisition Sample of articles published on February 20th: Yammer tops 7M users, sales spike after Microsoft deal – GeekWire, Todd Bishop Microsoft: Yammer Generates Big Business After Buy – eWeek, Pedro Hernandez Yammer has 7 million users as SharePoint integration continues – CITEworld, Matt Rosoff Yammer Touts Record Year – Seattle Times, Janet Tu  

New Office 365 for business virtual launch and Enterprise Social case studies

Mark your calendars for this event on February 27th: Don’t miss the Feb. 27 Virtual Launch Event for the new Office 365 for business #Office365 Please find below a summary of recent case studies we published during the past weeks and yes plenty more to come!: Xerox Uses Social Networking to Quickly Share Ideas, Save Time, Spur Innovation Westfield Uses Social Networking to Boost Teamwork and Customer Satisfaction Global Environmental Organization Uses Social Networking to Help Protect the Planet Manhattan Associates – Solutions Provider Weds Social Functionality with Business App, Boosts Bottom Line

Microsoft Project Server 2007, 2010 and 2013 February 2013 CU release

Just in case you aren’t keeping up with the posts on the Project Support blog – head on over to https://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2013/02/14/microsoft-project-server-2007-2010-and-2013-february-2013-cu-announcement.aspx for the details of the February 2012 Cumulative Updates (CU) for Project and Project Server 2007, 2010 and 2013.  As mentioned previously, we are releasing earlier in the month – and plan to match “Patch Tuesday” (the second Tuesday of the month) in the even months.

MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App

Pat Malatack (Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation) has a comprehensive series of webcasts on extending the JS Grid in Project Web App. Note:   This blog post was originally created Monday, April 19, 2010. The webcasts were missing for the past several months, but have been reinstated on the Microsoft Events site ( https://msevents.microsoft.com/ ). MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 1 of 3) (Level 400) Tuesday, April 20, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the first webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we focus on initializing custom grid code and interactions between the grid and the Project Web App Ribbon. In particular, we show you how to add additional functionality to the Project Center.   MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 2 of 3) (Level 400) Thursday, April 22, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the second webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we focus on the use of events and delegates to interact with the timesheet grid in a way that allows for the addition of custom features and functionality to that page.   MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 3 of 3) (Level 400) Tuesday, April 27, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the third webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we walk you through more grid customizations, including adding custom commands to the column header dropdown and custom row header states.

Office 365 Home Premium, Project Professional 2013 and Yammer

It’s been a busy past few weeks in the Enterprise Social Networking #esn world, but I wanted to take a quick pause to celebrate the consumer release of Office, more information below, in the meantime please find below a picture from my desk with some of my favorite products! Microsoft Releases Office 365 Home Premium Office 365: The Next Bold Step  

Final Posting of 2012–Language Packs–over on the new Blog

Happy New Year to everyone – and I’ll probably keep these cross postings coming fro a month or two as you get used to the new URL.  The latest and last posting for 2012 covers language packs in Project 2013, Project Server 2013 and Project Online – https://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2012/12/31/project-2013-and-project-server-2013-language-packs.aspx   Enjoy!

Microsoft Enterprise Social roadmap #Yammer #SharePoint

Following my recent career move (see Hello Social, goodbye Project! #msproject #yammer ) focused on Enterprise Social and the recent SharePoint Conference 2012 last month, I’d like to share important announcements we made at that event that provides insights into our strategy around enterprise social. Putting Social to Work (Business Value, Vision, SharePoint + Yammer Roadmap, Yammer Packaging and Pricing ), Jared Spataro : https://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/11/12/putting-social-to-work.aspx SharePoint Conference 2012 Opening Keynote : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLsIjvIyAxo It’s an awesome two hour keynote you should be watching end to end but specifically watch these segments on Enterprise Social (I’ve put the approximate start times): Why we acquired Yammer? Jeff Teper- 0:36 Enterprise Social Network – David Sacks – 0:42 Transform your business, Experiences & Platform – Adam Pisoni – 0:46 3 social demos:  Yammer & SharePoint/ Open Graph , Yammer & SkyDrive Pro integration,Yammer Windows 8 app– Adam Pisoni – 0:51 Roadmap – Jeff Teper – 0:56 Nationwide Insurance – Yammer & SharePoint video – 1:00 A great blog to subscribe to: https://blog.yammer.com/blog/ Exciting years ahead and get started with Yammer today! Happy holidays!

A new URL for Project Support blogs–and the December CU posting

From now on the team and I will be posting to the new URL – https://blogs.technet.com/projectsupport in place of https://blogs.msdn.com/brismith .  Same content and writers – just a more descriptive URL.  The first posting is now live for the December 2012 CU for Project and Project Server and is posted at https://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2012/12/19/microsoft-project-server-and-sharepoint-server-2007-and-2010-december-2012-cu-announcement.aspx . Don’t forget to update your bookmarks, RSS subscriptions etc. for the new feed!

Project Online: How do I re-use an unwanted PWA instance

If you have used or are still kicking the tires of the Office 365 Preview and Project Online you may have noticed that you can have up to 3 PWA instances.  The first one is provisioned for you as the …/Sites/PWA instance, and you can then either use the New > Private Site Collection with Project Web App option to add a new site collection with PWA, or you can use the Project Web App > Add option to add the feature to an existing site collection.  Once you have used all three your SharePoint admin center may look something like this: The red bar in top right signifying that you have used all your available PWA instances.  In the preview we have seen that customers wanting to start afresh with a clean PWA have deleted the site collections and then still not been able to re-use this apparently deleted PWA instance.  The reason behind this is that the instance isn’t gone – it is in the recycle bin – and you could actually recover it if you needed to.  So how should you remove a PWA instance if you want to recover the quota to re-use somewhere else?  We have this documented over on the Office site (thanks Sonia! – and if the link isn’t live it soon will be…) and the key take-away is that you should use the Project Web App > Remove option.  This removes the feature from the selected site collection and gives you back one of your quota instances.  But what if I have already deleted the site collection?  The answer to that question is covered on the link given too – but I’m also going to cover the steps here as well as introducing the concept of administering your SharePoint Online instance via PowerShell. So my scenario is that I have deleted two of my site collections that had PWA instances – so still see that I have used my quota of 3 – what do I do next?  For the first recovery I will use the option to restore my PWA and then remove properly.  So looking in my Recycle Bin from the ribbon I can see my two sites (if I had deleted more than 30 days ago they would be gone anyway – and my quota would have been returned) – and I select the first one and click Restore Deleted Items – and then click Restore on the next dialog..   In my testing the restore took just a few minutes – but my PWA was pretty empty.  Once it was back I could select the site collection and use the option Project Web App > Remove, and then click Disable in the next dialog to disable this feature (and we really are sorry to see you remove PWA…). After this completes, which again for me was just a minute or two, I can see that I now have 1 PWA instance available to re-use – and I still have the …/Sites/PWS site collection.  This is important to note – I have disabled PWA which deleted all Project Web App data, including project plans, timesheets and resources – but I still have any pure SharePoint content that may have also existed in that site collection. For my remaining PWA instance that is still in the recycle bin I am going to take a different approach – and thanks to my colleague Stefan Schwarz for coming up with this workaround.  PowerShell is a tool that can be used across many and probably nearly all current Microsoft products.  For current Office 365 there is a good article at https://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh124998.aspx and for the commands we are interested in you will also need the SharePoint Online Management Shell from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588 You will also need to install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant as noted in the first article. I prefer using the ISE for PowerShell – so I start this up and then load the SharePoint Online cmdlets using import-module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell (installed from the link above) then connect to my SharePoint Online instance using Connect-SPOService and entering my Tenant admin url and then my credentials.  This isn’t just your tenant url but your tenant admin url – for example mine is https://BlogFodder-admin.sharepoint.com . I can then use the command Get-SPODeletedSite to see what is in my recycle bin: and to completely remove it I can use another PowerShell command – Remove-SPODeletedSite, along with the Url of the site I wish to remove – and to be extra cautious I can use the –Confirm parameter to give me that last chance to change my mind – and I then even get another last chance with the Permanently removing site dialog… Once this completes then I did notice it took a couple of minutes and a refresh or two before I could see my available PWA instances count go up to 2. Remember, the Remove-SPODeletedSite  isn’t just removing the Project stuff – but will completely delete everything to do with that site collection.  But hey – it was in your recycle bin so I guess you thought you could do without it.  Again, the link to the Office site gives a good breakdown of the options to use and what the consequences of your actions will be. The SharePoint Online Management Shell isn’t a total replacement for the SharePoint admin center UI – for example you can’t administer PWA instances and features – but it may offer some useful features such as user administration.  Another good reference to help understand the differences between the Office 365 and SharePoint Online PowerShell commands is https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161388.aspx .  I can see that the PowerShell stuff for Project and SharePoint online will be generating a few more blog posts. Thanks to Jean Donati and Sonia Atchison for feedback on this article – and Doug Welsby for running into the problem and getting us thinking about documenting the issue – and Stefan Schwarz for the PowerShell commands.