Microsoft Project Conference 2012 is the premiere Microsoft-led event to share Project and Portfolio Management best practices and connect with your peers from around the globe. Project Conference will be held in Phoenix, Arizona on March 19 – 22, 2012. Do you have best practices you would like to share on Microsoft’s Project Portfolio Management (PPM) offering? Do you have success stories you would like to share with attendees? Are you passionate about Microsoft Project & Project Server? If you do and are interested in presenting next March, you are invited to propose content for delivery at Microsoft Project Conference 2012! Action Propose titles & abstracts at https://projconfcallforcontent.deregistrationservices.com/ Complete all the required fields carefully so we can better evaluate your entries. Deadline for Submissions: September 30th, 2011 Acceptance Timeline:  Notifications will be sent out by November 15, 2011 Audience Project Conference hosts a mix of audience including audiences including Microsoft PPM practitioners, IT Professionals and Developers, as well as Decision Makers and Business Managers. Breakout Sessions Breakout Sessions are the main content delivery modality at Project Conference other than the keynote sessions. These breakout sessions are lecture-style presentations located in rooms seating anywhere from 100-400 people and are 75 minutes in length. They typically include slides, demos, and a Question & Answer period, and they are recorded and distributed in the MyPC virtual event platform. Content Tracks Business Values & Insights will showcase customers across industries and experienced partners, all sharing success stories and PPM best practices.  Product Session will showcase production information, how to best enhance your project portfolio performance, and solutions that enhance out of the box capabilities and provide integration with line of business applications. Deployment and Administration focuses on deployment, configuration, administration best practice as well as developer sessions on how to extend the out of the box desktop and server products to fits your specific business needs. Travel & Expenses Complimentary passes will be provided for all selected speakers.  Any travel costs including airfare, hotel, etc. will be the responsibility of the speaker. Questions If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the Project Conference Speaker Team at pcspkr@microsoft.com . All proposals will be responded to by November 15, 2011.

There are a lot of questions regarding the upcoming transition from Business Productivity Online Suite to Microsoft Office 365, and we want you to know we’re listening. You can find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions by downloading the transition FAQ , but take a look below as we highlight some of the more pressing questions and concerns. From watching blog comments, forum discussions, and feedback from our customers, here are a few specific questions you’ve been asking: Q. Will I have to pay more for Office 365? No. Office 365 will not change anything related to your subscription pricing or renewal date, with three exceptions: The SharePoint Online Deskless Worker offering will be phased out. Microsoft will contact all customers who are subscribed to the SharePoint Online Deskless Worker and offer them Office 365 Kiosk—which includes both SharePoint and Exchange—for the same price. The Live Meeting Standalone service will be replaced with a Lync service including both conferencing and instant messaging. The Extra Storage offerings will be offered for free to all customers. Q. What has changed between the current BPOS system requirements and the new system requirements of Office 365? The key changes in system requirements are: Office 2003 is not supported Office Communicator 2007 R2 with Office Communications Online will no longer be supported Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported Q. How can I make sure Microsoft can communicate with me about my transition? For each subscription that a customer has, make sure that contact details for both the “Account Owner” and “Service Administrator” are up-to-date. “Account Owner” and “Service Administrator” can be checked at the Microsoft Online Customer Portal ( https://mocp.microsoftonline.com ) by clicking the “Subscriptions” tab and “View Subscription Details” in the “Actions” column Make sure that the email accounts specified for “Account Owner” and “Service Administrator” are monitored regularly. Make sure that the domain “@email.microsoftonline.com” is marked as safe, to prevent the possibility of communications from Microsoft Online Services being blocked or filtered.

A very common problem people have when building their schedules is they have more work to do than they have budget for. We hit this problem all the time on the Project team when we are doing feature work (we just have so many good ideas for features thanks to all of your feedback). In the past when building budgets, we’d create multiple plans or even, aak, use Excel. Thanks to Inactive Tasks in Project 2010 Professional, we can now easily do this in Project. Before I get into the details, let me give you a little background. When we are doing budgeting, we don’t look at dates, we just look at how many dev hours are required for a feature and then work to get the rollup number to match our budget. So our initial schedules will often look like this: We’ll schedule all the tasks, once we’ve decided which features and tasks we’re going to do for the coding milestone. Yes, the feature and task names were changed to protect the innocent. Step 1 – Turn on the Project Summary Task. This allows you to see the rollups for your project. You can do this by going to the Format tab and checking Show Project Summary Task. Step 2 – Insert the Work field since this is really what I care about. After doing this, I can see it would take 1,793 hours to complete all of these features. Unfortunately I don’t have that much time. I only have 1,370 hours so I need to do some cutting. Step 3 – Working with my co-workers, I determine the priority of each feature. We track this in a text custom field, Feature Priority. I’ve collapsed the view to Outline Level 1 since right now we only care about features. Step 4 – Inactivate the lowest priority features by clicking Inactivate on the Task Tab – Schedule group. Before:   After: Notice how Work is now reduced to 1,385hrs. The original values are preserved for the inactivated tasks, they just don’t affect the rollups anymore. Step 5 – more cutting since I’m still over my budget of 1,370hrs by 15 hours. I could ask for an exception but I want to see if anything else stands out at this point. I’m going to expand the Medium priority features to get more details. Under feature 2, I see some pri 2 UI work that we could ship without so I’ll cut that. And we are now 1 hour under our budget – yay. At this point, our next steps would be to get the correct devs assigned to the tasks and the work scheduled out. Now clearly I simplified this from the real world experience to make the example fit the blog article but I hope this article shows that you can easily use Project when you are trying to hit an hour or cost budget. If your project is more date driven, you can still use inactive tasks, you’ll just have to adjust your predecessors along the way. From experience the hard part is not using Project, it is getting everyone to agree on the priorities of the various features and agreeing to the cuts. Click here for more info on Inactive Tasks.

  Here’s a list of content that the team has been hard at work on delivering this summer: Published the week of July 11, 2011 Updated article Deploy cumulative updates (Project Server 2010) Updated with information about the June 2011 Cumulative Update. Published the week of June 27, 2011 New articles for Project Server 2010 SP1 Deploy Service Pack 1 for Project Server 2010 Describes how to deploy Microsoft Project Server 2010 with Service Pack 1 (SP1). This article provides an overview of key enhancements, deployment instructions, considerations, known issues, and links to related resources. Updated for Project Server 2010 SP1 Hardware and software requirements (Project Server 2010) , Plan browser support (Project Server 2010) , and Project Server 2010 with SharePoint Server 2010 architecture (overview) Updated to include information about additional supported Web browsers for Microsoft Project Web App Team Member pages in Project Server 2010 with SP1. New articles Database maintenance plans for Project Server 2010 Describes database maintenance recommendations for Project Server 2010. Updated articles Install and configure Project Server 2010 and Plan for deployment (Project Server 2010) Updated to specify that Project Server 2010 is not compatible with multi-tenant environments. Run Migration Script 7 to compare Project Server 2003 and Project Server 2007 data validation snapshots Updated to include information about the script’s possibly reporting a false mismatch of task identifiers between Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 tasks. Published the week of June 13, 2011 New articles Plan hardware architecture in Project Server 2010 Discusses the recommended hardware configurations for various Project Server 2010 dataset sizes. Upgrade from a trial version of Project Server 2010 Describes how to upgrade your Project Server 2010 trial version to the fully licensed version. Published the week of June 6, 2011 New resource center Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Content Pivot Viewer Use the pivot viewer to browse a complete collection of articles, white papers, training videos, and models for EPM in Project Server 2010. Pivot on content by lifecycle, solution area, or content type.

Almost all Project Server administrators know that when you have an enterprise custom field using a lookup table that you can pick one of the values from that lookup table to be the default value for new entities.   But what about a case where the field is set to NOT have a default value but some new projects are being created where when the Save button is hit on the New Project PDP a value is being entered for that field? What might cause that? There are (at least) two possible answers. Templates on Enterprise Project Types When you create your enterprise project types you can associate an enterprise project template so that when a new project is created using an EPT it will automatically use that template. It is possible for a template to contain values in some enterprise fields as part of the template. If the template associated with the EPT has a value in that custom field then it can look like there was a default value set for the field, even when the field itself does not have a default set. Two things lead to this being overlooked: EPTs are a new feature to Project Server 2010 and it does not always occur to users that clicking “New” in the Project Center could call up a template to begin with. Many organizations tend to strip out custom field values when saving a project as a template so the idea of there being a value in the fields for a template might not occur to everyone. I have seen this issue at 2 different locations now and it can cause some pretty severe head-scratching.   Workflow Code or Custom Event Handler Code Through workflow coding or custom event handler code there could be situations where the code would examine the values of certain custom fields when the project is initially saved and then make decisions about the values of other custom fields. An example of this is if a project is created and the user picks “Washington” as the value for the ‘Location’ field. The code might be set to assign a certain value for an Account Manager” field based on the project being located in Washington state. For some users that do not know about this coding it might appear as if there were default values on some fields. This type of coding is much more common now in 2010 and in most cases users and certainly the administrators are likely to know about these kinds of changes. In my experience the most common cause for confusion about mystery ‘default’ values is going to be from a template on an EPT.

While we realize that many BPOS customers are eager to move onto the new Office 365 service and start using all the new features, we strongly recommend that you wait until we are ready to transition your tenant for you. We have received a number of Support calls from customers and partners who have tried to migrate their data from BPOS to Office 365 by themselves. Please be aware that if you attempt a manual migration, emails sent to your domains will be returned to sender as undeliverable until Support can delete your domain from BPOS and you can re-create in Office 365. This email outage could last as long as 24 hours (possibly longer if many customers are asking Support to delete their domains at the same time as you). What should someone do who is eager to move from BPOS to Office 365? Ideally, you would wait to be transitioned by the Office 365 team. However, if you are an expert in Exchange server migrations, comfortable with PowerShell scripts, and just can’t wait a couple of months, here’s what you need to do. (Please note that manual migration is not supported, manual migration will stop mail flow for at least 24 hours, and customers with Exchange Hosted Archiving will lose all archived data). Ensure all of your computers meet the Office 365 system requirements. Sign up for an Office 365 account. Do NOT add any other domains at this point Run the Office 365 online desktop setup tool on all desktop PCs. Back up all of your users’ mail to .pst files using Outlook. Remove all vanity domain information from BPOS. Remove all production domain e-mail addresses from any accounts using them. Here’s an example. Your production domain is contoso.com. You have a user, Joe, with the e-mail addresses Joe@contoso.microsoftonline.com and Joe@contoso.com. Remove the Joe@contoso.com e-mail address, as well as any other e-mail addresses in the system that end with contoso.com. Remove your production domain from BPOS. Contact BPOS Support, and Tell them you wish to have your production domain removed from FOPE. Ask them to check in the Office 365 environment to see if Microsoft has already copied your domain(s) and users to a pre-transition tenant. If this has happened, your domain(s) will need to be removed from Office 365 as well Wait 1 day for Support to remove your domains. You will receive no inbound email for this period. Sign in to your Office 365 admin account and add your production domain to Office 365. Add your users to Office 365. Import the .pst files you made in step 3 into the appropriate user mailboxes using Outlook. There will be a feature allowing domains to be deleted in FOPE without a call to Support, but it will take some time before this option is available. Please keep an eye on this blog for further updates. Final note: I have personally seen some creative workarounds in the BPOS community to the email outage that inevitably occurs while FOPE is deleting your domain. They’re not perfect, and Microsoft doesn’t support them (nor have we tested them).

Now that Office 365 has launched, we’re preparing to start transitions in September 2011, and we’ve updated the Transition Guide and Transition FAQ to provide you more information about what to expect between now and September 2012. Here’s a summary of the key actions you should take. 1)   Review the transition guide. This comprehensive overview covers all aspects of the transition process. Download the transition guide for in-depth information on everything from system requirements to the specific steps required for administrators and current users. 2)   Learn the key changes. Some of these system requirements may require you to upgrade your PCs before you transition. Make sure your business is ready for Office 365 and the new Microsoft Online Services by noting the following key changes: Outlook 2003 / Office 2003 is not supported Internet Explorer 6 is not supported Office Communicator 2007 R2 must be upgraded to Microsoft Lync Office 365 Desktop Setup is required (replaces the Sign-In Application) Review all of the Office 365 and Microsoft Online Services system requirements . In addition, make sure all your desktops are up to date for the necessary end-user requirements. You can find this information in the transition checklist for administrators. 3)   Understand the Office 365 password policy To make the transition to Office 365 as seamless as possible for your users, we will synchronize their current passwords with Office 365 whenever they change their password. This means that the new Office 365 password policy now applies to your existing subscription. Review the Office 365 password requirements to understand the changes. 4)   Download the transition checklist Start your transition prerequisites – The tasks required to configure your desktop environment can be found in the detailed transition checklist for administrators . 5)   Check out your new subscription offer The following table summarizes how Microsoft Online Services and BPOS subscriptions will map to the new Microsoft Online Services offerings after transition. All active subscriptions will be transitioned to the new offers while maintaining your current price through the end of your subscription term.  Learn more at the Office 365 website . Current Microsoft Online Services  Subscription   New Office 365 or Microsoft Online Services subscription BPOS Standard Suite >   Office 365 (Plan E1) BPOS Deskless Worker Suite >   Office 365 (Plan K1) Exchange Online >   Exchange Online (Plan 1) Exchange Online Deskless Worker >   Exchange Online Kiosk SharePoint Online >   SharePoint Online (Plan 1) SharePoint Online Deskless Worker >   SharePoint Kiosk (K1) Live Meeting Standard >   Lync Online (Plan 2) Office Communications Online >   Lync Online (Plan 1) What happens next? Microsoft will begin contacting customers and partners this summer with September and October 2011 transition dates. Each month, we’ll send out more transition scheduling notices. For more information about scheduling, please check out the transition FAQ . Processing timeframe The transition schedule is designed to best accommodate all customers and their needs, and that could mean your transition won’t be scheduled for several months. Don’t worry if you don’t receive a transition date immediately. Stay up to date 
 The transition center is the place to learn anything and everything about the transition process and all that Office 365 can do for your business. Microsoft Online Services is ready to support you through a smooth transition to Office 365. If you have questions, contact our IT-level support , which is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Also, be sure to take a look at the transition forum – the answers you need are likely already available.

Microsoft is updating the Microsoft Online Services Transporter Tools (aka Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools), adding commandlets to allow Administrators to manage password expiration for user accounts, permissions for Exchange Online mailboxes, and server-side forwarding rules for Exchange Online. The following commandlets are included as part of this update: Set-MSOnlineUserPasswordNeverExpire . This commandlet allows Administrators to set user account passwords to never expire. While Microsoft does not recommend non-expiring passwords due to security best practices, non-expiring passwords are often needed for service accounts that support line of business applications, unmonitored mailboxes, and mail-enabled hardware. Administrators setting non-expiring passwords for user accounts in their organization will need to be aware of actions required when the organization transitions from BPOS-Standard to Office 365. Required steps for organizations with non-expiring passwords can be found in an earlier post to this blog on the topic. Add-MSOnlineMailPermission . With this commandlet, Administrators can establish alternate permissions for an Exchange Online mailbox, such as granting full access to a delegate or granting send-as and send-on-behalf permissions to a delegate. Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient . This commandlet allows Administrators to set server-side rules to forward Exchange Online messages to an alternative e-mail address, including forwarding to a distribution list (DL). The updated Transporter Tool supporting these PowerShell commandlets are now available via the Microsoft Download Center .

We recently published a new article set to our Microsoft Project Server 2010 TechNet Library:  ” Database Maintenance Plans for Project Server 2010 “.  A Project Server 2010 farm environment includes not only the databases required for Project Server, but also databases required for SharePoint Server 2010.   Ensuring that these databases are maintained properly is key to smooth performance in your Project Server 2010 environment.  This article set contains information and guidelines for maintaining the databases that host Microsoft Project Server 2010. It describes and provides examples of the database maintenance tasks that we recommend when you are using Project Server 2010.   This document provides detailed examples for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. External references for how to perform the same database maintenance tasks with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 are also included. The goal of this article set is to provide you the information to create a database maintenance plan that best fits your environment.  This article set includes the following articles: Overview of Project Server 2010 databases Creating maintenance plans for Project Server 2010 databases Defragmenting indexes for Project Server 2010 databases Shrinking databases in Project Server 2010 Monitoring maintenance plans for Project Server 2010 For more information about maintaining the databases that are required for SharePoint Server 2010, read Database maintenance for SharePoint Server 2010 .  You should read this as well before you implement any database maintenance tasks or modify your Project Server 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 databases.

We are pleased to announce newly redesigned Solutions Page that is highlighting the key solutions built on Microsoft Project 2010 – including: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Integrating PPM and Application Development processes helps to improve visibility across projects throughout their life cycle. It ensures project managers and developers can follow their own methodologies supported by different productivity tools, while remaining seamlessly connected with each other. Application Portfolio Management (APM) Gain control, reduce costs, transform your application portfolio and link your business strategy to your application management strategy. Capital Planning & Investment Control (CPIC) Powerful collaborative and analytical tools that provide consistent and visible decision-making capabilities for managing investments from launch to conclusion. Financial Management and Earned Value Driven by challenging economic times and enhanced compliance requirements, financial management has become a priority for organizations investing in project and portfolio management best practices. Hosting / On-Demand Solutions Unleash the power of Microsoft Project Server 2010 with a browser-based hosted solution. Innovation Process Management (IPM) Innovation Process Management (IPM) enables organizations to foster innovation by capturing, evaluating, and developing ideas to drive growth and profitability, and to increase competitiveness. Line of Business Integration Seamlessly integrate Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management solution with different applications and systems in order to automate business processes. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) / New Product Development (NPD) Emerging as a strategic driver of business value, PLM helps manufacturers tackle complex processes and synchronize the efforts of distributed teams to consistently create the best possible products, capture greater market share and increase customer satisfaction. Project and Portfolio Management PPM/EPM Project and Portfolio Management helps organizations gain visibility and control across all work, enhancing decision-making, improving alignment with business strategy, maximizing resource utilization, and enhancing project execution to optimize ROI. Project Professional 2010 Microsoft Project Professional 2010 gives you a powerful, visually enhanced way to effectively manage a wide range of projects and programs. It is also a powerful platform for extensions that address specific business needs. For those that would like to see a list of solutions by product – the “ Solution By Product ” section links directly to PinPoint – a Microsoft directory of Partner companies and their offerings – and lists registered solutions in PinPoint by product. (Any partner with valid PinPoint profile can register their solutions and align them with Project 2010 products directly in PinPoint.) Thanks! Jan Kalis World-wide PPM Partner Lead, Technical Product Manager | Microsoft Project  https://blogs.msdn.com/jkalis/