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Updated Cumulative Update reference for Project Server 2010 now available

I’ve just updated the running blog post that give the version numbers to identify the specific release of Project Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 you have loaded – https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2010/09/23/how-to-tell-which-cumulative-update-hotfix-or-service-pack-version-of-project-server-2010-and-project-2010-you-are-running.aspx This now includes the February 2011 Cumulative Update for Project Server – including the link to the published KB on the roll-up – which can be found at https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2475879 . One quick reminder – there are other packages which can be loaded for just SharePoint Server or Project Server – which may mean that the versions of the databases could be different to the ones I have listed.

Using Project to Create Meeting Agendas

If you think about it, meetings are a lot like projects. They’re for a defined amount of time with the goal of getting something accomplished. All good meetings have a defined agenda just like all good projects have a detailed schedule. Since you can use Project to create schedules, why not use Project to create your agendas? Now this is probably overkill for your one hour meeting where the agenda is three bullet points but if you are trying to plan a multi-hour meeting where a variety of speakers have to present and you need to stick to a timeframe – Project can definitely help. I recently had to plan a meeting that had some complexity and using Project saved me time. I knew that we had four hours available and had to get in seven presentations plus an intro and conclusion. I started by just dividing the time out and giving everyone the same amount of time but then all the speakers were saying they needed extra time or didn’t need that much time. If I had been in Excel or Word I would have had to manually update all the time slots and then constantly be checking to make sure everything still fit. Since I was in Project, I could make use of links and deadlines to automate this. This was especially handy after I made what I thought was the final schedule and someone pointed out I should probably add some breaks seeing how it was a four hour meeting – whoops. The below timeline is the final result of my planning and made for a great agenda graphic in my meeting request: How did I do this: Create a new project. Go to the Project tab – Project Information and set the project start date to the exact date and time of the meeting. Ex. 3/23/11 1:00 PM. If your meeting goes over lunch or outside normal working hours, also make sure to set the Project Calendar to the 24 hour calendar so it doesn’t affect your agenda. Go to File tab – Options. On the General tab, set the date format to HH:MM On the Duration tab, set Duration is entered in Minutes (or Hours is that works better for you) Now add your agenda items in the order you’ll be presenting. Feel free to use summary tasks to help organize the topics – I did. Select the last meeting item and go to the Task Information dialog – Advanced tab. Set the deadline to be the meeting end time. This way you’ll get an indication if you go over time. Now link all of the tasks by selecting them and clicking Link Tasks on the Task tab. You can now start playing with different durations to build a meeting agenda that will work. Don’t forget breaks! When you are done, you can create an agenda timeline by right-clicking the tasks and selecting Add to Timeline. Here’s the actual schedule that I created: Happy meeting planning!

The Service-Oriented Business: Part 2

Fast forward four years. It’s 2009. Remember that you’re Sara, the CIO of a mid-to-large retail company. You have many accomplishments that the business leadership team (and Board of Directors) has recognized: a streamlined supply-chain management system that reduces costs and out-of-stock conditions in stores, expanded your ecommerce presence to Europe, and improved the service levels of your major mission critical applications substantially as well as most of your “tier 2” applications, to name a few. Internally, you recognized that to have accomplished these goals for the business, changes within your IT group had to be made: You examined the IT processes that historically were either poorly performing or not defined and created programs and training for staff to implement IT management processes based on ITIL You virtualized most of your data center except for your mission critical applications and large database systems You implemented an IT service management management function that resulted in a robust but practical and usable configuration management database (CMDB) You created an SLA enforcement mechanism for your critical applications that has the effect of notifying your systems operations center when mission critical application components fail As a result, sales are up, costs are noticeably lower, and service quality is significantly improved. Life is sunny. Until the clouds come (sorry, I just had to put that in!) The implementation of your online presence in Europe has increased the traffic to your site infrastructure by 20%. Moreover, this move results in many holiday specialty items. While your ecommerce infrastructure (web site, fulfillment, inventory, and supply chain) has generally kept up with demand, it has struggled with performance and scaling issues during the holiday season. Also, the annual operational cost of the data center is quite high due to the need to support seasonal demands. This new expansion is stressing your servers even more at peak and, though you’ve grown capacity to meet the demand, your CFO is putting pressure on you to cut operational costs. As you look at your utilization reports in February and March, noting the significantly low traffic that your servers are getting, you know a change needs to be made. To solve the performance issues and the overall seasonality challenge that’s causing significant annual operating costs, you form a task force to investigate the implementation of a private cloud environment. While you believe this will potentially solve the performance and scale issues, you’ve come up with more questions than answers. On the plus side, cloud technologies promise significant scalability benefits (elasticity) to be able to more effectively handle the seasonality concerns, including scaling back services when demand is low. This plan could also result in improvements in your ability to deliver services on demand by deploying ready-made virtual machines for web and application servers. However, many questions persist: What model do I choose: PaaS, IaaS, or some combination? If I choose infrastructure as a service, how do I guarantee the quality of the resulting applications? If I go with platform as a service, what standard services do I put in place that will promote agility without sacrificing quality? How do I enable flexibility and not compromise compliance? Will it be cost-effective? I have a charge-back model today for the services I provide to various lines of business. How will I need to redefine that model so I can keep costs in line? How will it affect my service delivery? Right now now I have a pretty well-defined service management system that helps me keep my critical apps up. Will there be significant VM sprawl as a result of the elasticity I should be getting? If so, how will that affect my ability to manage this sprawl for my critical applications. Heck, I just finished getting a handle on my tier 2 apps. Will I lose control of those? If you haven’t gathered by now, there are themes here that the War on Cost team has been exploring and discussing for some time across a variety of scenarios. They are the enduring business value pillars of reducing costs, improving agility, improving quality of service, improving governance and compliance, and managing risk. All of these value dimensions are in play with the introduction of a cloud paradigm. In fact, they have the potential to be amplified: Agility – Possibly the value pillar with the highest potential amplitude. The cloud paradigm (whether public, private, or something in between) has the potential for extreme agility. Automatically provisioning development, test, and production environments in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks has enormous potential Costs – Costs have the potential to be dramatically reduced by providing a commoditized set of services that can be automatically commissioned and decommissioned at will. Also, server utilization can be significantly improved through intelligent load balancing as demands for the service change, particularly due to seasonal demands from stores and online traffic Quality of Service – QoS in all its forms (reliability, scalability, performance, availability, etc.) can be greatly improved by intelligently and dynamically load balancing workloads across (potentially large) arrays of servers running as VMs on a farm of servers that are well-utilized Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management (GRC) – These three are related values and the cloud offers huge potential benefits here too. As services are defined (whether its infrastructure, platform, or software), they are standardized (one of the main tenets of cloud computing). Standardization has the natural implication of introducing governance and compliance regulations, which, in turn, has a direct net benefit to managing risk But, and it’s a really big but, what about complexity? You’re thinking about the sheer number of VMs that can get spun up in your data center. Where once you had a hundred or so servers, you now have somewhere between five hundred and a thousand VMs (you’re not really sure). Will implementing cloud exacerbate that VM growth? How can I contain it? How much should I contain it? So, therein lies the challenge before you: if you’re going to move to a private cloud because you and your business leadership team see the potential for huge benefits, how will you manage the complexity introduced by this cloud to be able to maintain and enhance your IT team’s ability to deliver for the business? What do you think? Do these ideas ring true with you? Are there other major considerations to weigh? Let us know what your experience has been. Have you answered these questions for your organization? Don’t be shy. We want to hear from you. All the best, Erik, Strategist, War on Cost

Partner Story – CionSystems, Inc.

Customers and partners are utilizing Microsoft BPOS to create new and innovative cloud products. The blog post below comes from CionSystems, Inc. and describes what they are doing in the cloud with the power of Microsoft BPOS. Do you have a BPOS story? Send the BPOS Community team an email. -Josh Single Sign-On, Password Self-Service, and Deprovisioning Solutions Identity Management is a hidden, but significant, cost for most businesses. Whether companies use business intelligence and reporting to track the cost of identity management in their IT infrastructure or not, industry experts like Gartner, ARC, Forrester, IDC, and many of their competitors know that Identity Management is a multi-billion dollar industry. When companies fail to manage identity or manage it poorly, those companies lose significant profit from their revenue stream. From forgotten passwords to unlocking accounts, help-desk support calls, provisioning access to IT systems, maintaining accounts and access to multiple systems, and removing unnecessary access when employees leave the company or no longer need that access, companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, if not millions, to manage their identity infrastructure. Just for handling the problem of lost productivity when employees need passwords to be reset to gain access to their workstations, a 1,000 person company can easily spend in excess of US $300K per year. That cost increases in direct proportion to the number of employees and that cost may further and exponentially increase in direct proportion to the number of systems to be managed by the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, increasing oversight by newly evolving government acts and regulations require stricter auditing and reporting (e.g., HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, CFR, etc.) for companies in the healthcare, financial, and telecommunications sectors. It is now more important than ever to know exactly which employees have access to which systems and data and when they do not. In addition to limiting the amount of damage that disgruntled employees can do after leaving a company, user accounts that await deprovisioning after an employee has been terminated still remain a security vulnerability for hackers breaking into corporate networks. The Cloud now provides exciting new ways for companies to lower costs by employing new purchase-only-what-you-need and pay-for-only-what-you-use models, but also introduces new security challenges for identity management potentially increasing support calls to the help desk for password and account management. For pennies on the dollar, small to large enterprises need a way to mitigate the lost productivity of employees requiring a password reset or needing to unlock their accounts in the local domain or in the Cloud. Additionally companies require transparent, bi-directional synchronization of identities with the Cloud and deprovisioning of user accounts needs to be immediate both in the local domain as well as the Cloud. CionSystems provides a cohesive solution to the above challenges via comprehensive, transparent, bi-directional, real-time directory synchronization between the local domain and the Cloud. Single Sign-On (SSO) and migration to the Cloud is supported by CionSystems’ Cloud Management Tool. CionSystems, Inc. https://www.cionsystems.com

This Week in BPOS News 3/25

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. For this week in BPOS news we take a look at Microsoft’s cloud strategy from an executive’s view, and learn how partners are moving over 1,000 customers to the cloud. 1. Microsoft Exec Says Cloud Strategy Is Right On Track It’s old news that Microsoft is making a hard push towards the cloud. But Microsoft Office Division President, Kurt DelBene is taking a fresh look at Microsoft’s cloud strategy in our first BPOS Story from InformationWeek . DelBene offered an interview with InformationWeek in which he dives into some recent “significant customer wins” in the cloud and the progress of Office 2010, mobile and the future. DelBene points to greater productivity coming to mobile devices in the near future. “The first workload that will move to the cloud is messaging. We have been engaged with all cell phone manufacturers over the last several years to license our Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol.” The conversation from InformationWeek touches on some other cloud computing applications and the vision of the future. The article concludes with another Kurt DelBene quote, “‘Companies are looking to get the same capabilities in the cloud that they now have on premises, and they want to do that in a flexible way,’ he said. ‘There’s not a single one of our customers who says, ‘flip the switch, I’m moving everything today.’” What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s cloud strategy? Do you agree with Kurt DelBene? Leave your comments below. 2. Microsoft Partners Move 1,000 Customers to Cloud Computing Microsoft BPOS is enjoying some great success and adoption through the hard work of Partners that are committed to bringing new customers to Microsoft BPOS. In our second story for this week in BPOS news, we take a look at how some of the top Microsoft partners have brought more than 1,000 customers to cloud computing. With the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference coming up in July 2011, MSPmentor author Joe Panettieri believes that more partner wins are being recognized by Microsoft and third party websites. This article even points to a list of the top 10 U.S. BPOS partners based on company migrations. Joe Panettieri goes on to write about how he envisions Microsoft’s delicate cloud computing messaging in the near future. What do you think of partners moving 1,000 customers to the cloud? What messaging does Microsoft need to relay to Partners? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below. What are your thoughts about the stories we shared with you this week? Did you see a story you want to share with us? Let us know what other topics you’d like to see. You can comment on this blog post or send an

Microsoft Project Conference 2012 March 19-22, 2012– SAVE THE DATE!

It’s official, our next Microsoft Project Conference will be held a year from now in sunny Phoenix: Next Project Conference – March 19-22, 2012 . We will have plenty more content about the event in the future; until then as mentioned in the past you cannot miss this event for the quality of the content delivered by experts from our community worldwide and from the Microsoft Project group, not to mention the key networking opportunities you will gain at this event. Start planning by blocking off your calendar!

Microsoft Project Conference 2010 March 19-22, 2012– SAVE THE DATE!

It’s official, our next Microsoft Project Conference will be held a year from now in sunny Phoenix: Next Project Conference – March 19-22, 2012 . We will have plenty more content about the event in the future; until then as mentioned in the past you cannot miss this event for the quality of the content delivered by experts from our community worldwide and from the Microsoft Project group, not to mention the key networking opportunities you will gain at this event. Start planning by blocking off your calendar!

Project 2010 Help Content – Now Available for Download

You can now download a bunch of help content around Getting Started with Project 2010. This content includes a guide to the ribbon, information on what’s new in 2010, and a PowerPoint you can use for training people on 2010: Basic tasks in Project 2010.html Getting_Started_with_Project2010.wmv Project2010Guide.exe Reference_Project_2007_to_2010.xltx Training Presentation – Getting started with Project 2010.pptx What’s new in Project 2010.html Link to download location – https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d05156e8-3ee5-4735-a45a-b4372f12abdb Additionally, you can find that help content and much more posted here – https://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/project-help As always, let us know if you have any feedback on the content or have requests for future help articles.

Microsoft Project/Project Server Presence at Tech·Ed 2011

Please find below a summary of the Microsoft Project and Project Server presence at the upcoming Microsoft Tech.Ed North America 2011 in Atlanta, May 16-19, 2011. We have a very exciting content and speakers line up (see summary below); not to mention a full Project booth with experts from Microsoft product group, support, consulting services and Project MVPs. Last but not least, yes we will have exciting giveaways as well, stay tune for more information, in the meantime register and attend (point your manager to this page: How to Convince Your Boss ). See you in Atlanta in May! Title Description Speaker OSP202 SharePoint Governance and Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Project Server 2010 Is SharePoint becoming an important part of your company’s overall IT offering? If so, it’s likely that you have a need to better manage SharePoint business requests – things like new sites, workflows, custom applications, web parts, and Business Intelligence dashboards. Join industry expert Scott Jamison as he discusses the importance of SharePoint lifecycle management from an IT governance perspective. We’ll introduce a free, downloadable solution that provides a powerful request and workflow process, enabling IT to view, analyze, prioritize and resource requests using the workflow and portfolio analytics capabilities of Project Server 2010. Business users are able to make special project requests through a form in Project Web App, and project managers can monitor and assign resources, evaluate priorities, and manage their overall project portfolio more efficiently. Scott Jamison, Christophe Fiessinger OSP203 Application Lifecycle Management: Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010, Better Together The Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack further strengthens the Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management Solution by bridging the gap between Project Portfolio Management and Application Development. By bringing the best of these two worlds together, it creates a win-win situation that enables developers and project managers to use the tools and processes of their choice and collaborate at the granularity they desire. Bi-directional data synchronization between Team Foundation Server and Project Server allows the PMO and Development teams to share project information transparently and provide management with insight into resource utilization, portfolio execution and alignment with strategic objectives. This session provides an overview and demonstrates the Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration feature pack. Ed Blankenship, Christophe Fiessinger OSP371-INT Best Practices Troubleshooting Microsoft Project Server 2010 Deployments Project Server 2010 is an integrated solution with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise, and makes extensive use of Microsoft SQL Server – both through SharePoint and directly with its own databases. Troubleshooting requires knowledge of the full stack and the tools associated with gathering and analyzing data from each of the layers. This session highlights how these various tools are used in Microsoft Premier Support to troubleshoot issues and help resolve customers’ problems – and shows how you can use these tools. Brian Smith