New Office 2013 compatibility content for IT Pros in the Office Resource Kit

There is exciting news coming from the Office IT Pro Blog about great new Office 2013 content. Be sure to view the article below from the Office IT Pro Blog or read the original post here . Written by Jill_M [MSFT]   We’ve published a new Visio poster and article about compatibility and telemetry in Office 2013. These are both good starting points for IT Pros who want a high-level view without diving into too much detail. The  Visio poster  (also available in PDF format) describes how telemetry works in Office 2013. You can learn about the telemetry components, the types of files and solutions that are monitored, the monitoring process, and more. The new  Office 2013 compatibility guide  describes the modern Office compatibility process and how Office telemetry supports this process. You’ll learn about topics like discovery vs. inventory, the importance of working with business groups, and how to conduct user acceptance testing using Click-to-Run, to name a few. As always, we welcome your feedback and we encourage you to  check for new  and updated content weekly . -Jill

New "From the Trenches" white paper by Chris Vandersluis: "Top-down or bottom-up?"

We’re happy to announce the publish of a new white paper by Chris Vanderluis of HMS Software for the “From the Trenches” column in the Project Server 2010 TechCenter and the Project Server 2007 TechCenter . This latest white paper – “Top-down or bottom-up” – discusses project management, portfolio management, and task management, and it compares the top-down and bottom-up management practices related to them. Here is some bio information about the author: Chris Vandersluis is the president and founder of Montreal, Canada–based HMS Software , a Microsoft Certified Partner. He has an economics degree from McGill University and over 24 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and helped found the Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec chapters of the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUG). Publications for which Chris has written include Fortune , Heavy Construction News , Computing Canada magazine, and PMI’s PMNetwork , and he is a regular columnist for Project Times . He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University and often speaks at project management association functions across North America and around the world. HMS Software is the publisher of the TimeControl project-oriented timekeeping system and has been a Microsoft Project Solution Partner since 1995. Chris Vandersluis can be contacted by e-mail at: chris.vandersluis@hms.ca . If you would like to read more Enterprise Project Management related articles by Chris Vandersluis, see his blog: EPM Guidance .

More than 100 Reasons To Attend Microsoft Project Conference 2012

With less than a month away before the start of the Microsoft Project Conference 2012 (#MSPC12), March 19-22 in Phoenix Arizona, I wanted to take a moment and re-iterate why this is the event you cannot miss next month. As the all-up content owner for this conference I have had the pleasure to review about 170 submissions during the Call For Content phase; and lately I have started doing content reviews with speakers, and trust me there are so many great stories that I just can’t wait to see attendees excited about the quality of sessions we’ll have in Phoenix. To date we have 97 sessions (including instructor lead labs) and these alone are 97 reasons you need to come to #MSPC12! Dux did a great write-up on his Top 7 Reasons You Should Attend #MSProject Conference 2012 #mspc12 #pmot , in particular I completely agree this is a unique opportunity to Network with customers, partners, MVPs (experts) and last but not least with Microsoft employees that build, support, sale, deploy and market your favorite product everyday. I personally have made a lot of marketing projects decisions following face to face meetings with attendees, and expect to do many more for the coming year… As Dux mentioned mentioned in his #5 reason: Keeping up with the Joneses, trends and news is also a very strong reason to attend. Some of you might argue that staying in the office in front of a computer is sufficient to hear and see the pulse, I actually think events like this will give you a much better vision of trends and news with respect to PPM/PM etc… Another fact to support this point, is look at these sessions we’lll have from the two leading PPM analysts: Dan Stang & Matt Light from Gartner: The Gartner perspective: PPM Industry Trends and Adoption Best Practices and Going Beyond PPM – Effectively Manage Your Entire IT Portfolio Decisions with Project Server 2010 . I also think considering the above plus free certifications, training etc. it’s a relatively cheap event with a very strong ROI (return on investment) to one should consider for their business (if you are a partners for instance) or as a career if you are an individual. As my colleague Brian mentioned in this post: To All Aspiring Project Ninjas “ Project Conference won’t be hosted every year and there won’t be another worldwide Project Conference elsewhere ”, so register today instead of regretting tomorrow! And yes we’ll also also lots of fun at the event, stay tune for more information The first Project Conference I attended was back in January 2006, and I have attended every single one since (October 2007, September 2009) plus dozens of Microsoft lead events like (SharePoint Conference, TechEd, Summit of various sorts etc…) and I truly believe next month will be very unique Project Conference and I expect to see you all there! A bientot! PS: an adaptation of the #MSPC12 theme I did during the last Seattle snow storm, feel free to use it in your email signature/blog posts etc…

10 Tasks For the 2011 Holidays

Dear readers I wish you all a restful and peaceful holiday break! Since it’s a quiet time of the year and a great opportunity to catch up on recent product updates and announcement I wanted to provide you a list of tasks to keep you busy if you have spare cycle in the coming two weeks Register to Microsoft Project Conference 2012 next march in Phoenix Arizona.Yes you can’t miss it! We have great content and speakers, plus it’s a very unique opportunity to network with Microsoft, customers, partners and MVPs. More information on our site: https://msprojectconference.com Update your farms/servers with the latest software updates (SP & CU), for 2010 we released Service Pack 1 (SP1) last June and this week the December 2011 Cumulative Update (CU) below. We have shipped a number of updates based on your feedback and ensuring your users/customers experience the latest and greatest from Microsoft is a great holiday gift ! As usual please read the best practices and guidance documented on TechNet on how to deploy software updates. Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint Server 2007 and 2010 December 2011 CU Announcement Announcing The Release Of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010 Read the latest product documentation and guidance – yes there is a lot of valuable content we have published throughout the year and continue to do so based on your feedback so please ensure you are on top to optimize your usage or our stack. A great tool to start catching up on documentation is the Enterprise Project Management Content Pivot Viewer . A sample of recent documents for instance are listed below (and yes there are a few more on TechNet and our main product site: https://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/articles-white-papers.aspx ) Actual Work Best Practices Documentation Now Available Best practices for managing a large number of resources in Project Server 2010 Testing Project Server 2010 deployments Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide for Project Web App Catch up on recent Project news announced on our main product blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/project . For instance: Microsoft is Rated in the Gartner Project and Portfolio Applications MarketScope Announcing SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 Microsoft Project for the masses Deploy our latest Project 2010 Demo Pack V2 as announced by Jan Kalis: Project 2010 Demo Pack Version 2 NOW available to Microsoft Partners! and yes it contains Project Server and scenarios and data to showcase our full PPM functionalities. Read our recently published customer case studies : https://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/customer-success.aspx . For instance in the past few months we released these: Revlon – IT Department of Global Cosmetics Company Cuts Time in Meetings by up to 30 Percent Nagra – Digital Security Firm Makes More Efficient, Data-Driven Decisions About IT Projects Intel – Intel Will Save Annually While Making Project Management More Flexible Purchase Project and or Project Server 2010 books – yes another testament that 2010 is an awesome release, is the quantity of books available today listed on your favorite online site. In addition check out our Training and Learning site . Test out our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Innovation Process Management (IPM) solutions. A lot more information can be found below: New Feature Pack from Visual Studio Improves Project Management and Software Development Team Collaboration Innovation Management and Ideation Solutions with SharePoint and Project Server Ramp up on Windows 8, SQL Server 2012 and System Center 2012 , key links below: Building Windows 8 SQL Server 2012 System Center 2012 Sign up for an Office 365 trial , yes its landmark release for our cloud offering and it keeps getting better on a regular basis: official Office 365 site . Buy a Windows Phone and feel the love! Could not resist to add this 11th task… Seriously test out the Office 365 integration for instance or more fun application like the Skydrive app or the XBox Companion app to name two. It’s a great OS and it has improved by professional and personal productivity a lot. A lot more information here: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone . PS: please find above a poster we used internally recently thanks to a similar campaign done by the Microsoft Germany subsidiary

New "From the Trenches" white paper from Chris Vandersluis: "They Say They Want a Resolution"

We’re happy to announce the publish of a new white paper by Chris Vanderluis of HMS Software for the “From the Trenches” column in the Project Server 2010 TechCenter and the Project Server 2007 TechCenter . This latest white paper –  “They Say They Want a Resolution” – describes some common challenges you may face when scheduling projects. It describes coming up with the best approach when you try to determine how long tasks should be and how many tasks there should be to optimize a project schedule. It discusses how different industries typically require different types of schedules (for example, software development, EPM (engineering, procurement, and construction), and plant shutdown).  It also discusses several factors in choosing project resolution (for example, length of project, resources involved, management or division of resources, speed and effort required in collecting data, and data update schedule).  Here is some bio information about the author: Chris Vandersluis is the president and founder of Montreal, Canada–based HMS Software , a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. He has an economics degree from McGill University and over 27 years’ experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and helped found the Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec chapters of the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUGA). Publications for which Chris has written include Fortune , Heavy Construction News , Computing Canada magazine, and PMI’s PMNetwork , and he is a regular columnist for Project Times . He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University and often speaks at project management association functions across North America and around the world. HMS Software is the publisher of the TimeControl project-oriented timekeeping system and has been a Microsoft Project Solution Partner since 1995. Chris Vandersluis can be contacted by e-mail at: chris.vandersluis@hms.ca . If you would like to read more Enterprise Project Management related articles by Chris Vandersluis, see his blog: EPM Guidance .

Hello Skype World!

I’m very excited about this announcement this morning: Microsoft Officially Welcomes Skype . I have a fairly international family spread across multiple continents and every time I travel it’s exciting to see how broadly Skype is used and a recognized brand worldwide. This opens up lots of exciting opportunities in the future… About a month ago I wrote this post Celebrating 10 years at Microsoft and it’s amazing how many major announcements we have made since September, a non exhaustive list below: Microsoft Reimagines Windows, Presents Windows 8 Developer Preview Xbox 360 Teams Up With Entertainment Leaders to Transform TV Microsoft Expands Data Platform With SQL Server 2012, New Investments for Managing Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere More Microsoft Press Releases Archives here . In the end I’m all fired up about the future and MSFT continuous innovation!

New "From the Trenches" article by Chris Vandersluis: "Dashboard directions"

We’re happy to announce the publish of a new white paper by Chris Vanderluis of HMS Software for the “From the Trenches” column in the Project Server 2010 TechCenter and the Project Server 2007 TechCenter . This latest white paper –  “Dashboard directions” –  describes some of the common challenges you may face when deciding to use dashboards in your EPM environment. It describes how the prettiness of a professional-looking dashboard might sometimes hide the need for users to look into the quality of the data — “pedigree” and updated data, for example.  It mentions how data for dashboards should go through an approval process to ensure high data quality and completeness.  It includes a few techniques to prevent people from skewing data under their control to misrepresent the data that is displayed in the dashboard.  Additionally, it states some basic rules you should take into consideration when you create dashboards for EPM.   Make sure to look at this and other white papers in the From the Trenches column, as they are sure to provide you helpful insight into deploying and using Project Server in your environment. Here is some bio information about the author: Chris Vandersluis is the president and founder of Montreal, Canada–based HMS Software , a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. He has an economics degree from McGill University and over 27 years’ experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and helped found the Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec chapters of the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUGA). Publications for which Chris has written include Fortune , Heavy Construction News , Computing Canada magazine, and PMI’s PMNetwork , and he is a regular columnist for Project Times . He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University and often speaks at project management association functions across North America and around the world. HMS Software is the publisher of the TimeControl project-oriented timekeeping system and has been a Microsoft Project Solution Partner since 1995.  Chris Vandersluis can be contacted by e-mail at: chris.vandersluis@hms.ca . If you would like to read more Enterprise Project Management related articles by Chris Vandersluis, see his blog: EPM Guidance .

Project Server 2010: SP1 and June 2011 CU–FormatException when trying to provision a PWA site

Thanks to everyone who joined Adrian and I for this morning’s webcast – we sure covered a lot of stuff (well mostly Adrian – with the June CU update).  For those who couldn’t attend you can listen to the recording https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032487727&CountryCode=US . One thing I mentioned towards the end was a bug that both Adrian and I had seen since loading SP1 and the June Cumulative Update around provisioning PWA sites if you had more than one web application to choose from on your ManagePWA page.  Well we just had our first customer hit this same issue – so looks like it is out in the wild and not just something Adrian and I broke on our servers.  Still digging in to the detail and trying to find the root of the issue – but the workaround is simple – just use PowerShell to create the PWA site.  More on that later – first some details of the error so the search engines find this posting.  You will either get it when selecting a web app other than the default and filling the page and clicking OK – but you can also see it if you just change from a web app that is not the default to another one in this dialog: and this will be the error you get and the text for the search engine – String was not recognized as a valid boolean.: and from the ULS logs: 07/06/2011 16:27:50.59    w3wp.exe (0x1E10)    0x1FF4    SharePoint Foundation    Runtime    tkau    Unexpected    System.FormatException: String was not recognized as a valid Boolean.    at System.Boolean.Parse(String value)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.EntityEditor.ParseSpanData(String spans)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.EntityEditor.LoadPostData(String postDataKey, NameValueCollection values)     at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessPostData(NameValueCollection postData, Boolean fBeforeLoad)     at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)    c52c7488-9e1f-4a26-a256-de796d689c12 The PowerShell workaround is really straightforward – you can use the New-SPProjectWebInstance command, and either give all the parameters or just hit return and respond to the prompts.  The URL is the full URL of the Project Web App you wish to provision.  Full details on using Windows PowerShell for Project Server 2010 can be found at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662497.aspx and here is the syntax listing from the {PowerShell get-help command on the  New-SPProjectWebInstance command NAME     New-SPProjectWebInstance SYNOPSIS     Creates a new instance of a Project Server service application. SYNTAX     New-SPProjectWebInstance -AdminAccount -ArchiveDbname -DraftDbname -PrimaryDbserver –publishedDbname -ReportingDbname -ReportingDbserver [-PrimaryDBMirrorServer ] [-ReportingDBMirrorServer ] -Url [-AssignmentCollection ] [-HostHeaderWebapplicationUrl ] [-Lcid ] [-Wait ] [ ] DESCRIPTION     Use the New-SPProjectWebInstance cmdlet to create a new instance of a Project Server service application. An instance of a Project Server service application is referred to as a Project Web Access (PWA) instance. RELATED LINKS REMARKS     To see the examples, type: “get-help New-SPProjectWebInstance -examples”.     For more information, type: “get-help New-SPProjectWebInstance -detailed”.     For technical information, type: “get-help New-SPProjectWebInstance -full”. Once you’ve used this you will never want to go back to the UI!  I’ll update this entry as we find more information and have news on any fix.

This Week in BPOS News 6/17

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 look at a household brand making the move to BPOS, and we take a step-by-step look at setting up your very own Cloud. 1.       Coca-Cola Amatil turns Microsoft, won’t look back 15,000 Coca-Cola Amatil employees are BPOS users. CIO, Barry Simpson, understands the need for better collaboration and has invested heavily in Microsoft’s BPOS productivity tools. Barry touches on the cost saving advantages of moving to Microsoft BPOS. “’When companies run their own e-mail infrastructure, you tend to have large capital spikes and it’s very hard to keep current with the releases that the software companies are bringing out.'” The ability for staff to work from any location, easy integration of mobile devices, constant updates and increased cloud capacity has enabled Coca-Cola to be on the leading edge of their field. Coca-Cola Amatil upgraded their Cloud solution from Lotus to BPOS and was able to see results: 300MB to 5GB of storage 69 servers relieved of hosting Mobile device integration We are glad to have Coca-Cola Amatil in the Cloud with us! Are you in the Cloud with Microsoft? Tell us your story in the comments below. 2.      The Big Build – Parts 1 through 4 Are you a BPOS user that is looking to migrate to Office 365? Then our first BPOS story may be for you. Jorge R. Diaz , Senior Microsoft Engineer at Planet Technologies and Office 365 Grid member , writes four posts about his experience with deploying a client to Office 365. The four part blog post features fantastic images and step by step instructions on how to deploy Office 365. The four parts can be broken down: Part 1 – Review the overall configuration of the migration Part 2 – Configure the CAS/HUB array to allow Exchange delegation Part 3 – Public folder Free/Busy configuration Part 4 – Deploy the sign-in assistant Do you have a migration story? Was this walkthrough useful to you? Leave your comments 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 email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook   page.