We’re excited to accounce that we will be giving out full Microsoft Project Conference 2012 passes ($899.00 each) to three deserving individuals who would like to attend Project Conference 2012. We want you to nominate someone you know who has made a substantial contribution and gone the extra mile for your organization or the Project community. Think of someone who always puts others first, someone going above and beyond, and someone you feel deserves more recognition–from the “accidental” project manager all way to project management professionals. We want to thank your project hero! Here is how you enter: Email projconf@microsoft.com  with the subject “My Hero Nomination” by 11:59 p.m. on the 7 th of March 2012 Describe why the unsung hero deserves this prize in 100 words or less. Your Unsung hero’s Name Your Unsung hero’s Email address     We will judge the entries and pick three (3) individuals who we will offer a full conference pass to Microsoft Project Conference 2012 (MSPC12). We want dedicated and passionate individuals who love to help others.  We want to reward them with the chance to attend MSPC12 in person and see for themselves the passion of the Project community. You can nominate up to five (5) project hero! (separate email entries for each please) Here are the Official Contest Rules Thanks and have fun nominating those who you think have made your life easier or improved our community.

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…

I have seen a few questions recently in the Microsoft Project Server Forum and other in other social platform about the integration of Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Dynamics CRM 2011, and since I delivered a session on this topic at an event a few months ago, I wanted to share my thoughts on the subject. Before I go any further I think it’s important to understand the Microsoft Dynamics CRM offering, hence I recommend you look at our official CRM product portal for a basic understanding of our offering: https://crm.dynamics.com/en-us/home At a high level Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers the three solutions: Sales Force Automation Customer Service Marketing The goal of the session I co-delivered with a CRM consultant was to investigate integration scenarios between the two line of business applications (CRM & PPM) and showcase integration options between the two extensible platform.  We introduced and demonstrated the following two scenario during that session: Sales to Project Delivery – once an opportunity reaches 80%, a project is created in Project Server Marketing planning to execution – marketing campaigns are imported in Project Server to leverage the Portfolio Analysis engine to choose which initiatives are align with the objectives based on cost & resources constraints Demo screenshots: Demo screenshots: Due to not only the rich extensibility of both products but also to the ease programming of both, even a marketing person like myself (!) with the help of a CRM trained consultant we were able to built these demos in a few days (including a CRM workflow creating a Project Server project using a standard PSI call). For more information on the extensibility of each please refer to the Developer centers on MSDN: https://msdn.microsoft.com/Project https:// msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm If you do not have programming experience on MSFT CRM or Project Server I highly recommend you engage Microsoft certified CRM & PPM partners or Microsoft Consulting Services to help your with the technical aspect of the integration.  The two scenarios/use cases presented above are by no means exhaustive and more can achieve between Microsoft CRM and PPM offerings. In summary integrating Microsoft Project Server and Dynamics CRM offers a strong line of business application and integration is possible today using custom code thanks to their respective rich extensibility. Happy integration projects and see you next month at Microsoft Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix !

From the great food and great people to the keynotes and SharkPro sponsored evening event, there are plenty of reasons to attend Project Conference. But it’s the second to none training events that truly makes the trip worthwhile for many of our users and I wanted to take this opportunity to focus on the conference experience for you. Whether you’re just starting out with Project or a seasoned veteran, Project Conference is the single greatest opportunity to see how the experts use the tool, share your questions while networking with the community, and grow to master the tool. As much as we’d like to, Project Conference won’t be hosted every year and there won’t be another worldwide Project Conference elsewhere, so we encourage you to register for Project Conference 2012. We have a ton of great sessions for all audiences, but I wanted to highlight the key sessions that will help our desktop users (Standard or Professional) master the tool. To go along with our instructor led trainings, hands-on labs, and on-site certifications for Microsoft Project Managing Projects 70-178, we have the following sessions dedicated to the client to help train you and the rest of your team. 10 “Golden Rules” to work with Microsoft Project! Bridging Project Management and IT Service Management domains using Microsoft Project professional 2010 Care and Feeding of the Zealots: Why Project users are disproportionately invested in their product, and how you can help spread the love Critical Chain Project Management using Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and Prochain: Implementing Project Portfolio Management Critical Path 2.0 Designing with Project’s new manual scheduling type Desktop Reporting Overview Implementing PMI’s Practice Standard for Scheduling in Microsoft Project Leveraging Project 2010 with Office 365 for Project Management Success Making the Most of Project Professional When Managing Multiple Projects Managing your projects: Come find out how to save over 3 hours a week using Microsoft Project Microsoft Project Inappropriate Practices Modeling Traditional, Serial and SCRUM Techniques in Project 2010 Project 2010 Desktop Overview Task Types The Painters, The Policemen and The Pope… understanding task movement in Microsoft Project 2010 YJTJ (Your Job Tool’s Job)™ – Working in Concert with Microsoft Project Learn more about Project Conference 2012  and follow us on Twitter @MSFTProject

“Today Microsoft announced limited details about Office 15. For more information, go here .”

Sorry for the delay in getting this posting out.  Vacation and an unusual amount of snow are a couple of the excuses, and if you missed the webcast then you can view here – https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032493964&role=attend&pw=5A2EBE71 Also if you are thinking of watching this or future TechNet webcasts then I’ll remind you that you will need the Live Meeting client install which can be obtained from here https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/CD010254990.aspx .  – but on to the questions – thanks for all of you who attended and for the great questions!: Q: What is the risk of applying the December Cumulative Update on the server but not on the client? Is it highly recommended to always keep them in sync, or is it acceptable to have some clients that are not patched to the same CU as the server? A: There is no dependency between the client and server, and although to be fully patched you should update both there is no risk (beyond not having some of the fixes) if you update the client or server independently.  Once you have patched the client it is also worth ensuring no un-patched clients can connect by use of the Server Setting to set the minimum client patch level that can connect (2010 only) Q:  Ref 30900 – the fix relating to custom calendars – is that custom enterprise calendar, or custom calendar in template, or both? A:  In this case, it is whether or not the template has the custom calendar associated with it. For example, suppose you have a custom calendar that is the base calendar for some tasks within your project. It is in this case that the PSI method would fail as it attempted to reconcile the calendar. Q:  The Save Error 9000 is a very generic message. Can you repeat the exact issue for which this fix was designed? A:  The scenario is this. As you save your project from Project Professional, you see the 9000 error and your project does not get saved. We found about four different conditions where duplicate IDs or objects such as views could appear and it’s because of these duplicates that the save process failed. We’ve added fixes on both the client and server to address these various conditions. As Brian states, there could possibly be other conditions that could lead to this issue and so time will tell.  As mentioned – you don’t need to install both server and client fixes – they are independent – but to get full protection you will. Q:  In regards to Timesheets in Single Entry Mode, if a timesheet is submitted and accepted with actuals against 3 projects, and later one of those projects is deleted, and then someone deletes that timesheet and attempts to create a replacement timesheet, currently that results in an error. (The timesheet line items from the deleted projects still remain and seem to stop the new timesheet from being created.) Does this CU address this? The issue is that there is an “orphan” timesheet line record. A:  With the December CU the practice of deleting timesheets should be reviewed within your organization as the behavior changes – but it should not give an error.  When the timesheet is re-created it will re-load the current tasks with any current actual work that has been accepted.  The deleted project will no longer appear.  The specific error mentioned isn’t familiar – so there may still be a risk of it occurring – possibly related to pending actions? Q:  You spoke about graphical indicators disappearing occasionally after changes have been made to their enterprise field definitions. Are there other graphical indicator problems…. such as enterprise fields showing incorrect indicators after changes made to their field definitions? I experienced some problems in one of my deployments but I believe the issue was a wrong indicator not a missing indicator. The problem seems to have gone away when I created new fields in the production site. Forum postings gave me the impression the December CU would address this. Any comments on the status? Are all of these graphical indicator problems resolved now? A:  We have certainly addressed a number of issues with graphical indicators – it could be possible to see the wrong indicator if a condition of a formula calculation gives an unexpected result and no indicator (or an existing indicator) meets the resultant condition.  We’d be keen to hear of any reproducible steps that are still giving bad results. Q:  I know that for Project Server 2007 there was a tool (P12ACTool) that could be run against the environment that would check for standard issues behind the scenes and provide steps for resolving those issues. This was used in my past as a preventative step to keeping the environment up to par. Is there a similar tool for Project Server 2010? A:  There is a tool that we use for 2010 (P14ACTool).  It is used on support incidents under the direction of a support engineer and not publically available.  I does require some interpretation of the results and can give false positives which is why we like to be involved with the customer using the tool.  We do appreciate that some partners make extensive use of the tool with their customers and are reviewing a version of the tool that we could make more available – watch this space.  We are also investing a lot in diagnostics at Microsoft so expect some new automated packages sent to you from CSS to aid in collection of data. Q:  What is the status of the fix for the 2010 client issue with “Save and Send” where the data is not actually saved to the Server? A:  Although I remember hearing about a condition like this I tried some tests after the webcast and I was not able to reproduce or find a bug in our database.  I’d welcome any repro steps so we can address this if it is still an issue. Q:  We have a couple of different 2010 client machines running the Oct and Dec CU, and the links between tasks are vanishing and then reappearing, resource usage view is jumping around between resources when modifying planned time phased actual work, and indicators in the status line (at the bottom) are vanishing – is this a known issue? (not seen it prior to August client CU for 2010) A:  We have a hotfix request in for the resource usage view jumping – likely to be fixed in April CU – not familiar with the other issues – repro steps would aid our investigation here – and confirmed this was more a display problem than the links really going away.  Possibly a UI handle problem? Q:  Should you be able to update Actual Start in the Project Center views in edit mode A:  This has not been exposed for editing in the web – possibly because of the knock on effect on the task and assignment start dates. Q:  Are either of you going to be at the Project Conference? A:  We can now confirm that yes, Adrian and I will be at the Project Conference in Phoenix, along with others from the support team: our Manager Larry Block and escalation colleague Aik Chen.  Also look out for my next blog post asking what you would like us to talk about at the conference. Q:  This is a general Project Server config question: Is there a way to report time a the high level and not at task level because we just record total time of a project? Meaning entering the time A:  Reporting in the timesheet is possible at the top level Q:  Not really project related but I recently downloaded a few of the past webcasts in wma format. But I can’t sync any of these to my Zune. Any suggestions? A:  I tried this by downloading and syncing to my Windows Phone 7 and also this didn’t work.  I’ll see if I can find a way of doing this – I’m sure using Expression Encoder would allow re-encoding in a suitable format. Q:  What is the correct way to submit a Design Change Request? Is there a website we can go to directly? A:  No web site – usually giving feedback through your account team, or to a support engineer will get through to the right people.

Earlier this month our friends on the Office 365 team shared a link via Twitter to an article by technology writer Will Kelly . Entitled ” Microsoft Office 365 for Project Managers “, the article surfaced the project management potential in Office 365 and an interesting theme–the “democratization of project management data”. Read more about it here . Today, we’re excited to share a special series on how Office 365 adoption can transform your existing project management capabilities. Microsoft Office 365 provides an infrastructure for collaboration and information sharing. It offers a cloud solution for an organization of any size, whether that organization involves a small business or a small team with members spread across the globe. But best of all, it offers the ease and familiarity you’d expect from Microsoft and its Office products. Many enterprises have already had a great deal of success implementing a PPM solution via Project Server 2010. But how about options for smaller organizations or departments just getting started? Microsoft Project is perfect for helping project managers organize schedules and manage budget, resources and dependencies, but what about the rest of the team?  Effective project management begins with team collaboration.  It necessitates a secure and central location for all project documents and artifacts like a site provisioned in SharePoint Online, demands ease of mobile communication you’d find in Exchange Online and Lync Online,  and the great user experience provided by Microsoft Project and Office 2010 when working with project schedules and documents. By themselves, these tools are just tools, but together it opens the door to a unique collaboration experience that any organization can benefit from. And because we’ve built these products with the user in mind they just work, even across multiple platforms and devices.  We’ve called out a number of common pain points tied to project collaboration–document storage, effective communication, sharing a project schedule, and visual reporting for stakeholders just to name a few. But this represents a small sample of all the great possibilities Office 365 enables for project management and we’d love to hear more from users like you in the comments below or via Twitter and Facebook . Download the paper and accompanying video here. You can view the full video series on our YouTube channel as well. We’ll be featuring a great session  around this very topic this March at Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix, AZ. Don’t forget to register!

Now we all know that the finish date a project is automatically calculated by Project and might not necessarily be the due date. If the finish date is before the due date, you have some buffer, if the finish date is after the due date, you have a problem. Let’s assume you are in the first case – it is important to track this buffer and I’ve found manually scheduled tasks are useful for this since they won’t automatically move but they’ll warn you when there is a problem. Let’s say you have this project (this will work for all projects, just make sure you have a milestone representing the project finish that all task chains are connected to): My project finish date is January 9th but I actually don’t have to be done until the 13th so I have a few days of buffer. To represent that I add a new manually scheduled task with the Project Finish milestone as the predecessor and the end date as 1/13: You can now easily tell that you have 4 days of buffer. Now say that task 4 takes 3 days instead of 1 day. Your schedule will look like this: Notice how the buffer tasks didn’t move but you get a warning that there is an issue. Now go in and for the Buffer task, right-click and select Respect Links. This will push the task out. Now you need to decrement the duration until the finish date is once again the 13th: So you can now tell from task 4 slipping that you only have 2 days left of buffer. I find that manually having to update your buffer task helps to make you more aware of when you are using up buffer. You can use this same technique on individual task chains, etc., if you want. Additionally, if you want to make sure you remember the deadline, you can set a deadline on the buffer task to make sure you always adjust the buffer back to it. Learn more about this and other scheduling tips by attending the Microsoft Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix, AZ March 19th-22nd.

Happy new year! Yes I’m sure you are all actively making travel arrangements to attend Microsoft Project Conference in Phoenix next march, specially after this key announcement today: Microsoft Project Conference 2012 Full Session List Announced! Since I know you love to plan and budget I have put together a list of upcoming events Microsoft PPM will participate in (sessions, demo booth, etc.) in the next few months (yes there are plenty of other regional events as well) but these are the ones the corporate marketing team will be involved in. If you have any interest to present and or help with these feel free to contact me via this blog. Stay tune for more information on each event in the future! Event Start Finish Location URL Project Conference 2012 19-Mar 22-Mar Phoenix https://www.msprojectconference.com Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 21-May 23-May National Harbor https://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/program-management/ TechEd North America 11-Jun 14-Jun Orlando https://northamerica.msteched.com Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 19-Jun 20-Jun London https://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/emea/program-management TechEd Europe 26-Jun 29-Jun Amsterdam https://europe.msteched.com/ Worldwide Partner Conference 8-Jul 12-Jul Toronto https://digitalwpc.com

OK so I’m building a Project 2010 addin using Visual Studio 2010 (VSTO) and I got tired of the clickonce deployment option. I added a Visual Studio installer project to my solution and went about following the advice on this page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/ff937654.aspx It was mostly pretty good. A bit confusingly worded in a few places but I wrote that off to me not having enough real development background to pick up on the flow as I might if I was an experienced dev. In the section on registry entries it made mention of this page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386106.aspx . It also showed sample registry entries settings and how to set them up in your installer project. I followed these to the letter and matched mine up with their screenshot to make sure they matched. For the Manifest entry mine was: “[TARGETDIR]ADDINNAME.vsto|vstolocal” I used this and my addin installed the proper ribbon tabs and buttons which meant that the system was able to interpret my entry enough to install my code into Project 2010. But some of my code was not quite working properly. Two of my dialog boxes should have read in a default value from an Application setting but the combobox controls that should have contained these defaults were blank. Click events for buttons were not firing off the code connected to them. The load event of a graphing control did not fire so while the graph control was there with the right visual settings it contained no data. I spent most of last night and much of the early part of this morning trying to figure out what was going wrong. I rebuilt my setup project from scratch. I double checked dependencies and looked to make sure I was building my setup project based on the right output, etc, etc. No Joy. I then checked in with old friend Colby Africa, one of the resident developer geniuses over at forProject to see what I was doing wrong. He had seen some roughly similar oddities in one of his projects and his research with his contacts suggested that I needed to add ‘file:///’ to the beginning of my registry setting in my Manifest key. It had something to do with the way the system interpreted the entry. I was skeptical but did it anyway. My Manifest entry was now “file:///[TARGETDIR]ADDINNAME.vsto|vstolocal”. I rebuilt my setup project and reinstalled my addin and poof! It worked! As always, having smart friends is at least as important as being smart yourself! 🙂