The Can’t-Miss Conference of the Year With just 3.5 months before Microsoft Project Conference 2012, excitement over Microsoft Project Conference 2012 has been through the roof! Come celebrate the phenomenal momentum of Project 2010 with us at the conference. There will be a concentration of learning, networking, and growth opportunities you can’t get anywhere else. Remember, Microsoft Project Conference doesn’t happen every year (the last one was in 2009) so you definitely don’t want to miss this.  We’ve got Over 100+ hours of Sessions! We received over 170 submissions (note: over 200 hours of great community content!)through our Call for Content. Here are some content highlights over the three tracks (Business Value & Insights, Product Sessions, and Deployment, Administration & Developer):  15 customer-led sessions (representing 6 verticals)  where customers share personal success stories using Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM). Project desktop best practices for scheduling, program management, Earned Value, and more. Project Server best practices for Demand Management, Portfolio Analysis, Resource Management, Time Management, Business Intelligence, and more. Key solutions overviews and case studies for Application Lifecycle Management, Innovation Process Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Dynamics AX integration, ERP integration, and more. Technical best practices for IT Professionals and Developers. A full list of session titles and abstracts will be available in mid-December on the official conference website .  Get hands-on Project 2010 Training at the Conference Whether you are currently using or looking to invest in Project 2010, Microsoft Project Conference 2012 provides awesome computer-based and instructor-led training opportunities. On-site at the conference, you can begin your mastery of Project 2010 and make the most of your investment through: Project Professional 2010 (Managing Projects 70-178) desktop training Project Server 2010 (Configuring 70-177) computer-based training with your Project Conference 2012 registration (Hurry: limited seats are available for this hands-on training session.) Instructor-led training sessions Fantastic Sponsor and Exhibitor Excitement The Sponsor and Exhibitor momentum has also been wonderful! We’d like to thank these partners for their support and continued dedication to Microsoft Project. Check out the list of sponsors and exhibitors . If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or exhibitor, it’s not too late! Contact ProjConf@microsoft.com for details. This is the event for You and the Project Community! Great content and a wealth of training are just some of the reasons for you to attend Microsoft Project Conference 2012. This is also the key event for the worldwide community to see, share, and evolve. With such richness of expertise and depth of knowledge in the community, you’ll be able to discover ways to take your project management success to the next level. Tell us what excites you about the event on Twitter or facebook .

Quick note to save someone down the road some time and frustration. 🙂 When working with VBA TimeScaleValue collections in Microsoft Project 2007 or Microsoft Project 2010 remember that timescaled values that fall on nonworking days are not zeros. They are also not NULLs. They are in that shadow world between numbers and NULLs. They are “”. Why is this important you ask? It is NOT important if you are just going to set the Value directly as in: TSV(Counter).Value = $400.00 It is VERY important if you are doing a running total of creating a rollup inside of a loop (in my case a For…Next looping through sets of Tasks, as in: TSV(Counter).Value = TSV(Counter).Value + TaskObject.Cost10 If you fire that second line of code off and the TSV(Counter).StartDate is a nonworking day AND there is not already a number in that value then the value that is there by default is that crazy shadow “” value. The result is a Type Mismatch error because you are trying to add your TaskObject.Cost10 to a non number. So to get around this you have to test the current value of TSV(Counter).Value to see if it is numeric: If IsNumeric(TSV(Counter).Value) = True then TSV(Counter).Value = TSV(Counter).Value + TaskObject.Cost10 Else TSV(Counter.Value = TaskObject.Cost10 End If Now the first pass through this TSV ‘slice’ will show a nonnumeric value and it will just set the value to be the Cost10 value for the TaskObject. But on the second pass through this slice it will be a numeric value since you just set it on the first pass and then it can start your ‘rollup’.

This is just a snippet of T-SQL to return the Project Name, Task Name, Task Start, and Task Finish dates for all tasks in the Project Server Reporting Database that are scheduled to start between the current SQL Server system time and the current system time plus 7 days. The core of this is really just the use of SysDateTime and the DateAdd functions. Other than that it is a very basic query. This gets asked for every once in a while so I will put it out here for those searching.   1: SELECT MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectName, MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskName, 2: MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskStartDate,MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskFinishDate 3: FROM MSP_EpmProject_UserView INNER JOIN 4: MSP_EpmTask_UserView ON MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectUID = 5: MSP_EpmTask_UserView.ProjectUID 6: WHERE (MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskStartDate > sysdatetime()) AND 7: (MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskStartDate < DATEADD(dd, 7, sysdatetime()))

I just wanted to highlight again the EPM Content Pivot Viewer app on TechNet which can be accessed at: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/projectserver/hh240184.aspx (once there I highly suggest clicking on for a better experience) We’ve had some great feedback from customers, but also in recent communications with the Project Server customers noticed that a significant portion of customers have not heard of the pivot or tried it. The idea behind developing the EPM Content Pivot Viewer was to help provide you the customer with an easy to use interface that allows you to view, sort, and search through our extensive content library. We’ve provided logical pivot points to help you find content for your area of the deployment lifecycle from planning through operations and technical reference, as well as pivot content by Project Server solution areas so you can pinpoint TechNet articles, training, and white papers that will be most helpful to what you are looking to do. If you find the EPM Content Pivot Viewer useful and would like to see future versions and new features, please email EPMDocFeedback@microsoft.com with any comments or questions as your feedback is very valuable to us. Thanks, -Rob

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 .

It is our pleasure to host Catalin Olteanu , Chief Product and Technology Officer, UMT and former Principal Development Lead for Microsoft Project to talk about extending Microsoft Project 2010! Webcast Description: Now that Microsoft Project Server 2010 is built on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, developers can take advantage of a rich platform and familiar tools to effectively build integrated applications and provide customers with shrink-wrapped solutions to common problems. Join Catalin Olteanu to hear lessons learned from developing UMT Project Financial Server 2010 in parallel with the Project 2010 release cycle. Project Financial Server 2010 is a complex, three-tier application that seamlessly integrates with Project Server 2010 and extends many of the out-of-the box components including demand management, the ribbon, the queue service, permissions, web parts, and the reporting infrastructure. Date: Starts: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 8:00 AM Time zone: (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) Duration: 1 hour(s) Register for Event today!

OK, so you have a nice view in Project Center and it groups by a given field, we will call it Location. You get all your projects into the system and you notice that the grouping works as expected but the sort of the grouped headings is odd. Not even alphabetical. Now, this is an “issue” that I’m sure has been around for as long as there has been a Project Server but I only just found it because on this engagement I’m on I broke with my normal process and did not prepare my custom field information the way I normally do. Normally, I gather up the lookup table values and set them up in Excel first. By force of an old habit from other systems I would either sort them in Excel or for those that did needed to be in a non-alpha sort I would put numbers in front of the values. Then I would put them into lookup tables. I know that Project Server allows you to control the display order of the lookup table (see  below) but I have always done this and habits are hard to break.   So what was my problem with the sort of my groups? Project Server views sort the group headings according to the display order set in the lookup table of the field you grouped on. My issue was that I had not put numbers in front of the values and I did not pick Sort Ascending. The default is By Row Number and that has always worked for me given my odd ‘pre sorting’ that is part of my normal routine. I went in and changed the sort order or my lookup table and my grouping was correct. The moral of this story could be “Don’t break with your process” or maybe it is “Update your process”. I’m going to go with the idea that it is “Don’t break with your process!” 🙂

The Project 2007 SDK download includes E-R diagrams of the major tables and views in the Project Server Reporting database. The Project 2010 SDK download does not include the Visio diagrams, although it does have the new RDB_Field_Selector.xls tool, along with the Project2010_ReportingDB.chm schema reference. You can easily create database diagrams by using either Visio Professional or Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. For example, with a Visio diagram, you can see the relationships between the timesheet tables: If you have Visio Professional 2010 and access to a Project Server 2010 Reporting database, you can reverse engineer the RDB to new database diagrams. Use the Visio diagrams in the Project 2007 SDK download as an example. With the Reverse Engineer Wizard in Visio, select the Microsoft SQL Server driver, and then create a new data source, for example: … and then follow through the wizard to select the tables and views you want for each diagram. In the Project 2007 SDK, there are four E-R diagrams: EPM User Views:  this is a very crowded page, suitable mainly for printing on a large sheet of paper. EPM Relationships:  shows the main relationships between the views in the previous page. Timesheet Tables SharePoint Data:  shows the links from tasks and projects to the Issues and Risks views. To create diagrams using SQL Server Management Studio, expand a Project Server Reporting database, right-click the Database Diagrams folder, and then click New Database Diagram . Select the tables you want, and SQL Server arranges them in a useful manner so that relationship lines don’t cross. Following are the timesheet tables in the Project Server 2010 Reporting database: Hover the mouse pointer over a relationship to show the relationship details.Database diagrams can help you derive T-SQL queries to build reports. Note:   When you create enterprise custom fields with lookup tables, Project Server creates additional views in the RDB, and can also create more column pool tables as required, for that instance of Project Web App. For more information, see  Custom Fields and the Reporting Database in the Project 2010 SDK.

The Guide to creating SharePoint Composites includes a 73-page download that explains SharePoint Composites. To quote from the download, “A SharePoint Composite combines data, documents, and business process in a useful, productive way. … A SharePoint Composite is a ‘do-it-yourself’ business solution.” The SharePoint Composites.docx handbook includes a detailed introduction along with common design patterns that can help provide ideas on how to integrate and present data for collaboration and BI, by using SharePoint. Although the Office 2010 integration points section includes only a brief mention of Microsoft Project, the handbook overall is a useful introduction to the concepts. For those who work with Project and Project Server, the handbook can help to expand your view of what is possible – as well as what is useful.  Similar terms you might have heard in the past include mashup and OBAs (Office Business Applications). The SharePoint Composites handbook extends those ideas specifically for SharePoint-based solutions.

This post is a reminder that Microsoft Online Services has maintenance scheduled for this weekend. Office Communications Online has a two hour maintenance window on Saturday, 8/27, between 1AM GMT and 3AM GMT. During this time, the service may be unavailable for a 10 minute period. We will deliver minor patch updates to the  Americas  Region BPOS Exchange Online service on Friday, 8/26, between 4AM and 10AM  GMT , and Saturday, 8/27, between 4AM GMT and 10AM  GMT . We expect minimal customer impact during this time. Between 3PM GMT Saturday, 8/27, and 3PM GMT Sunday, 8/28 , the billing portion of Microsoft Online Services will undergo planned maintenance. While we’re updating the system, the following services won’t be available: Purchasing new subscriptions or addition of additional licenses Conversion of trial to paid subscriptions/offers Viewing of monthly charges or final invoices Viewing or modification of credit card or invoice information.   The following services will NOT be affected by this maintenance:  All product services (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Office Communications Online) Managing existing BPOS subscriptions Thanks for your patience while we make important service improvements.