Few months ago we have announced releasing of the Solution Starters for Project 2010 . We are still committed to continue evolving them – and we will showcase many of them in the future version of our wonderful

64-bit Office apps–including Project 2010–do not support COM add-ins, which are 32-bit. To use the 64-bit environment, COM add-ins must be ported to a 64-bit add-in by using the

A fundamental part of the work we do on our team is to measure things: the costs of deploying desktops, the business value of an application lifecycle management solution, the costs of managing a virtualized server environment, etc. In doing this, we aim to drive scenarios that amplify the value that our future products will have to our core customers. And to do that, it’s important to understand how our customers measure performance, costs, risk, and so forth and put that in a context of how our products are being used. In a recent survey I conducted of 45 developers, DBAs, and information workers and managers, I wanted to understand what metrics were being used measure the effectiveness of current processes and technologies across a set of application platform scenarios such as building composite apps, managing app servers, and data warehousing to name a few. What I found is that most respondents had very little sense of what measures were used to track the effectiveness of the work they do. This was especially surprising given the number of respondents who described themselves as having a very mature IT organization. In his excellent book: How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business , author Douglas Hubbard makes a compelling case for how it is possible to measure just about anything from a business context. The value of his message, in my opinion, is not that you can measure these things or even that you should. Rather, I think the biggest value here is how to measure. Without going into a lot of detail (and spoiling the thrilling end of the book!), he states that even if an organization doesn’t have a specific measure for some process or desired outcome, they will certainly at least have some observable way to detect an improvement that the business values . If not, you wouldn’t do it. Given that rather straightforward and somewhat obvious statement, it’s clear that every organization in a business context will have measureable processes, technologies, and/or outcomes whether or not they have specific metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). What has your experience been in measuring your work against specific measures? How do you measure the effectiveness of your team’s work? Let me know at erik.svenson@microsoft.com or feel free to post a comment. All the best, Erik Svenson, Application Platform Lead, War on Cost Team

The Microsoft Project Server 2010 Server Settings Backup/RestoreTool Describes how to use the Microsoft Project Server 2010 Server Settings Backup/Restore tool (available in the Project 2010 Resource Kit) to migrate server settings from one Project Server 2010 instance to another. Plan for virtual environments for Office Project Server 2010 Describes deploying Project Server 2010 in virtual environments. Plan for using Project Server 2010 in a Hyper-V virtual environment Describes deploying Project Server 2010 using a Hyper-V virtual environment. Hitchhiker’s Guide to Demand Management (white paper) A whitepaper discussing the Demand Management feature in Microsoft Project. Move all databases to a different server (Project Server 2010) Describes how to move all Microsoft Project databases to a different instance of Microsoft SQL Server.

The September 2010 update of the

So you may have been going through the SharePoint documentation library recently and noticed a Project Server/Project Web App icon there. We are now cross-linking all Project Server relevant SharePoint documentation to point to relevant Project Server documentation on TechNet.

Many

We just published the latest article by Chris Vandersluis to the “From the Trenches” column on the Microsoft Project Server 2010 TechCenter .

For simple information discovery – we have just published a Project 2010 Demand Management resource center that centralizes all information around Demand Management and Portfolio Strategy into one single location.