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Following a recent discussion with a consultant, I wanted to re-iterate the quality, depth and number of technical session dedicated to IT Professionals and Developers at Microsoft Project Conference 2012 next month in Phoenix (March 19-22). One easy place to browse technical content is to navigate the session agenda and filter by each audience, or the filter using the Deployment, Administration & Developer track as shown on the right: Beside key topic that all Project & Project Server developers and IT Professionals should know, there is an all-star list of speakers from Project MVPs, SharePoint MVPs, SharePoint Certified Masters, Microsoft SharePoint & Project experts, partners and customers. To wet your appetite here is a sample of in depth topic of interest with brief comments delivered by Microsoft and outside experts:   Best Practices Troubleshooting Project 2010 Deployments – two part series with  Brian Smith & Adrian Jenkins with a combined 35 years of Project experience! Tracking Historical Project Activity Data using the Microsoft Business Intelligence Suite – great in depth BI session by Gabriel (a customer) for something customers asks often Integrating Data from LOB Systems (SAP, ClickSoft) for Strategic Resource Planning – another popular topic by Tim one of our MVP on how to integrate with SAP Extending and Customizing the Project Server 2010 Timesheet to Drive Adoption and Achieve Business Results – everyone wants to customize their timesheets! Planning and Executing a Multi-Instance, Multi-Version Project Server Migration – real life feedback and best practices from Brian Leveraging Project Server 2010 in SharePoint 2010 Extranet Environments – Ram is a SharePoint expert Everything You Wanted To Know About Administering Project Server 2010 But Were Afraid To Ask – another MVP lead session by Rolly, expert and professional trainer Integrating SharePoint and Project Server 2010 – Deployment Approaches, Integration Options and making the most of the SharePoint Enterprise Features . – reviewed Giles session yesterday and again this is another must attend for any architect Closing the Status Loop with Windows 8 Metro and Project Server’s Task Update Feature – say no more   Leverage the capabilities of SharePoint to light up Microsoft Project Server – Keenan is a colleague on the SharePoint team and has a great story for you! Hard to stop enumerating sessions, but you will hopefully get the point that WE HAVE TECHNICAL CONTENT FOR YOU! The beauty of all these topics is that I believe in sense they are version agnostic and hence it’s never too late to strengthen or fill knowledge gaps on the 2010 platform.  But wait there is more (!), you feel like you know it all, how about taking certifications on site? How about attending the dedicated partner pre-event which will have in depth technical sessions delivered by experts (agenda is here from Jan’s blog); how about attending PC12 post-event training ). A master at all of the above then how about learning about ALM, PLM, IPM, and Dynamics/ERP integration? In summary as a consultant, IT Pro. or Dev. you have no excuse not to attend #MSPC12 and get ignited again! See you soon!

When: Monday, April 23, 2012 at 9:00 AM – Friday, April 27, 2012 at 5:00 PM (GMT) Where: Technology House Shottery Brook Office Park Timothy’s Bridge Road CV37 9NR Stratford Upon Avon United Kingdom Hosted By: Technology Associates International Ltd Technology Associates International ( www.techassoc.com ) is an Approved Training Organisation (ATO), accredited by the APM Group – the leading accreditation, certification and examination body – to deliver PRINCE2® courses.    As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have over 18 years experience of delivering training solutions.   Our PRINCE2® trainers are skilled experts who take pride in guiding delegates through the PRINCE2® methodology and help them understand how the material applies to their specific personal and organisational circumstances. Register for this event now at: https://taipr230412fp-rss.eventbrite.com Event Details: The course provides a balance between a learning experince about structured project management and PRINCE2®, and maximising the delegate’s chances of passing the Practitioner examination. On passing the examination, the delegate becomes a Registered PRINCE2® Practitioner. The course starts with a period of directed self-study commencing approximately 2 weeks before the classroom event.   This brings everyone up to a common standard of basic familiarity with the language and underlying principles of PRINCE2®, and ensures that the course gets off to a smooth start. Delegates should plan their time for this self-study to ensure that they gain maximum benefit from this essential element of the course.   A minimum of 10 hours should be scheduled if at all possible. The first three days in the classroom follow the lifecycle of a project, explaining the use and benefits of the PRINCE2® processes, themes and techniques, and how these can be adapted to suit a variety of project types and scenarios.   Approximately 30% of this time is spent on practical work and discussion using a “continuous” case study as a basis for exercises that help to reinforce delegate learning.    The Foundation examination takes place on day 3.  The following two days are dedicated to reinforcing what has been learnt and to preparing for the Practitioner examination that takes place on the last afternoon.   Full explanation is provided of the types of question used in the examination, together with guidance on how to answer them to best effect. Evening work is provided (approximately one-hour) to enable revision and practice of what has been learned each day. Terms & Conditions of Booking: Payment is due on booking.   Cancellations and Transfers More than 20 working days notice before course commences – £50 cancellation fee is payable From 0 to 20 working days inclusive before course commences – 100 % of the course fee is payable   VERY IMPORTANT: If you are unable to complete a course due to illness or any other reason, you will have to pay the full course fee to attend a future course. No refund will be offered for failing to attend any part of the whole course.   A full copy of our terms and conditions of sale is available on request.                 PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.

When: Monday, April 23, 2012 at 9:00 AM – Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 5:00 PM (GMT) Where: Technology House Shottery Brook Office Park Timothy’s Bridge Road CV37 9NR Stratford Upon Avon United Kingdom Hosted By: Technology Associates International Ltd Technology Associates International ( www.techassoc.com ) is an Approved Training Organisation (ATO), accredited by the APM Group – the leading accreditation, certification and examination body – to deliver PRINCE2® courses.    As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have over 18 years experience of delivering training solutions.   Our PRINCE2® trainers are skilled experts who take pride in guiding delegates through the PRINCE2® methodology and help them understand how the material applies to their specific personal and organisational circumstances. Register for this event now at: https://taipr230412foundation-rss.eventbrite.com Event Details: The course provides a balance between a learning experience about structured project management and PRINCE2®, and maximising the delegate’s chances of passing the Foundation exam. This exam is the first of two required to achieve Registered PRINCE2® Practitioner status. The course starts with a period of directed self-study commencing approximately 2 weeks before the classroom event. This brings everyone up to a common standard of basic familiarity with the language and underlying principles of PRINCE2®, and ensures that the course gets off to a smooth start. Delegates should plan their time for this self-study to ensure that they gain maximum benefit from this essential element of the course. A minimum of 10 hours should be scheduled. The course covers the full PRINCE2® Foundation syllabus, following the lifecycle of a project, explaining the use and benefits of the PRINCE2® processes, themes and techniques, and how these can be adapted to suit a variety of project types and scenarios. Approximately 30% of the course is spent on practical work and discussion using a “continuous” case study as a basis for exercises that help to reinforce delegate learning. Evening work is provided (approximately one-hour) to enable revision and practice of what has been learnt each day.   Terms & Conditions of Booking: Payment is due on booking.   Cancellations and Transfers More than 20 working days notice before course commences – £50 cancellation fee is payable From 0 to 20 working days inclusive before course commences – 100 % of the course fee is payable   VERY IMPORTANT: If you are unable to complete a course due to illness or any other reason, you will have to pay the full course fee to attend a future course. No refund will be offered for failing to attend any part of the whole course.   A full copy of our terms and conditions of sale is available on request.                 PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.

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 !

Written by Divya Gunasekaran, Microsoft Online Services PM Admins can now manage client access settings for their Microsoft Online users through PowerShell. Updates to Get-MSOnlineUser and the new Set-MSOnlineCASMailbox cmdlet allow admins to specify whether Exchange ActiveSync or Outlook Web App (OWA) is enabled for users. 1.  Get-MSOnlineUser : This cmdlet can be used to retrieve the properties of a specified user in Microsoft Online Services. Three properties have been added to the output of this cmdlet: ActiveSyncEnabled : Returns a Boolean indicating whether ActiveSync is enabled for a user’s mailbox. This property will return False for users that do not have mailboxes. OWAEnabled : Returns a Boolean indicating whether Outlook Web App is enabled for a user’s mailbox. This property will return False for users that do not have mailboxes. POPEnabled : Returns a Boolean indicating whether POP3 access is enabled for a user’s mailbox. This property will return False for users that do not have mailboxes. 2. Set-MSOnlineCASMailbox: This cmdlet can be used to enable or disable ActiveSync or Outlook Web App for a user’s mailbox.  Admins can specify from the command line whether to enable Exchange ActiveSync or OWA for a user mailbox. For example, the following command can be run to disable ActiveSync and enable Outlook Web App for the user alexei@tailspintoys.com: C:PS> Set-MSOnlineCASMailbox -Identity alexei@tailspintoys.com -Credential $companyAdminCred -ActiveSyncEnabled False -OWAEnabled True The Set-MSOnlineCASMailbox also accepts some input from the pipeline by property name.  One use for this functionality is to run the cmdlet on information imported from a csv file. For example, let’s say we want to enable both ActiveSync and OWA for the user alexei@tailspintoys.com and to enable ActiveSync and disable OWA for the user pavel@tailspintoys.com. The admin would create a csv file (named “CASmailboxes.csv” in this example) and run the following command: Identity ActiveSyncEnabled OWAEnabled alexei@tailspintoys.com True True pavel@tailspintoys.com True False C:PS> Import-Csv –path C:CASmailboxes.csv | Set-MSOnlineCASMailbox -Credential $companyAdminCred Please note that the Set-MSOnlineCASMailbox cmdlet does not modify or remove the ActiveSync policy currently assigned to a user’s mailbox. If an ActiveSync policy has been assigned to a user mailbox and ActiveSync is then disabled, the same policy will be applied after ActiveSync has been re-enabled for that user. If no ActiveSync policy has been assigned to the user mailbox, the default policy will be applied when ActiveSync is enabled. To use the updated cmdlets, admins must download the latest 32-bit or 64-bit version of the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools. 

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 .”

Myself and Adrian Jenkins are attending and presenting at the Project Conference 2012, March 19th to the 22nd in Phoenix Arizona and will be delivering a couple of the sessions.  The sessions are planned to be one about the February 2012 Cumulative Update for Project and Project Server, and the other one will be a guide to troubleshooting Project Server – looking at some of the tools we use in support to help identify issues.  But if there are some specific scenarios or tools that you are especially interested in then we would be delighted to consider these for inclusion in the sessions.  The conference is your chance to hear great things from our partners, customers and of course Microsoft – and here is your chance to let me and Adrian know exactly what you’d like to hear from us.  Looking forward to meeting friends old and new in Phoenix!