Project Server newsgroup

If you work with Microsoft Project Server on a daily basis you will have question of all kinds on a regular basis. Sometimes you are able to answer them on your own maybe after you have done some research on the web. However, if you run into problems you can't solve I can recommend you the public Project Server newsgroup. Experts from around the globe post their questions and answer into this group. All you need is a Microsoft Passport e-mail account and you are ready to start!

This is the link to newsgroup using your web browser. If you find it more convenient you can also access the newsgroup through Outlook Express. Simply add a new news account, server name is msnews.microsoft.com. You can then subscribe to the Project Server newsgroup (microsoft.public.project.server) and all the other newsgroups you are interested in.

If you are looking for answers to a specific question make sure you run a quick search for similar posts before you ask a question that has already been answered many times.

Enjoy the summer vacation, stay tuned!

Archiving projects in Project Server 2003

If you have been using Microsoft Project Server 2003 for some time the question of archiving projects plans has surely popped up. And - to answer this question right away - there is no out-of-the-box function for archiving projects in the current version of Project Server 2003. Project Server 2007 however will consist of a separate archiving database what will hopefully erase this question from the list of Top 10 questions for Project Server 2003.

After doing some research on the net and a lot of trail and error by myself I have finally found what I was looking for on projectserverexperts.com - a great website for many topics related to operating and managing Project Server. This is the direct link to the article on archiving project plans. This solution provides archiving functionality by simply adding a new category for completed projects as well as an Enterprise Outline Code to define the status of projects (e.g. planned, running, completed) to your Project Server implementation.

Bear in mind that if you want to archive projects simply to reduce the size of your productive Project Server database this will not be what you are aiming at since the archived projects remain in the productive database. If this is what you are looking for you might want to check out the archive tool of projectmadeeasy.com. They use a nice little GUI that allows the admin to easily move one project from the productive database to a separate archive database. You will also have the possibilitiy to copy Enterprise Global, Enterprise Resource Pool, categories, views etc. from production to the archive allowing you to run reports against the archive database as well.

Hope this helps, stay tuned!

IE security update affecting Project Web Access behaviour

If you (or your company's system administrators on your behalf) have downloaded and installed the latest security updates for Internet Explorer ActiveX you may have experienced a slightly different behaviour in IE when working with Project Web Access.

E.g. when using the Portfolio Analyzer feature of Project Web Access you could start moving around columns etc. right away in one of your views. Now, with the above mentioned security update applied, you will first have to activate the ActiveX control by selecting the object and then you can start with changing the order of the columns in your Portfolio Analyzer views.
The same in timesheets. Before clicking the cell you want to write values into you have to select the timesheet object with an extra click. This is the new behaviour everywhere where ActiveX controls are used in PWA. Of course this is not only the case with Project Web Access but rather with all websites that use ActiveX objects.

As you can probably tell this could cause confusion among users. Therefore I would recommend you to inform everybody pro-actively about this change in behaviour. Although people probably won't like this new extra click they will have to deal with it sooner or later. Microsoft has provided a compatibility patch that will restore the old behaviour temporarily.

Useful Project Server tools: The Rename Project Tool

I will introduce you to the many helpful Project Server 2003 tools that are provided by Microsoft in a posting series. This is the first post in this series, covering the Rename Project Tool.

If you work with Microsoft Project Server 2003 at your company you might at first be very surprised to hear, that there is no way to rename projects out-of-the-box. However, you can download the above mentioned renaming tool from directly Microsoft. Don't even consider renaming a projects manually on database level unless you're a database pro with good knowledge of the Project Server tables.

After downloading you can simply double-click the exe-file to run the tool. Press the login button first to submit your credentials to the server to then receive a list of all projects currently stored in the selected instance of Project Server. However, you need to be a Project Server administrator to successfully rename projects with this tool.

Once you have renamed a project successfully with the tool you're almost done with the whole process. First, make sure you open the project you have just renamed in Microsoft Project Professional and publish the project plan (summary and tasks). If you skip this step you will run into problems when a users selects the "Open" option in Project Web Access. Finally, make sure you rename the project workspace as well (this is not done by the tool automatically) to avoid any confusion among the users. Of course this only needs to be done if you use the Windows SharePoint Services functionality with your Project Server.