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!