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.