Restoring single projects with Project Server 2007

For those of you who have been using Project Server 2003, this may be one of the new features not too many people have talked about. Yet, it will help you a lot in your daily life as Project Server administrator. In the past - or maybe present if you're still using PS2003 in your organization - it has been painful to restore a single project that for some reason is not accessible anymore or has some other issues. Many people have tried using the "Restore Single Project Tool" but were not too happy with the results. So the quickest way to restore a project actually was to restore the entire Project Server database to a backup instance of PS2003, open and export the project to a MPP file and finally re-import it back into the productive environment. That is finally over with MOPS 2007! If you already had a closer look at the 'Server Settings' in PWA of MOPS 2007, you have probably seen the 'Database Administration' section. There you will find all you need to solve the above mentioned scenario with MOPS 2007.

On the 'Schedule Backup' site you can define how many versions per project (as well as other backup objects) you want to retain. Per default, only one version per object will be retained.
On this page you can also define whether you want MOPS 2007 to automatically backup individual objects. You can also manually backup objects on the 'Administrative Backup' site. You will find the UI pretty intuitive and straightforward, I guess.

If you need to restore an earlier version of a project, simply navigate to the 'Administrative Restore' site. Here you can first select the object type you intend to restore - Projects in our case - then mark the respective version of the project plan and finally click the 'Restore' button to initiate the restoring process. For projects plan of a normal size this operation won't take too long, so don't be surprized if you don't even see the job listed in the queue.

Feel free to leave comments with questions - hope this post is helpful.

Workaround for corrupt look-up tables in MOPS 2007

If you have installed Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 in your organization (MOPS 2007), you will sooner or later run across some product bugs that will hopefully be resolved with SP1 (availability unknown). This article describes a workaround for one of these bugs around Enterprise Custom Fields and Look-up Tables.



As you know with MOPS 2007 you can now create your Enterprise Custom Fields in PWA rather than in Project Professional as it was the case with Project Server 2003. To me, this is definitely much more convenient and a nice improvement. However, you will soon find that not all changes you apply to a look-up table linked to a custom field will be represented in Project Professional 2007. This is obviously caused by the new Active Cache feature in Project Pro 2007. Here is how you can work around that issue until a hotfix or service pack is available

1. Open Windows Explorer
2. Navigate to the following directory:
   C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\MS Project\Cache\
3. In \Cache you will find several subfolders labeled with long GUIDs
4. Within each GUID subfolder you will find a file named 'global[1].mpc'
   
5. Delete the 'global[1].mpc' from each subfolder. Alternatively you could also the entire subfolder for each GUID

Note: Make sure that the Project Professional 2007 application is not running at the moment you're performing the above steps.

Keep in mind that you will have to follow these steps for all clients.