No More Project1 !

It is with a lot of emotion that I discovered today that Project1 is no more automatically created in Project 2013 where it was always showing up at Project 2010 start-up!

2010 opening window:

2013 opening window:

For sure, if you're not selecting any project or pushing ESC in the backstage, Project 2013 will create a Project1 for you. But I see as a great improvement to be now able to open a project without always having this Project1 to close before!

I hope you share my enthusiasm!

I'm now a Microsoft P-Seller for Project!!

It’s official, I’ve been nominated and accepted by Microsoft as a P-Seller for Project (formerly called Virtual Technology Specialist)! I’m extremely excited to be considered among the elite in the Microsoft Partner Community, and I look forward to learning more about the program and helping businesses find value using Microsoft Project.

One of the first questions I had during this process was “What is a P-Seller?”

I’ve located this text, which explains the program:

"The Microsoft P-Seller (VTS-P) is a select group chosen from the elite in Microsoft’s partner community, whose focus is to augment Microsoft’s internal Technology Specialist team. Their primary role is to communicate the value of Microsoft Solutions to customers and to provide architectural guidance for Enterprise Integration solutions. The Microsoft P-Seller program was designed to create a deeper relationship with Microsoft Partners, the Product Teams at Microsoft Corporate, and Regional Microsoft Offices, in order to provide highly skilled solution specialists to Microsoft customers. It is designed to enable a high performance team of partner-based resources to deliver pre-sale activities and resources to empower customers and help them meet their solution and integration needs."

Here are the 3 key points to keep in mind about the P-Seller role:

Figure 1 : overview of the P-Seller role

1 - Contributes to MS sales and pre-sales technical support capacity:

The Partner Seller (P-Seller) is a Microsoft Partner resource acting as an extension of the Microsoft sales team in the capacity of sales and pre-sales technical support. The appropriate P-Seller has the ability to position, demonstrate, design and implement Microsoft solutions.

2 - Provides subject matter expertise for key technology areas:

Designed to help Microsoft scale out its sales and technical pre-sales efforts by enabling Microsoft partner resources to help drive and accelerate pipeline velocity and customer deployment.

3 - P-Seller resources are deeply integrated into Microsoft’s sales team:

P-Sellers engage wth AM/OM/SSPs on Sales Opportunities providing SSP and TSP deliverables which include -Sales & positioning presentations, Technology & Strategy briefings, product demos and technical follow up. P-Sellers are provided access to the same demo content and presentations as Microsoft SSP's and TSP's.

I now get access to information on the Microsoft corporate network such as knowledge bases, technical articles, training materials, and other resources. I also get guest access to Microsoft facilities, and priority for participating in Microsoft marketing events.

This is a really great opportunity, I'm proud to be a part of this elite community, and I look forward to all that comes from it. 

Your Enterprise Global Doesn't Want to Save my Macro to Project Server 2013?

Hello everyone

Sorry with this blackout period.But, I'm still  happy to share interesting things I found.

Currently in a 2013 configuration, I wanted to upload to Enterprise Global two written macros to the EGlobal.
After a lot of trial to save the EGlobal after transferring the macro using the organizer, nothing is uploaded to the server.

Thanks to an old blog written by Pieter Veenstra, I managed to save my enterprise global.

Two possibilities :
Install the HotFix proposed by Microsoft or follow the below process to hack the system!


1- Open your Enterprise Global either using MS Project ( it has moved from PWA settings in 2010 to MS Project menu in 2013)

2- While the Enterprise Global is opened, go to the organizer

3-  Copy the content to the checked-out Enterprise Global

4- Create a dummy task in the enterprise global gantt chart view (be sure to not change the view, it can corrupt in some way your fragile Enterprise Global) 

 5- Delete the same task!

6-Close, save and check-in the Enterprise Global

Final- The Enterprise Global is now well saved to the server

MVP Project!!

It is with great pride I announce that I have been awarded as a Microsoft® Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Project for the first (hope not the last) time. 

The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft. The idea behind this award is to give some recognition to folks that have volunteered their time to write books, create documentation, run user groups, and generally spread the word as advocates for the development platform.

I'm even more honoured that we are just around 60 MVPs for Project wordwide and as far I could see on the MVP website, I'll be the only one in Canada.

Now let's go on and continue sharing my experience and knowledge with the community!

Delegation in 2013 - Don't Misundurstand the Project Pro Message

One interesting feature Project Server has introduced in 2010 is the capability to substitute yourself to someone else using the delegation.
By the way, you cannot use it while in SharePoint Permission mode

One of the drawback is that this is only working in PWA interface (except for the Business Intelligence part).
Consequently, Project Professional will not allow you to connect to a server while you have an ongoing delegation session.
So now, let's imagine you're in a delegation session in the name of this famous John.

Then, you try to open your MS Project Pro connected to your server and, Surprise, a misleading message appears.

It's not that wrong message as you do have inadequate permissions but not really explicit!

So, next time a user call you with this kind of message, make sure they are not using the delegation in the meantime before trying to check network or permissions to the server!

Regards!

Manage Calendars using Recurrence Pattern

One of the challenge of planning with MS Project is to be accurate in the dates and vacations.
Though, statutory holidays coming every year needs to be taken into account!

Let's take the example of the 4 of the US holidays found in Wikipedia:

Official Name	Date
New Year's Day	January 1 (Fixed)
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.	Third Monday in January
Inauguration Day	First January 20 following a Presidential election
Good Friday	The Friday before(western) Easter

Interesting in those holidays is that they happen every year. Some can be set recurring, some not:

January first is always the January first (hopefully for those who are partying all New Year eve).

Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday is the 3rd Monday of January. Strange for an anniversary but still, the public holiday is like that.

For the Inauguration Day, this is not possible to predict when it will happen, recurrence will not help in that case

The Good Friday is arriving before Easter, which is again unpredictable and though, the recurrence will not help either.

MS Project and though Project Server is proposing a nice feature in setting recurrence to exceptions in calendar. 

You will first have to go to the Calendar setting:

After creating an exception, while clicking to the details detail button, you will get the following window:

Now, see how to set the above defined recurring and not recurring holidays.

January first:

Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday:

Inauguration Day:

Good Friday:

Now you can declare enterprise calendars with mostly recurring statutory holidays. Some will still need to be entered one by one.

Obviously, this can be configured for Project Server calendars in going to enterprise calendars in the PWA settings

In the next future, I will share with you some calendars until 2020!

Additional note thanks to Gary Chefetz comment:

While creating recurrence, you will have to identify exceptions such as first of January falling on a Sunday. Then a creation of a specific calendar exception will be necessary. The easy way to identify such case would be to check each calendar exception year after year and verify which day it falls.

Furthermore, try to limit your calendars horizon to your projects horizon to not overload the server and the database with unnecessary information

Hope you will love to avoid defining calendar exceptions every year!

Change a custom field label in PDPs

When you're in charge of a large Project Server deployment, you might face concerns and issues that are due to the project scaling. When I say "large", I mean thousands of users, hundreds of custom fields, tens of project types, PDPs...

In this context, in order to keep a consistency between lookup tables, custom fields or any other objects, I usually use a naming convention such as "lkp_table name", or "organization_customfieldname" for multi-organization deployment. Thus it means that you do need to find a way to display a custom label for those custom fields, different from the name in the system.

Figure 1: naming convention for lookup tables or custom fields

It also make sense for out-of-the-box fields such as "project Owner". In many case, the project owner will be a project manager, but it could be a PCO. Thus organizations might want to give a custom label to this native field.

Facing this concern, evenif I'm not a developer, there is an easy way to give custom label. So enjoy it because that will probably be the one and only post I'll ever write about coding. But as you'll see, it is not much difficulty.

We'll make a simple example with the "owner" out-of-the-box field.

Figure 2: default owner field

Just open a notepad and write the following code:

var pageMode = 0;
findPageMode();
var arrayOfFindAndReplace = [["owner", "your_custom_label"]];

Replace with your custom label and save the file with the .js (javascript) extension in the shared documents librairy of your PWA instance.

Then edit your PDP from the server settings and add a content editor webpart.

Figure 3: add a content editor webpart to the PDP

Edit the webpart then enter the path of your javascript file:

Figure 4: enter the javascript file's path in the webpart configuration

Finally just hide the webpart so it won't be displayed while opening the PDP:

Figure 5: hiding the content editor webpart

Et voilà!! The native field is "renamed" as you needed to.

Figure 6: PDP with the new label

Note that if you have installed language packages, since the code contains the name of the field and not the GUID, you'll need to consider writing in the javascript file the label for custom field in all languages supported on your PWA instance.

**2014-08-01 : need to add a function or it will not work. I'll update the post asap.**