projectified

Use of the Duration1-Duration10 Gantt Chart Styles in PWA

I was recently asked about how to display a custom Gantt bar in one of the PWA Gantt chart views. At first I did not see a way to do it but then tested and verified that the Duration1 –Duration10 bar styles available in several of the bar sets in PWA can be used. I had some some reading on the Internet that implied that they were non-functional but I found that they draw using the StartX-FinishX date sets for tasks. So Duration1 is drawn from Start1-Finish1, Duration9 between Start9 and Finish9.

Server Settings | Gantt Chart Formats:

Then this project draws like this:

What do you wish Project 2010 could do, but doesn’t?

I’m working on a toolkit for Project 2010 that will have several tools and utilities that people have, over the years, asked me to write for them in VBA.

 

I'm looking for feature suggestions from the crowd. What do wish there was a button for in Project 2010? do you want to run a series of checks against your project to make sure your tasks and resources abide by a set of standard rules? Do you want to create a logfile of all the new tasks, task deletions, resource assignments, etc for that project? How about a tool to remove rates and costs from a schedule before you send it to a client or partner? What about one that lets you prepend or append some text to the Task Name of a set of selected tasks? Well my toolkit has these already. What would you like to see?

Send me an email at [email protected] and tell me what you wish there was a button for and I will try to add it to the toolkit.

‘An unknown error has occurred’ when adding an Administrative Task to a Timesheet

Just a quick post to get this into the search engines for the next person.

If you have an Administrative Task in Project Server 2010 that has either any of the following characters in the task name you cannot manually add that task to a timesheet.

&

<

>

There are likely others but these are the 3 I know of for sure.

When you add one of these tasks to a timesheet you get the error “An unknown error has occurred” as shown below.

The odd thing is that you can set one of these tasks to “Always Display” and the task will display with no problem but it cannot be manually added to the timesheet.

 

T-SQL for Returning Tasks Scheduled to Start within 7 Days

This is just a snippet of T-SQL to return the Project Name, Task Name, Task Start, and Task Finish dates for all tasks in the Project Server Reporting Database that are scheduled to start between the current SQL Server system time and the current system time plus 7 days.

The core of this is really just the use of SysDateTime and the DateAdd functions. Other than that it is a very basic query.

This gets asked for every once in a while so I will put it out here for those searching.

 

   1: SELECT     MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectName, MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskName, 

   2:            MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskStartDate,MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskFinishDate

   3: FROM         MSP_EpmProject_UserView INNER JOIN

   4:                       MSP_EpmTask_UserView ON MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectUID = 

   5:                       MSP_EpmTask_UserView.ProjectUID

   6: WHERE     (MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskStartDate > sysdatetime()) AND 

   7:           (MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskStartDate < DATEADD(dd, 7, sysdatetime()))

When Does an Enterprise Project Field without a Default Value Setting Get a Default Value?

Almost all Project Server administrators know that when you have an enterprise custom field using a lookup table that you can pick one of the values from that lookup table to be the default value for new entities.

 

But what about a case where the field is set to NOT have a default value but some new projects are being created where when the Save button is hit on the New Project PDP a value is being entered for that field? What might cause that?

There are (at least) two possible answers.

Templates on Enterprise Project Types

When you create your enterprise project types you can associate an enterprise project template so that when a new project is created using an EPT it will automatically use that template. It is possible for a template to contain values in some enterprise fields as part of the template. If the template associated with the EPT has a value in that custom field then it can look like there was a default value set for the field, even when the field itself does not have a default set.

Two things lead to this being overlooked:

1. EPTs are a new feature to Project Server 2010 and it does not always occur to users that clicking “New” in the Project Center could call up a template to begin with.
2. Many organizations tend to strip out custom field values when saving a project as a template so the idea of there being a value in the fields for a template might not occur to everyone.

I have seen this issue at 2 different locations now and it can cause some pretty severe head-scratching.

 

Workflow Code or Custom Event Handler Code

Through workflow coding or custom event handler code there could be situations where the code would examine the values of certain custom fields when the project is initially saved and then make decisions about the values of other custom fields. An example of this is if a project is created and the user picks “Washington” as the value for the ‘Location’ field. The code might be set to assign a certain value for an Account Manager” field based on the project being located in Washington state. For some users that do not know about this coding it might appear as if there were default values on some fields.

This type of coding is much more common now in 2010 and in most cases users and certainly the administrators are likely to know about these kinds of changes. In my experience the most common cause for confusion about mystery ‘default’ values is going to be from a template on an EPT.

2010 Reporting Whitepaper Goodness!

Some old buddies of mine from the Microsoft Consulting Services EPM team went NUTS and generated about 200 super high quality pages about Project Server 2010 reporting. Blaise Novakovic, Jean-Francois LeSaux, Steven Haden, and Amit Abrol outdid even the high standards MCS sets. Nice work guys!

 

Microsoft Project Server 2010 Reporting with Excel Services and also Creating Dashboards for Microsoft Project Server 2010

Excellent work!

Groups and Categories

This is something I posted over on my Microsoft blog a while back but it comes up so often that I wanted to repost it over here.

Project Server security is something that is very flexible once you get used to how it works but it can be a bit confusing when you first look at it.

Here are the basics as I explain them to my customers:

The Group

Groups contain sets of users and they define the system level permissions that those users have the rights to perform. These include: Logging in, performing certain admin functions, create a new project, create a new resource, etc..

The Category

Categories provide access to projects, resources and views. The projects and resources that the category provides access to can be specifically called out by name or they can by dynamically included based on a set of rules within the category itself. For example a category can provide access to all projects where the user is the project owner or a status manager on a task, or all the projects where the Project Owner is ‘below’ the user in the RBS structure. I refer to this set of projects and resources as the “Scope” of the category.

Categories can be shared by many groups because of the dynamic way the scopes can be defined. The dynamic options for project and resource scope are dependent on the user and their relationship (via the RBS structure) to either the owner or team members on a project or to the resources themselves. I often, for simplicity, create a role based group and then a corresponding category. It sometimes means that there are technically more categories than is absolutely required but it does make the whole security model a bit easier to follow.

 

The Group\Category Permissions

This is the part that people often overlook.

A group and a category can be ‘linked’ or joined. When this happens there is a set of permissions that sit at that joint. This set of permissions defines what the members of that group can DO with the projects and resources within the “Scope” of the category.

If you open a Group and you see the list of Categories that are associated to group there is one of these grids for each category. If you select one of the Categories associated with the group the grid pertains to THAT pairing of group and category. If you select a different category the grid changes and is now pertaining only to THAT pairing. The same is true if you open a category and select the Groups that are associated with it. The grid pertains to the pairing. It can be edited in both places but it remains the same.

Circular Relationships in the PWA Schedule Web Part

I recently found that it is possible to create circular link relationships between tasks within the PWA Schedule Webpart. Project Pro checks for things like this as you are editing but the PWA webpart only calculates and checks for things such as circular logic when you hit the Calculate button. The part that makes it more difficult to deal with is that the error message that one gets when the Calculate action finds the circular logic does not contain the ID of the task(s) involved in the link the way that Pro does.

This means that if a user goes into the schedule webpart and makes many changes, including some circular logic they will not see the error message until they hit Calculate or Save, at which point the bad link is already in place and the error does not tell them which task it is.

The solution is to open the project into Pro which will immediately let you know about the bad logic and give you the task ID.

The error you see when you save or calculate is like the one below: