10 Tasks For the 2011 Holidays

Dear readers I wish you all a restful and peaceful holiday break! Since it’s a quiet time of the year and a great opportunity to catch up on recent product updates and announcement I wanted to provide you a list of tasks to keep you busy if you have spare cycle in the coming two weeks

1. Register to Microsoft Project Conference 2012 next march in Phoenix Arizona.Yes you can’t miss it! We have great content and speakers, plus it’s a very unique opportunity to network with Microsoft, customers, partners and MVPs. More information on our site: http://msprojectconference.com Also check out the partner pre-event Jan announced you do not want to miss if you are a PPM partner: Celebrate Project 2010 Momentum at Project Conference 2012 during the Project Partner exclusive pre-day!
2. Update your farms/servers with the latest software updates (SP & CU), for 2010 we released Service Pack 1 (SP1) last June and this week the December 2011 Cumulative Update (CU) below. We have shipped a number of updates based on your feedback and ensuring your users/customers experience the latest and greatest from Microsoft is a great holiday gift ! As usual please read the best practices and guidance documented on TechNet on how to deploy software updates.
   1. Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint Server 2007 and 2010 December 2011 CU Announcement
   2. Announcing The Release Of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010
3. Read the latest product documentation and guidance – yes there is a lot of valuable content we have published throughout the year and continue to do so based on your feedback so please ensure you are on top to optimize your usage or our stack. A great tool to start catching up on documentation is the Enterprise Project Management Content Pivot Viewer. A sample of recent documents for instance are listed below (and yes there are a few more on TechNet and our main product site: http://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/articles-white-papers.aspx)
   1. Actual Work Best Practices Documentation Now Available
   2. Best practices for managing a large number of resources in Project Server 2010
   3. Testing Project Server 2010 deployments
   4. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager's Guide for Project Web App
4. Catch up on recent Project news announced on our main product blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/project . I also recommend that you start following us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest and greatest. Key announcements recently are:
1. Microsoft is Rated in the Gartner Project and Portfolio Applications MarketScope
2. Announcing SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010
3. Microsoft Project for the masses
5. Deploy our latest Project 2010 Demo Pack V2 as announced by Jan Kalis: Project 2010 Demo Pack Version 2 NOW available to Microsoft Partners! and yes it contains Project Server and scenarios and data to showcase our full PPM functionalities.
6. Read our recently published customer case studies: http://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/customer-success.aspx. For instance in the past few months we released these:
   1. Revlon - IT Department of Global Cosmetics Company Cuts Time in Meetings by up to 30 Percent
   2. Nagra - Digital Security Firm Makes More Efficient, Data-Driven Decisions About IT Projects
   3. Intel - Intel Will Save Annually While Making Project Management More Flexible
7. Purchase Project and or Project Server 2010 books – yes another testament that 2010 is an awesome release, is the quantity of books available today listed on your favorite online site. In addition check out our Training and Learning site.
8. Test out our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Innovation Process Management (IPM) solutions. A lot more information can be found below:
   1. New Feature Pack from Visual Studio Improves Project Management and Software Development Team Collaboration
   2. Innovation Management and Ideation Solutions with SharePoint and Project Server
9. Ramp up on Windows 8, SQL Server 2012 and System Center 2012, key links below:
   1. Building Windows 8
   2. SQL Server 2012
   3. System Center 2012
10. Sign up for an Office 365 trial, yes its landmark release for our cloud offering and it keeps getting better on a regular basis: official Office 365 site.
11. Buy a Windows Phone and feel the love! Could not resist to add this 11th task… Seriously test out the Office 365 integration for instance or more fun application like the Skydrive app or the XBox Companion app to name two. It’s a great OS and it has improved by professional and personal productivity a lot. A lot more information here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone.

PS: please find above a poster we used internally recently thanks to a similar campaign done by the Microsoft Germany subsidiary