The Project Web App Help content, available on Office.com, is now also available on TechNet.
While the Help system within Project Web App continues to point to Office.com, this content has been made available on TechNet for those who may have an easier time browsing through content in the TechNet Library.
This content is also available in a downloadable CHM file that contains all Project Server 2010 technical library content on TechNet.
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IDC’s most recent MarketScape positions Microsoft as a leader in the Enterprise IT PPM and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) views. You can download an excerpt taken from the “IT Project and Portfolio Management 2010 Vendor Analysis – Four Views to Enable Effective Evaluation” from IDC MarketScape Excerpt: IT Project and Portfolio Management 2010 Vendor Analysis – Four Views to Enable Effective Evaluation
The other two views in the report were the SaaS and Financial Market views in which Microsoft placed as a contender and major player respectively. A few things worth calling out from the report:
Beyond our leadership position, it’s also good to see that we’ve been recognized for year-over-year growth indicated by the (+) compared to many of the other leading vendors that are shown as declining (-). This is consistent with the positive news and momentum we’re hearing from our customer and partner communities with respect to the adoption of Microsoft Project 2010.
So if you’re looking to replace, upgrade or deploy a new PPM solution for your organization today, I recommend taking a look at Microsoft Project 2010!
Arpan Shah Director, Project
How often are you told that your project will start on date x and then it is moved to date y, maybe date z before it finally gets going?
Now when your project start date moves, you can just update the start date in the Project Information dialog and a lot of dates will update but not all of them (ex. deadlines, constraints, tasks with actual work). If you want those to move you need to go through Move Project.
The advantage of Move Project is that everything in the project is moved with respect to its original offset from the project start date. For example, in this project task b has a deadline 5 days into the project and task c has a constraint to start 2 days after the project’s start date.
Now I select Move Project to update the project start date to 1/12/11.
And everything in the updated plan has the same offset as it had before. Task b has a deadline 5 days into the project and task c has a constraint to start 2 days after the project’s start date.
In Project 2007 and earlier, you can access this functionality on the Analysis toolbar, Adjust Dates but there are a few limitations: deadlines and tasks with non-zero percent complete aren’t moved.
OK. I’ll admit it. Sometimes documentation for Project and Project Server isn’t always easy to locate. It tends to be spread out. And sometimes it can be difficult to determine if the Help documentation you’re reading is from an official site. Worse, some URL’s have changed, and some new locations have been created. Let me help you set the URLs (and your Favorites list) correctly.
Here are a few other places that have proven useful, even essential, for Project and project management.
Here are a few more blogs that should be an important part of your Project support: Latest EPM News Project Programmability Project Support blog EPM Content Publishing News Dedicated to Project Partners MPUG Blog Microsoft Project Official MVP site
If you have other useful sites, let us know with a comment.
Customer requests fueled two new documentation resources for Project Server 2010! These resources just went live at the end December. If you have feedback on either of these resources, feel free to leave comments here, or send email to projdocs@microsoft.com.
This article details the standard method for archiving completed projects, as performed by a project manager and administrator. It also provides a high-level look at some alternate archiving methods, as well as some best practices for long-term archival.
This Visio file contains diagrams that illustrate five different timesheet and task progress workflow scenarios.
Standard (Single Entry Mode). This diagram illustrates the workflow involved with reporting time and task progress if your organization reports on both of these in one view.
Standard (Separate Views). This diagram illustrates the workflow involved with reporting time in the Timesheet view, and task progress in the Tasks view.
Timesheet Delegation. This diagram illustrates the workflow involved when a resource identifies a delegate to report time and task progress on his or her behalf.
Closed-Period Updating. This diagram illustrates the workflow involved when a resource needs to make a change to a timesheet for a time period that the administrator has already closed to updates.
Closed-Task Updating. This diagram illustrates the workflow involved when a resource needs to make a change to task progress that was reported for a task that the project manager has closed to updates.
In Project 2010, we’ve simplified the view creation process down to two steps.
Step 1: Update your current view to something that you want to save. In this example, I’ve inserted a few columns and applied a group to the Task Usage view.
Step 2: On the View tab, from any of the view dropdowns, click Save View.
A dialog will pop up and you will be able to give your view a name.
And once you click OK – your new view is now being displayed and will show up in the view dropdown list.
So, what’s going on behind the scenes?
A view consists of four elements– a screen, table, group, and filter. The screen is just the type of view (Gantt Chart, Task Usage, Calendar, etc.). The table defines which columns should be displayed. The filter and group settings also define what the view should show and how it should be displayed. All views have these defined, they just may be All Tasks and No Group. You can update the Table, Filter, and Group for a view through the View tab – Data group.
When you click Save View, in the background Project is copying the current view settings to the new view and creating a copy of the current table with the new view’s name. This way as you farther insert/remove columns in your new view, other views aren’t being affected since different views can have the same table. Project doesn’t create new filters or groups when you save a new view, instead the existing ones are just applied to the new view.
Another change for Project 2010 is that when you create a new view, table, filter, or group it is automatically added to your global.mpt file. This means that it will be available in all of your projects instead of just the current project you are in. If you don’t like this functionality, you can turn this off on the Advanced tab of the Project Options dialog. Also, note that you’ll still have to manually add items to the enterprise global just like in previous versions.
Another advantage of having items saved to the global, besides that they’ll be available in all of your projects, is that you can go back to the global copy if you no longer want your local version. For example, in the first image in this article, notice how I’m in the task usage view but it is no longer the original task usage view I started out with – I’ve changed the columns and applied a grouping. If I want to go back to that original task usage view, on the View tab, Task Usage dropdown, I can select Reset to Default:
Click Yes at the Warning.
And then I’ll be back to the plain Task Usage view.
Additionally, say I started with the view I just created, My Awesome New View, and made a bunch of changes to the formatting and such that I no longer wanted. I could click Reset to Default and get back to the original configuration I had when I first saved the view.
Finally if I’m in the new view, My Awesome New View, and click Save View again, this time I’ll get the following dialog:
And now I can choose to update the global version of My Awesome New View or save the updates as a completely new view.