Dieter's ProjBlog

With P12, we wanted to dramatically improve the extensibility of Project Server. We have found that a bit over 50% of our Project 2002/2003 customers customize Project Server. This can range from integrating with LOB or G/L systems to tightly integrating a 3rd part product with Project Server (for example, EPK's products).

Today, developers need to have a reasonably deep knowledge of Project Server and the Project Server database to extend Project 2002/2003. We wanted P12 to be relatively easy to extend by developers familiar with the Microsoft platform.

Some key extensibility points re Project Server 12:

Project Server 12 is a managed application running on top of ASP.Net

We replaced the PDS with a new, much deeper set of web services called the Project Server Interface (PSI). ALL of our clients (Project Professional, Project Web Access) communicate with Project Server through the PSI. The PSI has over 350 methods. These methods include the standard CRUD methods for Projects, Resources, Tasks, Assignments, and Admin functions. PSI methods use and return ADO.Net (typed) datasets.

Project Server 12 includes pre- and post-events for many of the PSI methods. This allows developers to subscribe to the events of interest, run their business logic, and allow a transaction to proceed or be rolled back. I will ask one of the workflow experts on my team to post in the future on how you can use this functionality to build rich workflows on top of Project Server ... all tightly integrated with Visual Studio.Net.

Project Server 12 includes a "true" reporting database. We have built a reporting database that moves data from our operational stores (used by Project Pro and PWA) into a database consisting of "wide", denormalized tables. The reporting db is quite complete = projects, resources, tasks, assignments, and timesheet data. The Project Server Reporting DB makes it much easier to plug in the report writer of choice to build banded reports/briefing books on very large datasets.

What does all this mean? Project Server 12 will be vastly easier to extend for developers familiar with Visual Studio.Net and ASP.Net. And the new broader functionality in P12 eliminates the need to write many of the PDS extensions developed for Project 2003. We have been using these new platform features for the past 12 months to develop Project Web Access and Project Professional. We think that you are going to love the new PSI as well.

Quick fyi:

I added a link to ProjBlog for the Project MVP site. The MVPs (Most Valuable Professional) are experts on all things Proj. We typically meet with the Proj MVPs at least once a year. They always have a LOT of ideas and suggestions ... and represent some of the most detailed, real world experience with Proj that you can find anywhere. We will be giving the MVPs the lowdown on P12 (including demos that I am currently working on) at the end of this month.

http://project.mvps.org/

I had a question posted by Derek about P12's schedule and availability.

First, Project is on the Office 12 schedule. We don't ship until Office 12 ships.

Beta 1 is scheduled for the end of this year. It is a closed beta = by invitation only.

Beta 2 is an open beta (i.e., sign up somewhere on Microsoft.Com and download the beta). Beta 2 will be Q1 next year.

General Availability is by end of year 2006.

Yes, I know these are vague "dates." Hopefully, they are exactly what Jeff Raikes, Bill Gates, Steven Sinofsky have already said. If my dates are different, refer to Jeff/Bill/Steven dates (-:) The marketing folks will release official dates as we get closer to RTM.

Internally, of course, we have much more precise dates. We are currently working hard on Beta 1. So far, things are looking good and we are hitting our glidepath.

From the beginning, P12 has been about the platform. As customers rolled out Project 2002 and then 2003, we saw where we needed to improve the communication between Project Pro, Project Server, and SQL Server. We were able to see the real concurrency loads put on the system and saw where we could add much higher levels of responsiveness and reliability under high loads. We saw where we needed to evolve our reporting architecture so it was easier to pull briefing book style reports and take far fewer resources and time to refresh our OLAP cubes. We saw that we could radically lower the expertise needed to build solutions on Project Server by leveraging .Net and Windows SharePoint Services.

When we start the planning for a release, we try to identify some key scenarios that we want to nail. Here are a few scenarios that we have in mind for the new P12 platform:

- Project managers on the road with their laptops using Project Pro to work on their projects locally but be able to easily work across WANs against their Project Server.

- 1000s of employees filling out their timesheets in the last hour or so on a Friday afternoon.

- Account managers and "business" types being able to quickly generate project proposals and capture future resource demand ... all from a web browser but still providing the kind of data for execs to really see what their resource capacity and demand looks like.

- Folks from the PMO being able to connect to a rich reporting database using common reporting tools to easily create reports that provide visibility into what is really going on in the organization.

- Partners being able to easily work with customers to create "workflows" that tightly integrate projects with business processes.

I will talk some more this week about the key technologies that power these scenarios in P12. Our platform team has done some really cool work in this release. While we still have some work to do after P12 re platform abilities, P12 is a great start and a long-term foundation.

We will be sending Phil Smail to the PDC next week to give an overview on the architecture and programmability features of Project Server 12. It should be a great talk. If you are at the PDC next week and interested in Proj, you should make time to see Phil's session.

Phil's talk will cover:

- Project Server 12 architecture, including a bunch of drill-down into our much deeper integration with Windows SharePoint Services

- Project Server Interface (PSI), our replacement for the Project Data Service. The PSI is a vastly more complete web service = ~350 methods! If you are a managed code (VS.Net, ASP.Net) developer, you are going to love the PSI. Phil has some cool demos lined up that show some of the power of the PSI.

- Server-Side Eventing

- New Reporting Infrastructure

Who am I? Why should you care?

I am the Group Program Manager (aka GPM) for Microsoft Project. I have been working on the Proj team since early 2000. I led the team that designed the Project EPM Solution for Project 2002. I then moved up to managing the overall program management team for Proj with the Project 2003 release.

I set the high level vision and direction for the release. My team does the detailed design and project management for each Project release.

I will take time in the next few posts to talk about:

- the scoop on the Proj talk at the PDC

- vision and directions for the P12 release

Day 0. I will be posting regularly (at least once a week) to this blog from the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference 2005 (week of 9/12) until at least the general availability of Office 12. The bulk of this blog will be on Project 12. I will be asking folks from my team to contribute content about some of the cool features that they are working on for P12. Hopefully, we can keep the content flowing and the ideas interesting.