MS TechNet White Paper: 7 Ways to Sustain Adoption of your PPM Solution, Post-Implementation

Just a quick post to announce that  another  white paper of mine is now published on the “From the Trenches” column, on  Project Server TechCenter on Microsoft TechNet.

It can be downloaded here:  7 Ways to Sustain Adoption of your PPM Solution, Post-Implementation

This white paper describes the key areas you can focus on to sustain adoption—post implementation—so that the usage of the new PPM tools becomes part of organizational culture.

Hope you will find the content useful. Please do let me know any feedback you might have.

And finally, many thanks to the MS Technical Content team, for providing me this opportunity, again!!

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Tip: Change the default task mode for new project

This post in not about the default task mode in Project Professional. Here is a Guillarme’s tip about that. When you just start with scheduling in PWA Schedule web part, you will see that the tasks by default are created in the Manually Scheduled  mode. While this can be changed, just by clicking the Auto Schedule mode button, it is another step your team members may miss or plain ignore.

 

 

This can be changed, so that all new projects will be started in the Auto Schedule mode. Here are the quick steps.

 

Navigate to Server Settings >> Additional Server Settings

 

On the Additional Server Settings page, scroll to find, Task Mode Settings  and select the option for Default task mode for new projects to be Automatically Scheduled. Then click Save.

 

Now, whenever you create a new project, the tasks will be set as Automatically Scheduled as default.

 

Note: This does not change the default task mode for existing projects.

 

Now how would you change existing projects behavior for new tasks?

 

Open the project in Project Professional, and navigate to File >> Options >> Schedule

For the options New Tasks created, change the mode to Auto Scheduled, and click OK. And then publish the project and check it in.

So, next time when you edit the project in PWA (or Project Pro), the tasks will be created as Auto Scheduled.

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Tip: Email Subscriptions for Excel Services Reports with #Nintex

It is a common request from senior management and executives that the reports be emailed to them, as attachments, instead of them having to go to a specific link and check it out. This helps them in scenarios like access reports even when they are not connected to the network.

 

If you have used SSRS Reports, you know that there is subscription service built into it. You can decide when, and who will get the reports with what frequency.

 

 

However, if you build the report in Excel Services using the ODC connections or the OLAP cubes, then you are out of luck, as there is no out of the box way to set these subscriptions up.

 

If you have Nintex Workflow 2013, though, you can work around this.  There is a neat option, to schedule item level workflows, which you can use to setup the subscription (sort of).

 

Step 1: The Workflow

The first thing you need to do is to build a workflow, that we can schedule later.

 

• To do this, start by navigating to your BI Center and navigate to the reports library.

Navigate to Library settings and click on Create a workflow in Nintex workflow to open the Nintex workflow designer.

Once the Workflow designer is open, build a very simple notification action workflow, as shown below.

The configuration is as below. Points to note

1) Make sure you check the attachments checkbox, so that the report gets attached to the email.

2) I am hard coding my workflow to Jan Kotas, but you could use a SharePoint group, or a list column to capture the “Subscribers”,  to make it more dynamic.

And also, You can build your subject and body with more dynamic content like the date and time, other project details etc.,

Once it is configured, go ahead and publish it. I named my workflow Email Subscription.

Step 2: Scheduling the workflow

Navigate back to the report you want to schedule

Click on ellipsis, beside the report that you want to schedule the subscription, until you see the Schedule Workflows option as shown. Click on it.

• This brings up the Schedule Workflows page, as below.
Click on Add Schedule and fill in the details as below, and Click Save.

That’s it. Now your workflow will run, to send the report attachment to the executives mentioned in the workflow.

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Back to Basics: Renaming a project correctly in Project Server 2013

I am sure most Project Server users are well versed with the procedures for renaming a project in Project Server.

However, this question (or related) comes up pretty regularly in the Project Server Forums, so hopefully this article will serve as a reference for this topic.

When you are using Microsoft Project as a stand-alone product, without it being connected to Project Server, then renaming it is the same as renaming any other file, document. However, when you are connected to the server, things are slightly different. These steps are covered in details below.

Note: My screenshots show Project Server 2013, but the procedure is also valid for Project Server 2010.

Renaming the project from PWA

• Start by navigating to PWA >>Project Center, and clicking on the project name to open the project in PWA.

• Make sure the project is in edit mode, by clicking on the Edit button on the ribbon. Then click on the Project Details PDP (or similar one, which has the name of the project field).

• Make you change for the name and click Save.

• You will presented with a warning, as below, Click OK to accept and save the change.

• Once the Save is completed, refresh the page to see your changes.

Renaming the project from Microsoft Project

You could also rename the project from Microsoft Project, as below.

• Start by opening Microsoft Project, connected to the PWA instance that you are working with.
• Click File >> Open to bring the Open project dialog box.
• Click on Show me the list of all projects to bring up the list of all projects on the server.

• Right click on the name of the project that you want to rename, and select Rename.

• Type the new name and hit Enter. You will be preseneted with a pop-up box similar to the one below.

• Click OK. You should see the new Project name displayed. (You might have to close the dialog box and reopen to see the change).

Note: When you rename a project with this method, you will need to publish the project before you can see the name update in PWA.

Renaming the Project Site

If you are using the Project Sites functionality (a SharePoint site that gets created when you create/publish a project), then it is best practice to rename the project site as well, when you rename a project. Otherwise, the Project Site will continue displaying the old name and URL< which might confuse the users.
Renaming a project site has two steps, as detailed below.

Step 1: Rename the Site

• Start by navigating to the Project Site, by clicking on the Project Site link.

• Click on the gear icon on the top right corner, and the click on Site Settings in the drop down menu.

• Under the look and feel section, click on Title, description and logo.

• Under the Title and Description, change the name to match the project name. Do the same for the Website Address, in case you want the URL also to match the project name.

Step 2: Edit Site Address

If you changed the URL of the Project Site in Step 1 of this section, then you will no longer be able to access the Project Site by clicking Project Site in project center. To fix this, follow the steps below.

• Navigate to Server Settings >> Connected SharePoint Sites

• Select the site that you just changed the address of, and click on Edit Site Address from the menu bar.

• On the Edit Site Address dialog box, enter the new site URL, test it to make sure it works and click OK.

That’s it. This is the full procedure for renaming a project, along with the connected SharePoint Sites.

Couple of caveats

• If there are timesheets reported on the project while it had the old name, the timesheets will continue showing the old name, until recalled, deleted and recreated.
• If there are previous timesheets submitted/approved while the project had the old name, the Timesheet tables in Reporting database will retain the actual values against the old name. So some of your timesheet reports might show both old and new names.
• If any of your users have pinned the previous site address, you will need to let them know about the new site site URL.

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Download: Project Online and Project Server 2013 Options - A Quick Infograph

A couple of weeks ago, I was presenting Project Online to a group of people, who are more from the SharePoint Community than Microsoft Project. Their knowledge of Project, Project Server was more

as users than IT Professionals.

Midway through the presentation we got into the discussion about various options that Microsoft is now offering as part of Office 365 and also the standard on-premises offerings for Project Portfolio Management.

Needless to say, that the discussion escalated quickly to a confusing array of terminology with Project Online, Project Pro for Office 365, Project Professional 2013 and what connects to what, what you can purchase how and so on. I was able to answer the questions, and also point the group to various excellent articles and references Microsoft put together on these topics.

Nevertheless, it occurred to me that it may not just be that one group that is confused with all the new offerings. So, I decided to put together a quick Info graph trying to explain various options available, and how they interact with each other.

I have made it available on TechNet Gallery so that more people can come across it. 

You can download it from the TechNet Gallery by clicking on the image or from this direct link: in jpeg format here. Quick Reference Info-Graph for Project Online and Project Server 2013

Hope it is useful! If you find any errata, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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Handling Special Characters in OData Queries

Recently, a question came up in the Project Server User Forums, where the user was trying to use a value as a filter in an OData query. The challenge was that the value he was filtering for, had an ‘&’ (ampersand) in it. So, the query was generating errors, explained below.

In this example, I am trying to filter for projects that have the field ‘Client’ equals ‘AT&T’. So, I would write the query as,

https://sgsglobal.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa2/_api/ProjectData/Projects/?$filter=Name eq 'AT&T'

This would yield a result like this:



This is because ‘&’ is a special character that has special meaning when used in a URL Query.
If you are old timer with SQL or have development background, you may know how to handle these. But if you are new to OData like me, you need to know that some of the special characters cannot be used in a URL query, and need to encoded.

So, long story short, you have to encode ‘&’ as ‘%26%’, before using them in your URL Query.
https://sgsglobal.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa2/_api/ProjectData/Projects/?$filter=Name eq 'AT%26T'

Now you will be be able to get the results, as shown below.



The other special characters, that need to be encoded are as below:



More information could be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa226544(SQL.80).aspx

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