by Martin Laukkanen | Jan 21, 2010 | Project 2010, Reporting
If you’re interested in a non-technical overview of the changes to reporting in Project 2010, then the MS Project Team Blog has a nice write-up describing all the changes including; OLAP Cubes, Reporting Database and Excel Services.
by Martin Laukkanen | Jan 7, 2010 | Project 2010, Workflow
I’ve spent some time over the past few days diving deep into the new Project Server 2010 Workflows which replace the Portfolio Server workflow from 2007, and so I thought that a post on my experiences was definitely in order.
First the not so good news:
- Workflow in Project Server 2010 is driven by SharePoint Workflow, and it replaces the Portfolio Server workflow entirely. This second point makes it one of the features that everyone will want!
- All workflow for Project Server 2010 must be created in Visual Studio, also AFAIK VS2010 will be the only fully supported version, although it does apparently work with VS2008. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee767686(office.14).aspx)
- Excluding some 3rd Party tool, there unfortunately is no easy way about creating even a simple workflow! This could be seen as a step backwards as in Portfolio Server very complex workflow could be created using the web interface.
- At present the included “Sample Proposal Workflow” does not and will not have source code released, I have spoken in the beta forums with some from MS who have “taken the idea under advisement“..
The better news:
- Project Detail Pages (the pages containing all project information, etc) are fully customisable without VS or Designer. Meaning the capture of custom fields for new projects is very slick.
- If the Sample Proposal Workflow fits (three levels of approval plus portfolio selection) then it can be fully customised to include all of your required custom fields, detail pages, and other information. However you just can’t change the workflow order without the code.
I can see this as being a really great feature for 2010, however the steep learning curve will be a problem for certain! Unfortunately this is a bit of a step backwards, as in Portfolio Server 2007 you could create quire complex workflow within the UI.
by Martin Laukkanen | Dec 1, 2009 | Project 2010
I’m doing some testing this week on migrating to 2010 so I have a few things I will be blogging about in the next day or so, but I noticed that my draft blog is getting very long so I thought I’d split one very important part of it into a separate entry altogether.
A few things have come out as obvious ‘gotchas’ in the migration requirements, and I’ll summarise them here quickly;
- In-place migration requires 64bit Project Server / MOSS in order to ‘upgrade’
This one is no surprise as 2010 is 64bit only.
- Upgraded 2007 installations need to start by running all latest patches (as of October ’09), so that means:
Project Server OctCU, MOSS OctCU, WSS OctCU, SQL 2005 SP3 + CU3 OR SQL 2008 SP1 + CU2. It’s worthwhile when doing any new installs from no onwards to START at that level.
- DB-Attach upgrades (more on the upgrade methods in my main blog), which is probably the method that will be used 90% of the time due to #1 above will need Workspaces provisioned OUTSIDE of the default content database, i.e. Not at /PWA.
Fortunately there are steps provided in the migration guide to move your workspaces to a new site collection and content db so that this is possible.
Come back later for more comments and some lessons learnt.
