Project Server technical bits

We all like Project Centre, with its lists of projects and useful fields, but sometimes you just want it to do a little more.  For example: - what if you could display some key milestones on the gantt - what if you could easily display colour-coded gantt bar by phases. The second point above (or variant of)  has been requested so many times and as of yet I have not seen anyone deliver such a report or view, so I decided to give it a go. Now, before we go ahead, the following is done with no coding and no complex Reporting Services reports.  I am sure (and have seen) some amazing report views in SRS similar to this requirement, but this is a Proof of Concept solution.  Go work out your own way :P So, a Portfolio Report: Ingredients: - Excel - SP2010 Farm with Excel Services configured - an ODC - Some formulas - Some conditional formatting Step 1:  Define This PoC is done working on the following: - There are 5 Phases for each project - The Gantt should include coloured bars by each

** WARNING ** following this post may kill your already sickly farm.... Imagine the scenario: - during some troubleshooting, someone deletes some EPM databases that they believe no longer point to a PWA Site (but actually do) or - when deleting a PWA Site, some environmental issue interrupts the process before it completes or - an issue occurred during PWA Site provisioning or - who knows what, sometimes bad things happen...... what you will see: Sharepoint will continually report events such as : An exception occurred while running the job scheduler.   Reason: Cannot open database "ProjectServer_Published" requested by the login. The login failed.  Login failed for user xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.  Technical Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database "ProjectServer_Published" requested by the login. The login failed.  Login failed for user xxxxxxxxxxxxxx     at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlEx