Project Server technical bits

** Update ** Having looked at the data, the general rules are now  Dont use TAP flag unless it is explicitly for the Team Assignments functionality (which no-one uses anyway) And if you want to use Generic Resources on Resource Plans using FTE planning, make sure (for now) that they have some capacity, and design this out of your capacity planning reports. Generic Resource Capacity in times gone by I have picked up the habit of using the "Team Assignment Pool" flag on Generic Resources to avoid setting the Max Units to 0% and still have zero capacity for the resources in the RDB.  This was a throwback to the heady days of PS2007 and its complete lack of stability (0% resources used to cause havoc when using the Assign Resources dialogue in MS Project). It looks as if this is a habit I am going to have to break. Today I have found a new issue in Resource Plans on PS2013 where setting the Team Assignment Pool OR setting Max Units to 0% on a resource has a negati...

This has been painful Project Online reporting has been a fairly significant limitation of the Online experience for me so far.  Besides the complexity in building the oData stream, the fairly fundamental limitations of the data filtering of the URI's has been a major falling down point for me. To digress for a moment, most reports people want are timephased in some way, either Actual Work by period, planned work by period, or timesheet data by period.  All of these reports lead to a "time by day" feed.  Now the thing with timephased reports is you are usually looking for a "last three months, next three months" view (or similar).  Also the thing with the Time By Day feeds is that they are HUGE! Add these things together and you really need a way of limiting your data feed to avoid extremely lengthy refresh times. Easy enough I hear you say.  Just put a timebyday ge '2014-01-01T00:00:00' select statement in your URI before adding it into your Pow...

Scenario: 1x WFE 1x APP 1x SQL Web Front End Service on WFE Project Server enabled on APP so a traditional 3tier scenario.  nothing complicated When deploying new Web features to the Farm, you are unable to create a Project Site based on a custom template. Error: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The site template requires that the Feature {17843394-988a-4a4e-9d5e-8b419bdc1340} be installed in the farm or site collection Now we know this IS enabled at the SC level.  Only un-installing these features enables the site provisioning to successfully complete.  Redeploying and enabling these features then breaks it again Cause: Well... it turns out the features are required on the server where Project Server is enabled. as these are site features, that means you have two options 1) enable the Web Front end service on the App Server - which seems like a crazy thing to do to me 2) copy the features from /15/Template/Features from WFE to APP - again, mad mad m...

Since MS provided the ability to plan only using PWA, this has been a really useful feature for some users.  However there has always been a (certainly from my perspective) perceived issue, in that the ability to reschedule incomplete work into the future (a key component of the planning cycle) was only available in MS Project client. The other day I was asked by a customer how they could get around this issue.  They use PWA extensively (cost reasons) for planning but were struggling with realising correct resource forecast data as they PM's were not able to re-forecast their remaining work schedule. As we had recently patched the Project Server to 2013 SP1 + 0614CU I thought I would look at the STOP/RESUME fields in the Project views to see if these were editable, and surprise surprise they were. The stop/resume fields are how MS Project handles task splits and the "update remaining work to restart after" component of rescheduling.  The Stop field will indica...

When calculating running totals (for S-Curve/BurnUp reports) I have had to transform the periodic data returned from SQL into running totals in a pivot or used the running value SQL RS command to transform the data. So, fast forward to happy SQL2012 land, and we have some useful script commands that can now be used.  Lets face it, our SQL boxes are usually packed to the brim with RAM and Cores these days so why not use them for what they're built for! The following script calculates the running totals by month by project for all the normal useful measures. I am in no way saying this is an optimised script, it's just my first kick out at this. In all honesty you'd probably want to remove the _userview references and go to the tables.   Enjoy, ignore, laugh at the naivety to your hearts content --SQL Script to return running totals (RTx) for Projects by Month Select p.ProjectName ,data.month ,data.RTAssnWork ,sum(data.work) ,data.RTAssnActualWork ...