Project Web Access (PWA) is designed so that specific Users and Security Groups can be denied access to certain PWA functions.  Depending on the function, that option may not display on the Quick Launch menu for a user.  For example, unless a PWA uses is assigned to the “Administrator” group, he or she will not see the “Server Settings” option in their Quick Launch menu. 

As an MS Project Server Administrator, if you want to deny a specific PWA function for everyone, such as viewing the Resource Center, you can modify the Global permission: 

• From the PWA Quick Launch menu, click Server Settings
• Under the Security category, click Project Web Access Permissions
• In the last category, Views, uncheck the Enable box for View Resource Center

Unfortunately, a user will still see the “Resource Center” option in the Quick Launch menu.  Clicking the option will give you the message;

You do not have sufficient permissions to view the specified page. Please contact your administrator for permissions to view this page.

This is not very clean.  However, we have the ability to hide specific functions from the Quick Launch menu!

• From the PWA Quick Launch menu, click Server Settings
• Under the Look and Feel category, click Quick Launch
• You will see the following view…

 

From here it is a simple matter to choose which menu item you want to hide.  If you want to hide the Resource Center function, click that option and change the option Display link in Quick Launch? to Yes.

In the Edit Quick Launch view, you will notice that any link that is now hidden will display True in the Hidden column.

Also note at the top of the Edit Quick Launch view, there is an option Show menu items from the Windows Sharepoint Services.  Unchecking this option will remove the Documents and Pictures links from the Quick Launch menu.

Customizing the Quick Launch menu can give a nice, clean look for your PWA users!

Microsoft has finally announced the new releases of Project Professional 2010 and Project Server 2010. 

I have been using a beta version since the MS Project Conference last year (see my Post on that conference).  In future postings I will be discusssing the new features.  In the meantime, here are some of the new features in both of these products. 

What’s New in Project Professional 2010

Microsoft® Project Professional 2010 gives you a powerful, visually enhanced way to manage a wide range of projects and programs. With all of the new updates and visual enhancements of Project Standard 2010, Project Professional 2010 delivers more with at-a-glance resource management and team collaboration tools using Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation 2010, to successfully complete all types of projects. And, utilizing Project Professional 2010, you and your organization can realize the results of unified project and portfolio management by adding Microsoft Project Server 2010.

Microsoft Fluent User Interface

• Work more efficiently with the simple and intuitive Microsoft Fluent user interface—new graphical menus and a familiar experience provide the tools you need to plan and manage your project.
• Task-oriented tabs and contextual menu groupings reveal powerful features, making it easier to get started and realize results.
• Learn about features and rich formatting controls quickly with descriptive tooltips and drop-down galleries.
• Simply be more productive by choosing your own menu options, quick access toolbar settings and setting defaults.
• Save to XPS or PDF. Quickly share, print, and publish project information from one location using the new Microsoft® Office Backstage™ view.

Excel-Like Flexibility & Ease

• Enhanced copy and paste makes it easy to share information effectively with other Microsoft Office applications while retaining formatting.
• Add columns dynamically by entering data without having to first select the data type.
• Simplify data entry with auto-complete which displays a list of previously used values to select from.
• Automatic text wrap eliminates extra formatting steps by adjusting row height to display full task names.
• Quickly mine data and analyze results with easy access filtering for all columns.
• Create emphasis with rich color options and text formatting to express ideas and solve problems in new ways.

User-Controlled Scheduling

• Gain flexibility with user-controlled scheduling—manually schedule tasks with the information you have right now or choose to automatically schedule tasks with calculated dates and durations.
• Be alerted to potential scheduling concerns with squiggly lines and choose how to manage potential problems.
• Gain insight with the Task Inspector to recognize issues and take action early—solving problems before they occur.
• Support rolling wave planning and easily create high level forecasts using manually scheduled top down summary tasks.
• Identify gaps by comparing manually scheduled summary tasks with information rolled up from subtasks.
• In Microsoft Project Professional 2010, you can simplify planning with inactive and activetasks to perform what-if analysis.

Timeline View

• Simply create the ultimate graphical timeline to express your schedule and plan.
• It’s easier to see and share—drill into details and visually recognize differences with a clear view of tasks, milestones, and phases.
• Reach your audience with new impact by quickly copying the timeline into an email, presentation, or any other document with formatting retained.

Team Planner

• Visualize the right mix of resources and assignments with a simple and intuitive resource view.
• Simply drag-and-drop to effectively plan tasks and optimize resources for your entire team and project.
• Quickly identify unassigned or unscheduled tasks to proactively solve problems.
• Simply hover over tasks to instantly view task-level details to plan with ease.
• Be visually alerted to potential problems, choose to manually level resources as you work.
• Automatically level over allocated resources on a task-by-task basis using Task Inspector to instantly resolve problems.

Connected Teams

• Enhance team collaboration by sharing information more efficiently—simply save, print or publish in one easy-to-manage Microsoft® Office Backstage™ view.
• Convert Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation 2010 task lists to realize project schedules.
• Publish your project plans to SharePoint® Foundation 2010 task lists so team members can update task status—automatically synchronize to receive updates directly into your project plans.
• Save, share and manage—simply be more connected in the ways you expect with Project Professional 2010 and SharePoint® Foundation 2010.
• Connect Project Professional 2010 with Microsoft Project Server 2010 and gain control across all types of work, improve project selection and strategic alignment, maximize resource utilization and visualize performance through powerful dashboards.

————————————————  

What’s New in Project Server 2010

Microsoft Project Server 2010 brings together the business collaboration platform services of Microsoft® SharePoint Server 2010 with structured execution capabilities to provide flexible work management solutions. Project Server 2010 unifies project and portfolio management to help organizations align resources and investments with business priorities, gain control across all types of work, and visualize performance through powerful dashboards.

Unified Project & Portfolio Management (PPM)

In Project 2010, the best-of-breed portfolio management techniques of Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 are included in Project Server 2010, providing a single server with end-to-end project and portfolio management (PPM) capabilities.

• Familiar SharePoint user interface throughout the solution.
• Common data store eliminating the need for the Project Server Gateway.
• Intuitive and simplified administration.
• Localized portfolio selection capabilities.
• Comprehensive Application Programming Interface (API) including both project and portfolio capabilities.

Built on SharePoint Server 2010

Project Server 2010 is built on top of SharePoint Server 2010, bringing together the powerful business collaboration platform services and structured execution capabilities to provide flexible work management solutions. Gain additional value from the Microsoft platform.

• Take advantage of the Business Intelligence platform to easily create reports and powerful dashboards.
• Control document review and approval through workflow.
• Enterprise search makes it easy to find people and effectively mine project data (resources, tasks, documents etc.).
• Connect teams and enhance communication with wikis, blogs, discussion forums and My Sites.

Project Initiation & Business Case Development

Project Server 2010 provides a new demand management module to capture all work from simple tasks to complex projects and programs.

• Develop and deploy effective governance workflows to manage project investments throughout their lifecycle and drive accountability and control.
• Define Enterprise Project Types for all requests and associate with workflow, a project plan and a custom workspace template.
• Standardize data collection through configurable business case forms. Capture project information, cost estimates, resource estimates, strategic alignment assessments and more.
• Display relevant Enterprise Project Types for each line of business using departmental fields.

Portfolio Selection

Project Server 2010 helps organizations select project portfolios that align with their business strategy by providing techniques to prioritize competing requests, run optimization scenarios under varying budgetary constraints and maximize resource utilization across the planning horizon.

Business Strategy Prioritization

• Objectively prioritize business drivers and drive consensus across the executive team.
• Intuitive and visual interface for completing the business driver prioritization assessment.

Portfolio Prioritization and Optimization

• Effectively prioritize projects from multiple dimensions – strategic value, financial value, and risk.
• Select the optimal portfolio of projects while meeting budgetary and other constraints.
• Enhanced optimization interface surfaces powerful analytical views (e.g. Efficient Frontier) to improve decision making.
• Better understand trade-offs with Force In/Out descriptive values.
• Compare optimization scenarios side by side with snapshot scorecard.

Capacity Planning

• Gain insight into generic resource demand and availability across the planning horizon.
• Reschedule projects within the horizon to maximize resource utilization while adhering to schedule dependencies.
• Model headcount decisions and compare scenarios.

Web-Based Project Editing

Project Server 2010 brings the power of Project Professional 2010 to the browser with Web-based Project Editing.

• Easily build schedules online and conveniently make simple project edits from anywhere.
• Gain flexibility with user controlled scheduling – manually schedule tasks with the information you have right now or automatically schedule tasks to have Project calculate durations and dates.
• Create projects with more than 100 tasks, assign multiple resources, and easily define task hierarchy and dependencies.
• Gain insight with change highlighting and multi-level undo.

Fluent™ User Interface

Microsoft Project 2010 delivers a consistent experience across Project Standard 2010, Project Professional 2010 and Project Server 2010 through the Fluent user interface.

• Work more efficiently with the simple and intuitive Ribbon, so the tools you need to plan and manage your project are always at your fingertips.
• Task oriented tabs and context sensitive menu groupings make finding and performing activities easier.
• Task oriented tabs and context sensitive menu groupings make finding and performing activities easier.

Time Reporting Enhancements

• Save time and unify task status updates and timesheet submissions by enabling Single Entry Mode.
• Flexible and consistent interface enhances the time reporting experience.
• Conveniently approve timesheet and task status updates through the consolidated Approval Center.
• Simply delegate approvals with enhanced user delegation.

Exchange Server Integration

• Choose to receive and update your project task status in Microsoft® Office Outlook.
• Project tasks are shown as Outlook tasks grouped by project name. No Outlook add-in required.
• Stay connected with notifications and updates through Outlook and Outlook Web App.

Enhanced Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI)

Experience the strength and depth of Microsoft Business Intelligence platform. Gain transparency and control with Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Visio Services, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 andSQL Reporting Services.

• Get started quickly with predefined best practice and localized report templates in the new Business Intelligence Center.
• Intuitively customize reports in a familiar Excel editor and publish through Excel Services.
• Simply create powerful audience-based dashboards to effectively monitor portfolio performance.
• Satisfy line of business reporting requirements with Departmental Cubes. Allow decision makers to focus on their data, eliminate unnecessary clutter and ensure faster cube build times.

Simplified Administration

• Project Permissions – Empower project managers to control who can view or edit their projects with Project Permissions.
• User Delegation – Enhanced delegation enables users to easily specify colleagues to act as their delegate when on vacation, without assistance from the administrator.
• Departmental Fields – Provide a level of autonomy while maintaining enterprise standardization and control. With Departmental Fields administrators can associate Enterprise Project Types, Resources and Custom Fields to specific departments, eliminating unnecessary clutter and allowing departments to focus on their data.
• Centralized Administration – One stop administration console for managing both project and portfolio management capabilities.
• Administer Reporting Cubes – Enhanced administration interface for displaying the status and managing available cubes. Quickly take action and intuitively add, edit, delete, copy and refresh cubes.

Extend Interoperability

Integration with related Microsoft technologies provides a familiar and connected work management platform. Empower teams to work in their preferred productivity tools and provide status updates toproject stakeholders with minimal effort and administrative overhead.

• Microsoft® Exchange Server – Conveniently receive and update your project tasks in Outlook or Outlook Web App.
• Microsoft® Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – Seamlessly connect the worlds of application development and project and portfolio management.
• SharePoint Server Sync – Effortlessly improve productivity with bidirectional status updates between Project Professional 2010 and SharePoint.

Today, I will start a series of articles on how you can tweek Microsoft Projet Web Access to have a look and feel, unique to your organization’s needs.

My first tweek will be how to replace the MS PWA logo with your organization’s logo.

1) First you will need to have a copy of your logo saved as an image file (.bmp, .jpg, .png, .gif, etc) to upload to PWA.

2) Create a Picture Library in PWA to store the logo;

• Start from the PWA Home page
• In the Quick Launch menu, click Documents
• Click Create
• Under the Libraries category, click Picture Library
• Enter the Name and Description of the picture library (i.e. “Your Company’s Images”)

 3) Upload the logo to the Picture Library

• Go back to the PWA Home page,
• In the Quick Launch menu, you will now see your newly created picture folder under Pictues
• Click the new folder
• On the menu bar, click Upload
• Click the Browse button and choose the location of your organization’s logo
• Click OK
• Feel free to enter in the optional Title, Description, Keywords
• Click OK
• Now should should see the logo in the picture folder

4) Get the Logo’s URL

• Click the image of the logo.  You should see information about the logo and the image of the logo
• Click this image of the logo.  You should only see the logo.
• At the copy of your browse, you will see the URL of the logo displayed. 
• Copy that URL
• Go back to the previous page

5) Replace the MS PWA logo with your logo

• Click the Site Actions button on the right side of PWA
• Click Site Settings
• Under the Look and Feel column, click Title, description, and icon
• Paste the URL of your logo into the URL field
• Click OK

There you go!  You now have PWA customized with your organization’s logo. 

1,300 plus attendees at the Microsoft Project 2009 Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, were treated to a preview of the next release of Microsoft Project.  Chris Capossela, senior VP with the Microsoft Business Division, presented Wednesday morning’s keynote on Microsoft Project 2010 followed by an overview demonstration of the product line by Keshav Puttaswany, Group Program Manager of the Microsoft Project Business Unit.

Capossela discussed the four pillars of the new product line as:

• Simpler and intuitive user experience.
• Enhanced collaboration and reporting.
• Scalable and connected platform.
• Providing unified project and portfolio management.

Puttaswany’s demonstration was often greeted with applause as various features were showcased.  A number of breakout sessions through the remainder of the conference highlighted many of the specific aspects of both MS Project Professional and MS Project Server 2010. 

This release was by far the most significant upgrade to MS Project since its debut in 1987.  Microsoft has consolidated Project Server and Portfolio Server into one application and  has removed the word “Office” from the product line.  The three applications under the 2010 product line will be:

• Microsoft Project Standard 2010
• Microsoft Project Professional 2010
• Microsoft Project Server 2010

The Beta version of the product will be available later this year and general release will occur in the first half of 2010.

In future posts, I will discuss some of the new features including:

• The “Ribbon” user interface.
• The “Team Planner”.
• The “Time Line” view.
• SharePoint “Sync”.
• And other improvements over existing features.

A popular topic during our project management seminars is the development of a project dashboard using Microsoft Project.  A project dashboard is often an executive view of the status of a project using colored indicators.  Common indicators are the schedule status and the budget status using green, yellow, and red traffic lights.  The example below is a typical dashboard. 

 

A green light means that the project is on track with regard to the schedule. Yellow shows that the project is at risk and red states that the project has exceeded some predefined organizational standard project threshold.  A white indicator is used when the project leader has yet to set a baseline, typically for a project that has not yet started.

PMO’s often create a Project Portfolio Dashboard.  This can give an executive an overview of all the organization’s projects and is helpful to identify projects at risk.

Here are the steps to create a simple project dashboard using Microsoft Project.  This dashboard will use the following thresholds:

• Green light - project is on track
• Yellow light - project is less than 15% over schedule.
• Red light - project is 15% over schedule or budget.
• White light - project baseline has not be established.

1. On the Main Menu bar, select Tools / Customize / Fields.
2. Change the field Type to: Number
3. Select the field named Number 1.
4. Click the Rename button and rename the field Number 1 to Schedule Dashboard.
5. Click the Formula button.
6. Insert the following items into the formula:
   • Field /Date / Finish Variance
   • “/” (the division sign)
   • Field / Duration / Baseline Duration / Baseline Duration
   • “*” (the multiplication sign)
   • 100
7. The formula should appear as: [Finish Variance] / [Baseline Duration] * 100
8. Click OK
9. Reply to the subsequent message by clicking OK, which will return you to the Customize Fields dialogue box.
10. Under the option of Calculation for task and group summary rows, selection the option Use formula
11. Click the Graphical Indicators button
12. Create the indicators to match the figure below:
13. Select OK and close the Customize Fields dialogue box.
14. Within the Tracking Table, insert the Schedule Dashboard field to the right of the Task Name column:
    Insert / Column / Schedule Dashboard / OK.
15. Display the Schedule Dashboard indicator for the entire project:
    • Tools / Options / select the View tab
    • Check the option Show Project Summary Task
    • OK

The addition of the Budget status uses the following calculation:

[VAC] / [Baseline Cost] * 100

As you experiment with the formulas and graphical indicators, your organization can create a sophisticated project dashboard.

Learn more about Glen Knight’s project management seminars.