I posted over on the Project Support blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2015/10/14/project-server-2010-and-2013-october-2015-pu-announcement.aspx – no Project Server 2010 updates – and just a reminder that Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 ended mainstream support just this past week.  This means we won’t be taking any further non-security fixes – so if you are still using this version it might be time to consider Project Online or moving up to Project Server 2013 – or reviewing the recently released preview for Project Server 2016, due out early next year.

No fixes yet for Project 2016, but some of the other 2016 client applications do have some updates.

Check-in pending?

One bug fix this month caught my eye – “When you force check in a project on a Project 2013 server, the project is still displayed as checked out in Project Professional. If you try to open and edit it in Project Professional, you receive an error message that states that the file in the local cache is damaged” – and looking at the fix this ‘might’ just resolve any continuing ‘check-in pending’ issues – as we are know looking at the server status of the plan when opening to ensure that any ‘checked-out’ information that exists on the client is validated.  Fingers crossed!

Thanks to Chris Boyd for sharing this script that helps with the automation of account creation for Project Professional and Project Pro for Office 365 users (hereafter just called Project Pro).  And to be clear, the account I am talking about here is the account normally configured through Project Pro – File, Info, Manage Accounts – and governs the connections available and their behavior when starting Project Pro, and not the account you might create in PWA on either Project Server or Project Online.

The following script should be copied locally to a file titles CreateAccount.ps1, then would be executed by an administrator on the computer that already has Project Pro for Office 365 or Project Professional installed.  This will work for 2013 and 2016 – you could also edit the registry key if you wanted to use for earlier versions.  Then you’d navigate to the directory containing the script and execute with two parameters – the Account name and also the PWA URL – so for example:

.\CreateAccount.ps1 PWA https://Contoso.SharePoint.com/sites/pwa

You would need to have the appropriate setting for your PowerShell execution policy – see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170 for more information

And now the script…

#
# This script will create the account for Project Pro for O365 to connect to Project Online.
#
# Execute this script with two parameters: the account name and PWA URL
#
# ./CreateAccount.ps1 PWA https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa
#
########################################################################################################################

Param(
  [string]$accountName,
  [string]$pwaURL
)

function CreateAccount ($keyPath, $accountName, $pwaURL)  {

    $guid = [System.Guid]::NewGuid()

    New-Item -Path "$keyPath$accountName"
    New-ItemProperty -Path "$keyPath$accountName" -Name Name -PropertyType String -Value $accountName
    New-ItemProperty -Path "$keyPath$accountName" -Name GUID -PropertyType String -Value "{$guid}"
    New-ItemProperty -Path "$keyPath$accountName" -Name Path -PropertyType String -Value $pwaURL
}


function CreateProjectOnlineAccount ($accountName, $pwaURL)
{
    $15keyPath = "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\MS Project\Profiles\"
    $16keyPath = "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\MS Project\Profiles\"

    If (Test-Path($15keyPath)) {

        CreateAccount $15keyPath $accountName $pwaURL
    }


    If (Test-Path($16keyPath)) {
        CreateAccount $16keyPath $accountName $pwaURL
    }
}

CreateProjectOnlineAccount $accountName $pwaURL
  

On its own this probably does not save much time – but if used with a suitable GPO configuration thjis could be used to push accounts out to users – see the the Scripting Guy’s blog on this topic for more information – http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2010/08/14/weekend-scripter-using-group-policy-to-deploy-a-windows-powershell-logon-script.aspx 

Enjoy!  And apologies if you saw an incomplete posting first time – finger trouble caused a premature publishing…

After a few weeks of experience supporting the Resource Management features of Project Online I decided to post a blog covering some details behind the resource plan migration that happens after activation of the feature.  Part 1 is over on the Project Support blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2015/10/21/project-online-resource-plan-migration-expectations.aspx.  Part 2 will come soon when I’ll cover a few things you can do with your migrated plans once they are resource engagements.

One thing I’ll pull out here is an OData Url that you can use to see just which of your current Resource Plans will get migrated

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa/_api/ProjectData/Projects?$select=ProjectName, ProjectResourcePlanWork, ProjectModifiedDate

Any where the ProjectResourcePlanWork is 0 will not come across – and also check the modified date to be sure you not only have published resource plans, but recently published resource plans.

I’ll also be touching on this topic at my session in the Virtual Project Conference – today, October 22nd at 4pm PST.  Looks like the popularity (of the conference – not my session) has closed registration right now https://projectvirtualconference.com/register/ – but I understand all the sessions are recorded so you can watch later if you don’t get to see it live.

I hope you all had a chance to attend some of the excellent sessions over the last couple of days – I’m just catching a couple of the last presentations right now at https://projectvirtualconference.com/ and will need to find some time to watch others that I didn’t get a chance to watch live!

I really enjoyed presenting (Session B009 if you want to take a look – 11pm to 12am UTC 10/22)  and wanted to thank Prasanna Adavi and all the MVP’s and others who made the conference so successful. 

I’d also like to thank the sponsors too:

The title isn’t quite true – as there are no server updates for 2016 obviously as it isn’t released yet – and nothing new for 2010 but there is an uber package – but the title would have been too long…

The blog post with all the details is out at Project Server 2010, 2013 and 2016 November 2015 PU Announcement.

Sharing one tip here too that I used when preparing the post.  I always download and install all the updates on my 2010, 2013 and 2016 systems before posting – just to be sure it all goes ok, but I was finding that the links from the KB articles were not coming up correctly so that when I clicked on the download links in the KB articles, like this one for the Project Server 2013 rollup – KB2101369 :

I hit an error telling me the page couldn’t be found.  The link for the above download is:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b9ea7019-91d7-49a3-bb91-2c42fa0ff26a

and when it works this should take you automatically to the following download page:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49828

If it doesn’t work for you (and this may never happen again – but if it does…) then you can just go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for the KB number and that will find the download page:

Seems this was quite a broad issue with the redirection to downloads as it was also affecting the October updates yesterday morning too.

There is now a pre-built content pack that you can add to Power BI to make dashboards of your Project Online data.  Theresa Palmer of Power BI team has posted a blog on this at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/11/18/explore-and-monitor-your-project-online-data-in-power-bi.aspx 

Or for an MVP take on this you can review Paul Mather’s blog post at https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/projectonline-powerbi-content-pack-available-bi-office365-ppm/.  Another Project MVP, Treb Gatte has also been pretty active with BI topics on his blog – http://tumbleroad.com/blog/.  I’m sure many other MVP’s either have or will be blogging this topic – so apologies if I haven’t mentioned yours.  Hopefully I’ll get time for a Fall roundup of all MVP blogs shortly (what happened to summer???)

This is a bit of a chicken and egg question – what’s the point of telling you about my new blog location in my new blog location – as you are here already?  Well I’ll also be posting a link on Twitter, and this is just some info about the migration to WordPress for our MSDN and TechNet blogs.  I’m in phase 1 for both the BriSmith and ProjectSupport blog – and one thing that is broken just at the moment is the redirect from the very original Urls.  My first blog was at http://blogs.msdn.com/brismith – but this transitioned to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith – but you never really needed to know as one redirected to the other.  Now the only one that correctly redirects to the current https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith is the one with the /b/ in the middle.  Same for the TechNet one which now lands at https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/projectsupport.  So make sure you update your favourites to keep getting content on support topics and tips for Project, Project Server and Project Online!

I might get around to customizing and getting a photo header back on BriSmith – when I get time.

Thanks to all my readers for the feedback and questions through 2015 and before – and looking forward to more in 2016.

Quick facts!

My most northerly reader?  North shore of Alaska – 71.2947 degrees North!

Most Southerly?  Chile – -53.15 South.

Westerly?  Tonga -174 degrees West

Easterly?  Suva (narrowly pushing out New Zealand which from memory has captured Southerly and Easterly in previous years)

I reached 6,500 unique locations and http://www.myworldmaps.net put my World Domination at 33.81% (up from 23.1% in 2014!).  Just short of 1000 hits a day – with nearly 40% in the US – UK second with nearly 10% and then Germany, India and Canada following on with around 4 to 5% each.

One single hit in each of Greenland, Equatorial Guinea, the Cook Islands and the Congo.  I need to break into Antarctica next – surely they must plan their project there?

Chrome passed 50% in the last month as the browser of choice by my readers…

And 1.42% of my readers are within 10 miles!

Happy New Year! (Big Ben should be striking about now).

I started my blog back in October 2006 – so just into my second decade of blogging – and wanted to reach out to find how this is working for you?  As we move into 2016 as a support team we are looking at how we should use social and what better way than to ask our customers!  So, not a survey, just some questions to get things flowing.  Also very keen to hear if the blog has been useful to you in the past.  I do get feedback and really good to know it has helped – and very useful information to give our management team to ensure we can continue sharing information in this way.  Don’t be shy.  Also be good to hear how it compares to support focused blogs for other Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies – always looking to learn from other practitioners.

I’m guessing many of you may read both this blog and the Project Support blog on TechNet – comments on both gratefully accepted.

So some questions:

• Does the format work?  Would it be better with some video perhaps?  What should we change?
• Are Twitter and Facebook places you’d want and expect to get support help?  Any other technology support doing this well today?
• How about LinkedIn?  Not something I’ve used for blog announcements or articles – but it seems to be getting a more popular destination.
• Our support forums?  How are they working for you?
• Do you find the Update lists useful on the Project Support blog?  (Top right – headed cumulative updates)
• Anything else?

Obviously we can only go so far in these external forums – more for the 5 minute answer than really deep problems – especially when we need to share logs or run some diagnostics – when opening a support incident is the preferred way to go.

Feel free to reply via comments – or contact me at Brian.Smith@Microsoft.com if you prefer.

I’ve posted the full announcement of the Project and Project Server update releases over on the Project Support site – and also updated all of the hotfix lists (top right) as an easy way to find what fixes have been released since Project 2010, 2013 and 2016 were launched.