Ed Horn our Senior EPM Trainer beats my score with a 911

Ed Horn recently passed the MCTS 070-0632 exam with a 911. Although I feel happy for him and the good job he did with the exam, I am also concerned it will be brought up every time we co-teach a class...;)

Good job, Ed!

Passed MCTS 070-0632 with a 900

The MCTS exam for Managing Projects with MS Project Professional is definately not a trivial exam. This is not a typical "office" exam. The questions in this exam require you to have a deep understanding of MS Project Professional 2007. If you are prepping with Transcendor or other Prep packages you might see some questions on earned value and the expected need to know alot about the formulas behind PV, EV, AC, etc. I personally only had one question on Earned Value formulas. You need to understand how task type settings work and what happens when resources are added and removed. You also need to understand dependency types and their influence when tasks get shifted around.

Overrall, it is a good exam and requires a breadth of knowledge to pass.

Portfolio Server 2007 SP1 released!

Project Portfolio Server 2007 SP1 released.

I think there may have been some confusion about the release of PPS SP1. Some of you may have thought that it was part of the earlier Office Server SP1 release. The update was published on 3/6/2008 and there are quite a few fixes.

The update itself is relatively straight forward compared to Project Server. It can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7cf44f2c-49d5-4431-bd3e-a10035ec1a39&displaylang=en

Its simply a matter of running the update and a Reboot is required.

Clearing the Queue in Project Server

Sometimes the queue in Project Server 2007 appears to be getting hung up and you find that jobs are not completing successfully from Project Professional. The first steps to take are:
1. Click “Server Settings”
2. Click “Manage Queue”
3. Expand the “Advanced Options” section and ensure that the “Cancel jobs getting enqueued” option is checked.
4. Check the box next to the task you want to cancel and click the “Cancel Jobs” button.

If this still doesnt appear to help then you should:

1. Launch Services
2. Stop the Project Queue Service
3. Stop the SharePoint Timer Service
4. Start the SharePoint Timer Service
5. Start the Project Queue Service

Online and Free Project Server Seminars

MS Project Pros has recently announced that it will offer ongoing free online seminars on various topics covering MS Project Server 2007 and the EPM offering. The topics will be 100-300 level depending on the topics. We will cover installation, configuration, troubleshooting and best practices among other things.

Finding the document URL in MS Office

While working with SharePoint and Office 2007 you often want to locate the URL of the document you are working with. In Office 2003/WSS 2.0 that was much easier to find. If Office 2007 they tucked it away.

Here are the steps for adding it to your Quick Access Toolbar.

1. Locate the Quick Access Toolbar
2. Click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar
3. Click More Commands
4. On the Choose Commands from:
5. Choose All Commands
6. Scroll down to find Document Location
7. Click the Add button
8. Click Ok

Now you can copy and past the document URL Location.

Managing Change Requests with Content types

Your team can manage change requests with SharePoint by Using Office templates and Content Types. First learn how to enable and use content types with SharePoint:
Here is a good article on how to do that:

http://www.bobmixon.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=44

You can then add custom workflow to the document library so that every request that get made gets routed to the PMO and Project Server administrator.

Upgrading to SP1 in a medium farm and having a snapshot restored to an earlier instance

We recently had a situation where an environment we support was upgraded to SP1. Everything went as planned. The MOSS admin VM instance then became corrupted. After investigating the log files we got a message related to the Schema being "inconsistent". This told us that the snapshot that was restored was earlier then the one that had the SP applied to it.

The simple solution was to apply the Service pack to the MOSS instance and it worked perfectly. Just apply the SP the same way you applied it the first time.

PS 2007 and Project Professional SP1

Be careful that your Project Professional users are not updating their Project Professional desktops to SP1 before you rollout the Service Pack across the enterprise.