Hi, i thought you may want to check out the web cast I am going to do in January
In this webcast we provide insight on how you can take advantage of the great reporting features in Microsoft Project Server 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. By using Excel Servises, Project Server delivers a suite of pre-defined reports out of the box. during the presentation we outline how users are able to generate thier own reports and report templates, give an overview on how to manage projects and portfolio dashboards by creating KPI reports using Perfomance Point Services and show how to visualise project and portfolio management processes by generating and integrating a dynamic visual report using Visio Services. The Web cast will give you a good introduction of the reporting capabillities of Project Server 2010.
PS: for thouse Australian viewers, sorry it is in the morning :( but it will be recorded I believe.
Check out this link to the register:
Register for Webcast
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Project & Project Server 2010
I am just in the Brisbane Airport waiting for my plane to Adelaide. Over the last week I had the pleasure being at the Project Server Conference 2009 in Phoenix where Project and Project Server 2010 was introduced. Before I start writing about my impressions, I would like to say thank you to all the MVP's I have meet last week. Many of you I have known now for years, but only a view I met face to face. Every time we meet, it feels like seeing an extended Family and I am very happy, honored and proud to be part of this elite of fine, smart and passioned professionals. Cant wait to see you all again.
Additionally I had the pleasure of meeting many people last week that share the same passion then I and one of the main reasons why I attend these conferences is to share my experience with same minded professionals of which some have become friends from all over the world, Finland, Germany, Russia, Israel, France, USA, Malaysia,New Zealand........ I feel very privileged.
OK now 2010:
Quite a view things have already been written over the last couple of days and as most of the bloggers I am also taken by the amount of great work and effort the Microsoft Project Team has been putting into the product. I already had the chance to see 2010 in action before hand during Beta1 and the conference has only backed up my thoughts. WAU, YEIPEEEE, UNBELIEVABLE, FINALLY, MIND BLOWING, these where the immediate words that sprang to my mind and finally I am able to talk about it :) since the NDA has been lifted.
Lets Start with Project Server 2010. The most important part to notice here is that Project Server 2010 requires SharePoint Server Enterprise 2010 to be deployed. This has a lot of license implications for many of my customers, but also a lot of additional feature sets. It took me about 2 sleepless nights before I started to accept the fact that Project Server is now a truly enterprise solution, not just from a feature set ( which it already was) but also from a licensing point of view. Microsoft has not reveled the license cost yet and I doubt that we will have final figures for a while now. So be aware of that.
Secondly ( which I believe was required) the entire infrastructure has to be 64 bit, including SQL Server. Most of my clients run 64bit anyway, so that should not be such a big issue, but for some organisations that means hardware upgrade which was required anyway :)
Now lets talk about feature sets. I don't really know where to start because there are so many :)
Additionally I had the pleasure of meeting many people last week that share the same passion then I and one of the main reasons why I attend these conferences is to share my experience with same minded professionals of which some have become friends from all over the world, Finland, Germany, Russia, Israel, France, USA, Malaysia,New Zealand........ I feel very privileged.
OK now 2010:
Quite a view things have already been written over the last couple of days and as most of the bloggers I am also taken by the amount of great work and effort the Microsoft Project Team has been putting into the product. I already had the chance to see 2010 in action before hand during Beta1 and the conference has only backed up my thoughts. WAU, YEIPEEEE, UNBELIEVABLE, FINALLY, MIND BLOWING, these where the immediate words that sprang to my mind and finally I am able to talk about it :) since the NDA has been lifted.
Lets Start with Project Server 2010. The most important part to notice here is that Project Server 2010 requires SharePoint Server Enterprise 2010 to be deployed. This has a lot of license implications for many of my customers, but also a lot of additional feature sets. It took me about 2 sleepless nights before I started to accept the fact that Project Server is now a truly enterprise solution, not just from a feature set ( which it already was) but also from a licensing point of view. Microsoft has not reveled the license cost yet and I doubt that we will have final figures for a while now. So be aware of that.
Secondly ( which I believe was required) the entire infrastructure has to be 64 bit, including SQL Server. Most of my clients run 64bit anyway, so that should not be such a big issue, but for some organisations that means hardware upgrade which was required anyway :)
Now lets talk about feature sets. I don't really know where to start because there are so many :)
- Project and Portfolio Server are now one product and it looks INCREDIBLE. My prediction is we do not have any more competition. With this solution primaveras of the world watch out. You can not beat what Microsoft delivered in a seamless solution. Not only does it look great, it does the job!!!!
- Project Server is a SharePoint Solution. All your EPM specialist you will need to become SharePoint Specialists too. There is no life without SharePoint. I personally love it. In the past I had to sell SharePoint to have the featuresets. Now it all comes out of the box. Excel Services, Visio Services, Workflow, Collaboration, KPI's, Perfomance Point, Forms Services and and and I dont know when to stop. That of course means endless possibilities for our customers. I will post more detailed featurests about SharePoint later. By the way the SharePoint conference is on the 15th October. You may want to consider going. This will be a huge event.
- No More ActiveX and OWC. All Grids are now bases on Ajax and JavaScript. THANK YOU MICROSOFT. No more complicated desktop deployments. All Server based and extensible to accommodate for any requirement.
- The Reporting Engine is Excel Services. That is great, well I already use Excel Services in 2007 extensible and think that this is a great move. Finally business users can create their own reports using Excel, their most loved reporting tool.
- Lost of new 3 letter acronyms :) EPT ( Enterprise Project Types). EPT's allow you to create as many different project types as you like ( e.g. proposal, small Projects, Enhancements, large Projects etc). I will write much more about this since this functionality gives you the ultimate flexibility.
PDP ( Project Detail Page) allow you to associate your own customised detail per EPT. I know that sounds a bit complicated but makes pure sense. :) Also more about this later - Departments. Finally you can determine custom fields on a department by department level. This means that Departments can have their individual custom field filter
- Delegation. Allows you to act as someone else in case of Holiday etc. That did cause a lot of discussion during the deep dive sessions :) but I am sure it will be very interesting for organisations.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
SP2 is comming
Microsoft just released the date for the 2007 Microsoft Office System and the 2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2. It is due to come out on the 28th April. Check out the blog for the realease on:
http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx
Accourding to the blog these are some of the changes that are comming out for:
MS Project:
http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx
Accourding to the blog these are some of the changes that are comming out for:
MS Project:
- The scheduling engine, Active Cache, and Gantt charts all have improvements.
- There is additional reliability with earlier versions of the .mpp format.
- Better memory management in the queue service.
- Performance to certain database table indexes is improved.
- Resource plans, build team, cost resources, and the server scheduling engine have improved.
Friday, March 13, 2009
A new venture
I knew that 2009 would be a great year and it has finally happened. After 6 years with SDM building their EPM business, I have decided to open my own EPM Practise and partner with a group of outstanding professionals. I am very happy to announce our new Company
i-PMO EPM Partners. (http://www.i-pmo.com.au). We are a team of currently 7 people with a presents in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide. We concentrate on the delivery and successful deployment of Microsoft's EPM solution with the technical expertise of integration work and custom development within the Microsoft EPM and SharePoint environment.
Additionally we offer various trainings including Project Server, Portfolio Server and MS Project Training. I am very excited about our new venture and know that we will be the EPM force to recon with in Australia. The entire team has many years of experience implementing EPM solutions throughout Australia. The ability to fully concentrate on delivering true value and business benefits to organisations that have a need and desire to deliver projects on time, within budget and to the full customer satisfaction will be our key to success. Lets get it started :)
i-PMO EPM Partners. (http://www.i-pmo.com.au). We are a team of currently 7 people with a presents in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide. We concentrate on the delivery and successful deployment of Microsoft's EPM solution with the technical expertise of integration work and custom development within the Microsoft EPM and SharePoint environment.
Additionally we offer various trainings including Project Server, Portfolio Server and MS Project Training. I am very excited about our new venture and know that we will be the EPM force to recon with in Australia. The entire team has many years of experience implementing EPM solutions throughout Australia. The ability to fully concentrate on delivering true value and business benefits to organisations that have a need and desire to deliver projects on time, within budget and to the full customer satisfaction will be our key to success. Lets get it started :)
Friday, January 09, 2009
Project Server and SQL 2008 Part 2
Christophe Fiessinger left an excellent comment with great blogs that he wrote on his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/.
Thanks Christophe!!. These are excellent posts regarding the SQL 2008 benefits and upgrade ( if you have the Microsoft VPC image). Have a read and enjoy: :)
to check out Reporting Services 2008 benefits for instance, check this
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2008/12/09/microsoft-sql-server-reporting-services-2008-sample-project-server-reports.aspx
to upgrade your existing PS 2007 VPC I've also posted this: http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2008/12/17/how-to-upgrade-your-existing-microsoft-project-vpc-running-on-sql-2005-to-sql-server-2008.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/.
Thanks Christophe!!. These are excellent posts regarding the SQL 2008 benefits and upgrade ( if you have the Microsoft VPC image). Have a read and enjoy: :)
to check out Reporting Services 2008 benefits for instance, check this
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2008/12/09/microsoft-sql-server-reporting-services-2008-sample-project-server-reports.aspx
to upgrade your existing PS 2007 VPC I've also posted this: http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2008/12/17/how-to-upgrade-your-existing-microsoft-project-vpc-running-on-sql-2005-to-sql-server-2008.aspx
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
New year, new challange Project Server and SQL 2008
It has been a very turbulent 2008 with many changes to the company I am working for, but now it is 2009 and I know this will be a most interesting year in every way. I started the year with a holiday with my wife and kids AND Project Server 2007 :)
Adrian, a friend and college of mine and I spent a day installing Project Server and MOSS onto a Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 image. We did get the cube working ( after a couple of hair pulling events) and we did install the new Report Builder 2.0. The Report Builder 2.0 not only has a ribbon look and feel, finally Microsoft decided to allow the word output format out of the box which is excellent. All in all the installation was strait forward. Here are a couple of tips to consider when installing Project Server and MOSS on a windows and sql 2008 environment.
WINDOWS 2008 BE AWARE things:
- When installing Project Server 2007 and / or MOSS 2007 on a Windows 2008 environment ensure that you have the PS / MOSS media INCLUDING SP1,otherwise the install will be a very short experience :) Windows 2008 doesn't like non SP1 media
SQL 2008 BE AWARE things:
- When setting up the cube within the SQL 2008 environment refer to this link:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285466.aspx
BUT there is one issue with this link. It askes you to download the backward compatibility components based on Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - February 2007 this is actually not working. You will need to use the backward compatibility components of the
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, August 2008 ( which makes kind of sense :) )
- Furthermore, if you want to use the Report builder. By default when installing SQL 2008 Reporting Service, it will install Report builder 1.0, which es the same then 2005. If you want to have the REAL NEW Report builder, you will need to download Report Builder 2.0 which can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f783224-9871-4eea-b1d5-f3140a253db6&displaylang=en
This Report Builder has great new features, a ribbon look and feel AND the ability to generate Word document "Out of the Box" YIEPPEEE.
So all report fanatics without technical skills, check out the report builder :)
Have a great start to 2009
Adrian, a friend and college of mine and I spent a day installing Project Server and MOSS onto a Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 image. We did get the cube working ( after a couple of hair pulling events) and we did install the new Report Builder 2.0. The Report Builder 2.0 not only has a ribbon look and feel, finally Microsoft decided to allow the word output format out of the box which is excellent. All in all the installation was strait forward. Here are a couple of tips to consider when installing Project Server and MOSS on a windows and sql 2008 environment.
WINDOWS 2008 BE AWARE things:
- When installing Project Server 2007 and / or MOSS 2007 on a Windows 2008 environment ensure that you have the PS / MOSS media INCLUDING SP1,otherwise the install will be a very short experience :) Windows 2008 doesn't like non SP1 media
SQL 2008 BE AWARE things:
- When setting up the cube within the SQL 2008 environment refer to this link:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285466.aspx
BUT there is one issue with this link. It askes you to download the backward compatibility components based on Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - February 2007 this is actually not working. You will need to use the backward compatibility components of the
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, August 2008 ( which makes kind of sense :) )
- Furthermore, if you want to use the Report builder. By default when installing SQL 2008 Reporting Service, it will install Report builder 1.0, which es the same then 2005. If you want to have the REAL NEW Report builder, you will need to download Report Builder 2.0 which can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f783224-9871-4eea-b1d5-f3140a253db6&displaylang=en
This Report Builder has great new features, a ribbon look and feel AND the ability to generate Word document "Out of the Box" YIEPPEEE.
So all report fanatics without technical skills, check out the report builder :)
Have a great start to 2009
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