Random Musings: MS Project and SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 is months away from being “old news”, but the amazing thing about the update from MOSS 2007 –> SharePoint 2010 is that it was so packed with updates, we can still blog about cool features.

Today, I’ll discuss the Project Task list and it’s integration with Project Professional.

For anyone that has ever needed to run a project in the Microsoft ecosystem, I’m pretty sure you cracked open Project Professional and built a plan.  For those that have been Project Managers you’ve probably worked with Project Professional in conjunction with Project Server, which is a slightly bigger kettle of fish.

Project Professional is a great product, it’s to a project manager what MS Word is to a document writer.  It is so packed with features, that stand alone, it can fulfil many features needed to run projects in an organisation.

There are however times, when the sharing of the plan becomes a requirement and this is when Project Professional starts to hit some limitations.  Similar to Visio, if you wish to share a plan / drawing, you need to convert it to PDF and mail it to your colleagues.  This approach, is time consuming, static and creates unnecessary data duplication.

Enter the Project Task list for SharePoint.

The Project Task list in essence allows the SharePoint administrator to create tasks that are dependant on one another.  These tasks are then shown in a Gantt chart view which gives resources a lovely snapshot of how their particular tasks effects the rest of the project.

The list works wonderfully on it’s own, but for those that have access to Project Professional the combination really takes it to another level.

The following screenshots illustrates how easy it is to synch a Project Plan to SharePoint via Project Professional:

1 – Once the plan is created, click on File –> Save & Send –> Synch with Tasks List

2 – Enter your SharePoint site URL, click on Validate, select the appropriate list and click on “Sync”:

3 – The tasks will begin to sync:

4 – After the successful sync, the tasks are available in the SharePoint list:

Staff will now be able to view the entire project plan without the need for a Project Professional license.  The project manager will also not have the requirement to save the plan to PDF in order to share it.

Some caveats do exists, so just beware of some of the following “gotchas”:

- When adding resources, you have to use the exact resource names of the AD Accounts for users.  Using generic resource names e.g. Consultant, Infrastructure Specialist et al is therefore not supported;

- The project plan can only support manual scheduling

- Only finish-start predecessors without constraints / lag times;

- Ensure there are no special characters in task names

- To view the expanded Gantt view you have to click on the folders which is a little cumbersome

In closing, I think the Project Tasks list is a great tool for the company that needs to manage basic projects.  When you require slightly better resource and task management, the combination of Project Professional and the Project Tasks list works very well.  Lastly, when things get very serious, Project Server becomes the necessary evil.

Project Governance

As I was driving to work this morning, I started thinking about some of the projects I had worked on the last couple of years.  Some brilliant, some not so much, others mentally challenging and a couple just very basic.  One thing that hit me, was how different the project delivery industry (e.g. IT) is to other industries.

I guess that is a fairly generic statement, but what got me thinking is how the IT industry seems to have a lot of grey area.  Although consultants work on an hourly rate (for time and material projects) I still find that there are many clients that expect a lot of “free” work to be completed. 

Baffling, I know.

I guess it has something to do with the fact that you can’t “touch” an IT solution.  Sure you can touch software, but if you take a product and build a solution on top of it, how do you quantify what was delivered and how does EXCO determine that it has been completed.

This is the key question and leads into a biggy and something I’m very passionate about;

Project Governance

Clients will be clients, staff will be staff, but without proper project governance, your project is doomed to fail.  In the project kick off meeting, everyone is buddy buddy and life is good, but the minute the vendor misses a deadline or an expectation is not met, hold on to your seat pockets, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Project Governance is something that most companies adhere to in some shape way or form.  Microsoft have also developed their “Sure Step” methodology to help vendors through the delivery process.  Over and above that, you obviously have various other delivery methodologies that range between agile and waterfall plus everything in between.

Project Governance (yes this is a very broad term) is almost pointless when things go well, but essential when things start going a little south.  It ensures that the client & vendor are able to have an objective discussion void of emotion by simply looking at the facts.

Good Project Governance

“Mr Customer, as per minutes dated 01/01/1900, we committed to doing XYZ.  XYZ has now been changed, therefore we need to raise a change request which will effect the time frame and cost of the project.

Bad Project Governance

“Hi Pietie, I told you in our last meeting that you weren’t going to get those fancy drop downs.  Now you’ve asked for them, that’s going to cost you a little bit extra mate.”

As noted above, project governance is a broad broad topic, but in summary, have a look at the examples above and ask yourself –

“Which conversation do I want to have with my customer?”

SPSecurityTrimmedControl and Full Control Permissions

In doing some recent updates to the Vinewave Staff Directory Web Part, I needed to hide a link called ‘Manage people’, which directed users to SharePoint’s built-in User Information List (the Staff Directory reads from this list).

I had to hide this link for users that did not have Full Control permissions on the site, because they were getting an access denied error when clicking on the link; the User Information list is only available to administrators.

SPSecurityTrimmedControl was the man for the job, but I couldn’t figure out what setting to use for the PermissionsString property to get it to only show content for users with Full Control permissions.

After some clever investigation on my part Googling, I eventually figured out that the property to use for this is ’FullMask’.

So, the following snippet shows how to display content only to users with Full Control permissions on the site:

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="FullMask">
    Content goes here…
</Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>