Project Blog

Winning with process control and knowledge management in Project Online

Mark Sargeant — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:30:00 GMT

Bassier, Bergmann & Kindler (BB&K) is one of Germany’s largest digital media agencies and works with many major brands across much of Europe. Distributed clients means decentralized teams, so BB&K relies on technology for communication, collaboration, and knowledge management to achieve success of over 500 projects each year.

Until recently, BB&K used a home-grown solution to keep teams on the same page and projects delivered on time, but growth introduced complexity, and it was recently evident that a more powerful solution was needed.

BB&K teamed up with SOLVIN, a Microsoft partner certified with the PPM competency, to deploy Project Online in conjunction with SharePoint Online. The solution was up and running quickly, and saved BB&K the costs traditionally associated with deploying new server solutions.

Project Online works with Visio 2013 to implement business process model workflows without writing any code or getting bogged down with technical difficulties. Peter Müller, Senior Project Manager at BB&K, is enthusiastic about these capabilities: "By using these workflow tools, we finally had control over the entire project life cycle from design to management, without the need to invest in a specialized workflow product."

The increasingly global nature of BB&K’s work makes close coordination between geographically dispersed teams a necessity. Teams can use Lync and SharePoint integration to quickly brainstorm and finalize bids, as well as coordinate everyday work to make sure projects come in on time. Team members can access their tasks and share statuses from virtually anywhere and on almost any device with Project Online. Since it’s a cloud solution, BB&K doesn’t have to address the challenges and costs traditionally associated with providing global access to server infrastructure.

By fine-tuning internal processes and boosting collaboration, BB&K sees savings and stays competitive. "We estimate that we’ll be able to decrease project management time by at least 10 percent by using Project Online,” says Dr. Anders Lehr, Senior Project Manager at BB&K. “This will help us create more competitive bids and win more business."

BB&K benefits from better process control, real-time collaboration, and improved knowledge management which results in increased customer satisfaction, according to Dr. Lehr. "On all counts, we give Project Online a triple-A-plus."

Read the BB&K case study for a complete view of the company, the solution, and the benefits BB&K has realized with Project Online.

–Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Project

Free Project 2013 quick start training available on demand

Jan Kalis — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:54:00 GMT

Whether you are a novice user of Microsoft Project 2013 or you want to learn about IT Professional or developer topics, please consider our new quick start training for Project 2013--it's free and available on demand!

You get over 9 hours of content divided into 13 modules. Don't have much time? Don't worry, each module is broken down into individual videos so you can go at your own pace.

Modules 2 through 4 provide an overview of the new capabilities of Microsoft Project 2013 while modules 7 to 13 go deeper into IT Professional and developer topics. Please find below the detailed description of individual modules.

--Jan Kalis, Product Marketing Manager, Project and Visio

Discover apps for Project in the Office Store

Jan Kalis — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:13:00 GMT

Are you using the new Project and wishing you could enhance its powerful capabilities with apps? Project 2013 has great extensibility potential—even across devices. The new apps for Project enhance capabilities of Microsoft Project 2013 applications, including Project Pro for Office 365, Project Professional 2013, Project Online and Project Server 2013.

How do I add an app to Project Pro for Office 365 or Project Professional 2013?

Open Project. On the Ribbon, click PROJECT, then click Apps for Office.

All apps for Project associated with your account will show up. If you need to acquire new Apps from the Microsoft Office Store, click the Find more apps in the Office Store link and follow the instructions on the screen.

Start using your apps

The example below shows a project plan that has been synchronized to a project site in SharePoint or SharePoint Online and the highlighted app on the right SharkPro Insite shows data from your project site next to your document.

Here are apps you can acquire for Project Pro for Office 365 or Project Professional 2013:

How do I add an app to Project Online or Project Server 2013?

Choose the site where you want to add the app. On the Gear menu, select Add an app.

The apps you see will depend on your corporate environment and on whether you have already acquired apps from the Office Store. If you don’t see the apps you want in the list, you can add them. On the left side of the screen, click the SharePoint Store link to browse all available apps. Follow the on-screen instructions to add the apps you want.

Once the app is added to your site, launch the app by clicking on its name in the left hand navigation or see all apps that are ready to use on your site through the Site contents command on the Gear menu.

The following example shows the TPG Risk Chart that visualizes the project risks and shows them in a heat-map style chart.

More resources

Looking for Milestone Trend Analysis (MTA), Advanced Timesheeting, Portfolio Cost Management and Multi-currency? The Office Store has all that and more:

CS Milestone Trend Analysis

Publish All Enterprise Projects

2A QuickStart

SharkPro Project View for Project Web App

SOLVIN TrackTimesheet Go

TPG MTA Chart

TPG Risk Chart

UMT Essentials Lite

Are you developer and would you like to build and App like that? Check out our developer resources.

If you haven’t experienced the new Project, learn more and give them a try:

Project Pro for Office 365
Project Online
Project Server 2013

Tell us what you think

Let us know in the comments what you think of the new Project apps and how you're putting them to work for you, as well as any tips or tricks you've learned along the way.

--Jan Kalis, Product Marketing Manager, Project and Visio

Global construction manufacturer bolsters bottom line with Project Online

Mark Sargeant — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:00:00 GMT

Construction solutions firm Hilti Corporation wanted a globally available service to coordinate worldwide offices and projects. Based in Liechtenstein, Hilti Corporation has research and development centers in over 20 countries on 6 continents, providing innovative products to the construction industry since 1941.

As an established company that needs to stay agile with project coordination, Hilti Corporation chose Project Online because it delivers all the benefits of process centralization and enhanced control without the risks involved in being locked in to large home-grown IT infrastructures. With Office 365, Project Online offers the security, global availability, disaster recovery, and the ability to handle heavy workloads critical to enterprise operations at a fraction of the cost. Many businesses know the challenges and associated costs of these requirements, but with Project Online and Office 365, it's easy to scale out and scale up–and have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that data is safe.

Hilti Corporation's Head of Workplace Platform Services, Dr. Christian Buddendick, is a business leader who embraces software as a service. "Using a cloud-based solution is clearly an advantage compared to setting up a customized server environment," says Dr. Buddendick. "We don't have to worry about maintenance, upgrades, or compatibility issues. All the capabilities we need are there, and are easily customizable."

Through the Office 365 infrastructure, Project Online delivers the agility modern companies need to be competitively efficient. Many of our customers' goals include increasing control and communication in their organizations without creating excess process burden. The "just right" process mix is different for every organization, and with Project Online, business leaders have more freedom to try new things and innovate internal processes, since retooling friction is minimized.

Hilti Corporation appreciates this agility and uses it to create global efficiencies. "By using a cloud-based solution, we got the agility we were seeking," says Buddendick. "We can scale the use of Project Online from 20 people up to 10,000 users. It is easy to use and satisfies nearly 100 percent of our business needs."

Read the Hilti Corporation case study for a complete view of the company, the solution, and the benefits Hilti Corporation has realized with Project Online.

Project Online and Excel Web App: Cloud data improves reporting

Mark Sargeant — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Mike McLean is a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft Project team.

Along with the general availability of Project Online in Office 365, new scenarios have been enabled for Project Online reporting.

We introduced the Project Online OData feed to help you access your data using Excel 2013. During Public Preview, you may have noticed that any attempt to refresh the Excel workbooks in Office 365 generated errors. Now you can refresh Excel workbooks in Excel Web App that consume Project Online OData feeds.

When Excel workbooks are refreshed in Office 365, the BI Azure Service retrieves updated data from Project Online and recalculates the internal workbook model. If the workbook has data connections pointing to Project Online OData feeds, the BI Azure Service must have permission to the SharePoint Online tenant to retrieve that data.

These instructions document how to grant the BI Azure Service access to your SharePoint Online tenant.

Log on to Project Online.
Add the following to the end of your Project Web App URL: /_layouts/15/appinv.aspx

For example, if your Project Web App URL is http://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa, type this URL in the address bar of your browser: http://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa/_layouts/15/appinv.aspx
In the App ID field, copy and paste 00000009-0000-0000-c000-000000000000, and then click Lookup. (Note: In the string of digits in Step 3, there are 7 zeroes before the 9, and the last set of zeros is 12 zeroes in a row.)
In the Permission Request XML field, copy and paste the following XML:

<AppPermissionRequests>

  <AppPermissionRequest

    Scope = "http://sharepoint/projectserver/reporting" Right="Read">

  </AppPermissionRequest>
  <AppPermissionRequest
    Scope = "http://sharepoint/content/tenant" Right="FullControl">
  </AppPermissionRequest>
</AppPermissionRequests>
Click Create.
On the last page, click Trust It to trust Microsoft.Azure.AnalysisServices. (Note: This step will grant the BI Azure service access to retrieve data from the SharePoint Online tenant. When performing the refresh in Excel Web App, the BI Azure Service will use the Project Online OData connections located in the Excel workbook. BI Azure will attempt to retrieve data from Project Online using the credentials of the user who is performing the refresh on the workbook.)

The next page that displays is PWA Site Settings. You can navigate back to PWA by clicking Project Web App.

If you'd like to verify the BI Azure Service has been granted permission to your SharePoint tenant, navigate to Tenant Admin and take a look at the app permissions.

Click Admin, then click SharePoint.
In the Tenant Admin, click apps.
Click App Permissions.
Verify that Microsoft.Azure.AnalysisServices is in the list.

Now you can open your Excel workbooks and refresh them in Excel Web App.

Select the workbook in a SharePoint Document Library. It will display in Excel Web App.
Click Data > Refresh All Connections.
The data in the workbook will refresh.

There are three sample OData reports available for Project Online: Project Overview, Resource Overview, and Project Overview Dashboard. For these to refresh in Excel Web App, you must first perform one refresh in Excel 2013 client and save the report. This will update the internal model of the workbook so it is supported by Excel Web App.

The refresh described in this blog post is in Preview mode as we're gathering feedback on use cases for Project Online customers. Feel free to try it out and refresh your Project Online workbooks.

For more information, you can check out our official online help; see Grant reporting access in Project Online!

–Mike McLean, Senior Program Manager

Project for IT pros

Mark Sargeant — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:01:00 GMT

We love Project IT Pros. Always in the trenches and getting their hands dirty with the latest technologies and improvements, IT Pros are the engine that keeps many project management offices running. With the release of the new Project, now there are new and improved ways for IT Pros to keep bolting infrastructure into place and tweaking performance levers to deliver high-quality capabilities to their organizations.

To help, we rounded up some of our most popular articles and organized them by common work responsibilities. Here, the focus is on IT Pros, with topics including OData integration, timesheet infrastructure improvements, and great new ways to use SharePoint Designer to deliver ever-better Demand Management solutions. IT Pros, we salute you!

New ways to kick Project into overdrive

OData. Project has something for everyone, and plenty for IT Pros. One thing we think is especially useful is the OData server reporting service we've built to retrieve data stored in your instance of PWA or Project Online.

Timesheet improvements. Project 2013 boasts a number of timesheet improvements for administrators and developers which add power to your ability to run projects and get data out of Project Online.

Demand Management. Initial proposals and project ideas are generally referred to as demands, and Demand Management is the process for collecting these demands. It's a complicated process, but it got a lot easier when we announced Demand Management with SharePoint Designer. Typical demand management phases are create, select, plan, and manage. The planning and management phases are accomplished by the more familiar project management processes by using Project Professional and Project Web App.

Tell us what you think

Let us know in the comments what you think of the new Project and how you're putting it to work for you, as well as any tips or tricks you've learned along the way. And don't forget to follow our Project for IT Pros blog feed!

--Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager

Project for team members

Mark Sargeant — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Project managers can do their best work when life is easy for their team members. With the release of the new Project, now there are new and improved ways for team members to do their part in keeping the project on track with minimal process friction. To help, we rounded up some of our most popular articles and organized them by common work responsibilities. Here, the focus is on team members, with topics including consolidated task management, quick collaboration, and streamlined time tracking--which should put a smile on everyone's face.

Tools to simplify your life

All your tasks in one place. On average, people work on 5 to 7 projects at a time. Rather than drilling into individual projects or SharePoint sites to see your assignments, now there's a new feature called My Tasks under the Newsfeed Hub to help you get a handle on what's around the bend.

Browser Compatibility. We listen to lots of customer feedback, and one top request was to make sure Project Online works in a wide range of web browsers. So that our users can access Project Online from anywhere, we expanded our browser support in Project to match the same set of browsers and devices that SharePoint supports.

Instant collaboration with Lync integration. Project Professional and Project Online now allow you to instant message, make voice and video calls, or send email with one click using Lync in the most common project views. This makes getting quick answers from other team members easier than ever.

Improvements to timesheets. We realize that one of the most tedious, and yet common, tasks that many users have to complete using Project Online is filling out a time card. To help ease the pain and make it faster for you to get back to your actual work, we've made some changes to streamline timesheets. .

Exchange integration. If you live in Outlook, it's good to have your assignments and tasks in Exchange so you can see and edit them in your favorite Exchange client--Outlook, Outlook Web App, or your mobile phone--even when you are offline.

Tell us what you think

--Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager

Project for project managers

Mark Sargeant — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:37:00 GMT

With the release of the new Project, there's curiosity about how best to put it to work and apply its wide range of resources in a variety of business roles. Some people are experienced users who want to learn new tricks, while others are just discovering Project's capabilities for the first time. To help, we rounded up some of our most popular articles and organized them by common work responsibilities. Here, the focus is project managers with topics including great new and updated features like reports, timelines and task paths, fresh templates in Project 2013, and even some deeper technical discussions.

A few features we think you'll love

It's been 28 years since the first version of Microsoft Project, and in that time, our tools for project managers have evolved to meet the needs of the constantly changing demands of their role.

Task path highilighting. Project managers' lives get a lot easier, because task path highlighting allows you to select any task and see the complete chain of predecessors and successors that are linked to it. Beyond that, the highlighting also differentiates between predecessors that are driving the scheduling of the selected task, and predecessors that are linked but can freely move without affecting the selected task.

Project plus SharePoint Task Lists. It's easy to put your task lists in the cloud with SharePoint. The SharePoint site and its tasks lists are where team members can view and edit the progress of their tasks, and Project Professional is where project managers can manage the progress of their projects. SharePoint tasks list sync empowers you to use the great functionalities of both Project and SharePoint tasks lists at the same time.

New and improved timelines in the cloud. With task lists in the cloud, it only makes sense that we would put timelines in the cloud too. Now, it's easier than ever to communicate a high-level view of your project to team members, stay focused on your upcoming personal tasks, and provide insight into all of your organization's work.

Reports. Whenever we talk to project managers, we hear one word over and over: reports. We hear how you're always preparing reports for status presentations or emails to customers, management, stakeholders, and team members, as well as how you have to make quick decisions and need reports to help you do this. All of that feedback inspired us to build a new reporting feature in the new version of Project.

New online templates. For the new Project, we've added some helpful online templates so you get started quickly, and we've even updated the template process.

New and improved schedule web part. Web-based scheduling with the new and improved schedule web part provides both the occasional and the certified project manager with the flexibility to quickly build simple and complex schedules online, and conveniently edit the plan via the browser from anywhere in the world.

Demand management. Learn how to use Project and SharePoint for demand management, empowering your team to submit new project proposals without getting overwhelmed with a deluge of information.

Tell us what you think

--Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager

Get organized fast: Saved by Project Pro for Office 365

Mark Sargeant — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Imagine that it's 2:00pm on Friday afternoon and you're leaving a planning meeting for the big springtime marketing blitz upon which your company, Coho Winery, is resting its hopes of international expansion. Just moments ago, the team was haphazardly scrolling through a long task list spreadsheet when your boss slammed her fist on the table and declared that you would have a first-class project management solution in place by Monday morning.

Yikes! That's a big job.

Since this project is so important, it's critical that the solution be robust and secure, while delivering as much efficiency gain as possible so the team can get more work done and you don't get buried keeping track of everything. But at the same time, there's not a huge budget for IT overhead and time is of the essence.

You decide to go with Microsoft's Project Pro for Office 365 subscription combined with SharePoint Online and Lync Online, so that Coho's teams can easily communicate in real time and collaborate through shared team sites. With the subscriptions, you pay as you go, never have to worry about setting up IT systems, and can stream the rich Project desktop client to make your work quick and easy.

A quick visit to the Project website confirms your intuition that Project Pro for Office 365 is the right solution for Coho. You click the link to sign up, and a few moments later the account is set up and ready to go.

"Wow," you exhale, "That was easy!"

Soon, you'll find out that the rest of the process for getting Coho's project management up and running is just as easy as it was to subscribe to the service. There's a convenient two-step process to configure your organization.

With options to import users with a bulk spreadsheet upload, it's really starting to look like you might get out of the office before 5:00pm.

A convenient spreadsheet template shows you where to fill in the blanks for your team.

...and upload it into SharePoint to have accounts created automagically.

A quick check confirms that everyone on your team got imported correctly.

You breeze through the next few steps in about two minutes, simply taking note of the passwords generated for each account and selecting the appropriate licenses and permissions for each person. Now it's time to put together the project plan so painstakingly hammered out in the meeting you left just half an hour ago.

Being a rock star project manager, you know that the first step is to stream an installation of the Project desktop client. This is simple with Project Pro for Office 365--just click the Download link from your Office 365 admin page and watch those bits fly!

Seconds after clicking Run on the Internet Explorer download prompt, the Project desktop client is streaming to your PC and you're ready to really start earning your paycheck. But wait! You're pleasantly surprised to see the great templates built right into the startup screen... and there's even one for a marketing campaign plan!

You fire up the template, customize a few tasks to reflect the team's agreed-upon project plan, and start filling in resource assignments.

It takes a half hour or so of applying your tradecraft until you feel good about the v1 project plan and decide to sync it to the SharePoint Team Site. This is as easy as hitting the Save As button and pasting in the web address from your browser.

Project's integration with the Office 365 account service keeps your site secure from any unauthorized publishing to your site--and keeps you safe from accidentally syncing with the wrong site!

You hit refresh on the Coho Winery SharePoint Team Site to see your work alive in the cloud, and can't help but smile as the page loads with a robust cloud-based project plan ready for broad collaboration, work management, and access from virtually anywhere. Beautiful.

The clock on your office wall ticks 5:00pm as you triumphantly hit send on an email assuring your boss not to worry--you've got everything under control.

Project available as 3 flexible cloud services through Office 365

Mark Sargeant — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:00:00 GMT

We're proud to announce the availability of Microsoft Project as a flexible cloud service, delivered by Office 365. For the first time, customers can sign up for flexible plans, get started quickly and use the full capabilities of project and portfolio management without adding IT complexity.

There are 3 Project cloud services to choose from:

Project Online

Project Online is a flexible online solution for project portfolio management (PPM) and everyday work. With a convenient subscription and delivery through Office 365, Project Online enables organizations to get started, prioritize project portfolio investments and deliver the intended business value—from virtually anywhere on nearly any device.

Project Pro for Office 365

Project Pro for Office 365 delivers the latest version of Project Professional as a subscription through Office 365. Your software is automatically kept up to date (with options for customizable policies) and users on the go can work from the computer of their choice by streaming the complete desktop client with Project on Demand. Keep deployments simple, benefit from flexible options, and enjoy integration with other Office 365 services like Lync and SharePoint.

Project Online with Project Pro for Office 365

Project Online with Project Pro for Office 365 is an all-in-one subscription which delivers the full spectrum of project management capabilities – from task management for teams to project management to project portfolio planning. Now you can have the best of our suite of project management solutions in a single cloud service, without IT overhead and the ability to easily scale from just a few users to your entire organization.

Now that you can get Project virtually anywhere, through Office 365 cloud services, team members can manage their tasks as easily as pressing a check box on their smartphone browser and managers can check reports on the go with just a swipe on their wirelessly connected tablet device.

Collaboration is smooth and effective with Project Team Sites on SharePoint, where colleagues can share documents, comment in newsfeeds, and keep up to date on team tasks and deliverables with the Team Timeline. Real-time communication comes via Lync integration, making it simple to see a team member's status, open a chat dialog, or even initiate a phone call or video conference. Reports are more clean, clear, and easy to create right out of the box than ever before.

Ease your IT management headaches with Project delivered through Office 365. Microsoft offers excellent security, guaranteed uptime, and additional benefits so that businesses can gain efficiency and scale without losing focus on core competencies.

We invite you to visit our new website to learn more about Project, and hope that you’ll contact your nearest Project partner to make arrangements for a live demonstration. It’s our pleasure to share our new products with you and we look forward to maintaining innovative and robust services to meet your project management and project portfolio management needs.

--Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager