...in Bed

I do not remember who taught me how to improve fortune cookies, but whoever it was has provided additional amusement in my life many times. Fortune cookie messages can be funny if they happen to have a timely message, but usually they are rather generic and banal. To improve your fortune, add the phrase "in bed" to the end of the message.

Today my fortune read:

You are going to have a very comfortable old age (in bed). 

Coming Up Next: a 64-Bit World

If you have applied Service Pack 1 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and have read the associated documentation, you will have already seen this:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 are the last SharePoint Products and Technologies versions able to run on 32-bit hardware and operating systems.

So if you want your Project Server hardware to last long enough to support the next version, make sure it is 64-bit.

#ERROR for Project Custom Field Formula

A co-worker was having a problem with Project Server 2007 where any formula put into a project-level custom field would come back with #ERROR. It did not matter whether the formula was a calculation or just a reference to another field the result was #ERROR in Project Professional. (It would show up blank in the PWA Project Center.)

Task and resource level custom fields with formulas continued to work properly.

There were no errors in the ULS logs, SQL logs, or Event log.

We flipped emails back and forth to attempt to address the problem:

• Checked Project's calculation mode -- it was automatic
• Closed and reopened Project
• Cleared local cache (in case of corruption)
• Created a simple formula (=1) -- it still failed

Eventually we struck gold when we checked other formulas for problems or corruption. There was an old custom field with a formula that referenced another custom field that had been deleted. It was failing and all of the formulas calculating after it were failing too.

Once we removed the problem formula and did a recalc, all the results from formulas showed up correctly.

Microsoft Project Conference 2007 Presentations

You can find the presentations from the Microsoft Office Project Conference 2007 (European version) at:
http://www.ineventmedia.com/msprojectfinalupload/

Now these are just the slides and a lot of Good Stuff was either spoken, asked/answered or part of a demo. Based on just the slides, I will highlight the following:

• BP301 Managing Security in the EPM Solution by Phil Smail
• SA209 Project Server Disaster Recovery by Steven Haden and Christophe Fiessinger
• SA200 Chalk Talk: Project 2007 Common Questions and Answers by Adrian Jenkins
• SA201 Administration of an EPM solution by Adrian Jenkins (Brian Smith delivered this in Seattle)

The Placeholder

The SP1 placeholder has appeared in the Office Download section of the Microsoft website.

SP1 before Christmas -- Now there's a good present

It looks like the release date for SP1 for Office 2007 (which includes Project and Project Server) will be Tuesday, December 11, 2007.

Who Picked The Dates?

Who the %&#^@* picked October 28-31 to be the dates for the next North American Microsoft Office Project Conference? Obviously not someone with kids.

PWA 2007 ActiveX Controls

If you want to distribute the Project Web Access 2007 ActiveX controls to your user base, you can find the installation files on the server under:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Layouts\PWA\Objects\

Resources Checking Into the Hotel California

Recently I came across an installation of Project Server 2007 where the security groups were being populated with users by synchronizing with Active Directory but after each synchronization a few of the resources would appear to be checked out. These resources were checked in before the synchronization was run, so it appears to be a bug in the synchronization code. Oddly, which resources ended up being checked out was not consistent.

The workaround seemed fairly obvious - merely sign on as an Administrator and Force Check In the impacted resources - but the list of resources available to Check In was empty.

A call to Microsoft support led to the following workaround to get the resources checked in. WARNING: This involves direct modifications to the data in SQL Server. Continue at your own risk.

1. In the ProjectServer_Published database, open the table Msp_Resources.
2. Find the users that appear to be checked out, but do not appear in the Force Check In list.
3. For each of those records, confirm that the "Res_CheckOutBy" field value is "{00000-00000-00000-0000}"
4. For each of those records, change the value of the "Res_CheckOutBy" field to Null by holding the Control key and pressing 0 (zero).

Email Notification Issue

One thing to check when email reminders and notifications do not work from a Microsoft Project Server installation is whether the email server allows the relaying of messages from the Project Server box.

Usually this just means asking the Exchange administrator to allow messages from the Project Server machine.

For more information about relaying in Exchange, read "Controlling SMTP Relaying with Microsoft Exchange".