Do More Than Manage http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/ Gord Schmidt's Ideas for Doing More with Microsoft Project Server en-us Copyright 2004-2008 Gord Schmidt gord.schmidt@gmail.com gord.schmidt@gmail.com Do More Than Manage http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/Images/Milestone.GIF http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/ 13 13 Gord Schmidt's Ideas for Doing More with Microsoft Project Server Resolving circular references in MS Project http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2008/05/29/Resolvingcircularreferenc.html A customer presented me with a project plan with thousands of tasks. Somewhere within that large list of tasks lurked one or more circular relationships and the error message did not help. The task to which the error message was pointing was not, as far as I could tell, part of the circular relationship.

No calculations can be performed now. There is a circular relationship in task ***. The successors of this task refer back to this task or its predecessors, causing a circular reference. To remove the link that is causing the circular reference, select the two tasks that are causing the circular link, and then click Unlink Tasks on the Standard toolbar.

I started scanning the project but there were so many defined dependencies I quickly gave up on that approach.

Instead I added the Predecessor column and an unused custom text column to the Gantt view and bulk copied the contents of the Predecessor column into Text20. Next I removed all of the predecessors with one massive delete resulting in something like the following:

Predecessors and Text20

Next I copied the contents of Text20 back into the Predecessors column and was presented with a series of error message that clearly identified the dependencies that were causing the problems.

A pasting error occurred on ID 1025 in the Predecessors column. If you want to link the two tasks, outdent the subtask to a summary task, and then link them. To cancel this paste operation, click Cancel. To continue pasting with additional error messages and ignore this error, click Yes. To continue pasting with no error messages in this column, click No.

Whew! That was a boring afternoon avoided.

]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Thursday, May 01, 2008 ...in Bed http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2008/04/23/...InBed.html 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). 

]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Coming Up Next: a 64-Bit World http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2008/03/06/ComingUpNexta64-BitWorld.html 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.

]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Thursday, March 06, 2008 #ERROR for Project Custom Field Formula http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2008/02/19/ERRORforProjectCustomFiel.html 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.

]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Microsoft Project Conference 2007 Presentations http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2008/01/07/MicrosoftProjectConferenc.html 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)
]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Monday, January 07, 2008 The Placeholder http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2007/12/06/ThePlaceholder.html SP1 placeholder has appeared in the Office Download section of the Microsoft website. ]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Thursday, December 06, 2007 SP1 before Christmas -- Now there's a good present http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2007/11/29/SP1beforeChristmas--Nowth.html Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Thursday, November 29, 2007 Who Picked The Dates? http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2007/05/30/WhoPickedTheDates.html Microsoft Office Project Conference? Obviously not someone with kids. ]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Wednesday, May 30, 2007 PWA 2007 ActiveX Controls http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2007/04/01/PWA2007ActiveXControls.html 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\

]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Sunday, April 01, 2007 Resources Checking Into the Hotel California http://www.DoMoreThanManage.com/articles/2007/03/22/ResourcesCheckingIntotheH.html 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).
]]> Gord Schmidt ©2005 Gord Schmidt Thursday, March 22, 2007