Back to Blogging, on WordPress Not SharePoint

OK, this blog has been pretty quiet of late and at some point a while back I did think about running a separate blog for SharePoint-related stuff, having acquired a hosted SharePoint site courtesy of FPWeb.net.  Well, having spent more time understanding how best to manage a public-facing SharePoint blog, I’ve taken the decision to stick with the WordPress one you’re reading right now for everything.   There are several reasons for this:

1. If you are allowing anonymous comments on your SharePoint blog, it’s much more difficult to manage these than it is in WordPress, so you need to try fiddling around with the comments list columns and probably want to add something extra to weed out spam bots.  It’s also not ideal if you want to capture simple non-intrusive information about who is commenting.  You can see lots of examples of this among SharePoint bloggers (take a look for instance at the comments entry form for any of the posts on the current SharePoint Product Group blog).
2. The Akismet spam filter that WordPress provide does a pretty good job of catching spammers without any intervention from me.
3. I noticed that even FPWeb bloggers host their blogs on WordPress rather than using SharePoint !

One thing that I (and several other WordPress bloggers) have noticed recently is the appearance of automatically generated links which click through via viglink.com.   From what I can see, these are being generated by WordPress themselves as a way of tracking (and somehow monetising?) popular links, but would be interested to hear if anyone knows more about this.

I’m also keen to have a change from the current WordPress theme (Contempt at the moment), so if anyone has a suggestion for a replacement which looks good with the WorkerThread colour scheme let me know.

So – I have some new posts in progress and these will be appearing here shortly…

SharePoint 2010 Project Tasks – Summary Tasks

Christophe from PathToSharePoint commented on my previous post, asking “how does SP deal with MS Project summary tasks?”.  I thought I would show what it does here, as it’s quite interesting and illustrates another new feature of the SharePoint 2010 Project Tasks list – the Summary Task content type.

Users of Microsoft Project will be aware that you can easily create summary tasks to act as a container which groups sub-tasks together.  On the Project 2010 ribbon you will see “indent” and “outdent” options – the picture below shows “Indent Task” which will indent selected tasks and make them subtasks of the nearest preceding task at a higher level:

You can see this in action in the sample project below, where the three tasks concerned with mobile development have been indented and made subtasks of Phase 2. 

So, what happens when we sync this with our SharePoint 2010 Project Tasks –

As you can see, I have a new Summary task item for Phase 2, and if  click on the hyperlink to drill down further, I get to see the subtasks:

This is all made possible because a SharePoint 2010 Project Task list actually includes a second “summary task” content type:

Which is actually a folder with appropriate project task metadata – and Project 2010 uses this when synchronising.  Here is list view of the same project task list, which shows the Phase 2 folder more clearly:

So there you go Christophe – and thanks for all your efforts on PathToSharePoint!

Technorati tags: Microsoft Project, SharePoint 2010, sp2010

SharePoint 2010 Project Tasks Part 2 – Synchronise with Microsoft Project 2010

(A quick update on my posts on SharePoint 2010 and Project tasks: as far as I am aware the SharePoint synchronisation feature is only available on Project Professional 2010, NOT Project Standard).

In my previous post I wrote about the Project Task List in SharePoint 2010.   Using it in conjunction with Microsoft Project 2010 makes it even more useful.  For example, you can use the nice Project 2010 features to create a project, add resources, set predecessors etc (all standard Microsoft Project stuff), then use a new feature you can find under the “Save and Send” option on the File menu:

From here you can either sync with an existing SharePoint task list, or create a new task list in the site you specify.  It’s also possible to start from a SharePoint Task list and create your project from there, using this option on the “New” menu:

The synchronisation process will also assign resources, as long as these already exist in your SharePoint user list and in the same format.  It’s important to note that the data in your SharePoint Task List is Manually scheduled.  In Microsoft Project 2010 you will see two scheduling options on the ribbon:

Auto Schedule:

And Manually Schedule:

Now, it’s quite likely that if you start by creating your project with Project 2010, everything will be Auto-Scheduled, because that means that when durations or actual completion dates change, other dependent items in the project will be re-scheduled.  If you are auto-scheduling, then when you sync with the SharePoint list, you will see this message:

which is telling you that everything will be switched to manual scheduling when sync’d.  So after a sync you will need to re-set auto-scheduling to see the impact of any updated tasks (by the way, if there are any synchronisation conflicts you will see a conflict resolution dialog where you can decide whether you keep the SharePoint version or the Project 2010 version).

Project 2010 also provides a “Manage Fields” option:

where we can add other Microsoft Project fields to our SharePoint list like this:

And once added you will see them as new columns in the SharePoint list:

This is ideal if you want to use other features in SharePoint to provide current project status information, perhaps on a dashboard where you might use SharePoint charts or KPIs.  Once you are syncing between Project and SharePoint you might also want to place other restrictions on the SharePoint list for standard users – perhaps only allow data in specific columns to be amended, or make sure only project owners or administrators can add or delete tasks.   The new InfoPath 2010 SharePoint list form capabilities might come in handy here.

In summary, if you are planning to use SharePoint 2010 Project Task lists, then getting a copy of Project 2010 for your project owners or managers is likely to be a good investment.  It will allow you to publish and maintain project tasks to your assigned resources, who can easily update status and completion dates from the SharePoint site without the need to provide Project 2010 licences for everyone else involved.

I’ve also started looking at the new Silverlight SharePoint Gantt Chart from IntelliGantt and how it might work in this scenario.  I’ll post more about this once I’ve tried it out on some sample project sites.