Project Solution Accelerator

Microsoft’s Solution Accelerator for Project <Frothy coffee> One of the major announcements at Ignite was a solution Accelerator for the new Project, aka, Project for the Web (P4W). The accelerator is being developed by Microsoft and will include items such as project requests, issues, risks, programmes, and will create some additional functionality for P4W to bring […]
A whole host of Power BI content – Power BI Lunch and Learn and the Manchester Power BI user group

Power BI Lunch and Learn and the Manchester Power BI User Group <Frothy coffee> Over the last four years I’ve spent a lot of time working in both Power BI and using the similar tools in Excel (for those of you who didn’t know Power BI was “born” in Excel, or at least as an […]
Planner Tasks Power BI Template on GitHub

Planner Template on GitHub <Ice Cream> Microsoft are retiring content on TechNet, and so I’ve taken this opportunity to slightly modify the Planner Power BI template, and move it over to GitHub. At the same time I recorded a video of how to use the template file – I didn’t cover the whole of template […]
Updated Planner Tasks Power BI Template

Planner Priority field #2 <Tea> It’s great when Microsoft copy one of your ideas 🙂 Back in Sept 2019 I updated my Planner Template to include the Priority field. Microsoft have now included the Priority field in their own charts as blogged here by the product team. Here’s the Priority visual spotlighted in my Power […]
Planner Tasks now have a Priority field

Planner Priority field <Tea> This is just a quick blog post to say that Planner now includes a priority field for each task. The priority can be Urgent, Important, Medium (default) or Low. Setting of the priority is easy, but what’s really nice is the ability to filter and group by priority as displayed in […]
PowerBI Template for Exported Planner Plans

Power BI Template for Planner Plans <Update 10th September 2019> The Power BI template now supports the Priority field, and an additional two tabs have been created, one to display the tasks by priority, and another with a buttons to switch easily between the status or priority views. As well as links to the template […]
Updated PowerBI Template for Project Online

Updated Power BI Content Pack – drill through and buttons! <coffee> Power BI has definitely become my favourite application (after Project of course) in the Microsoft suite simply because of its power and versatility. In the past I’ve taken Microsoft’s standard content pack (available here) and modified it to expand the number of languages […]
Project Online Content Pack Multiple Language Support – now with Polish language

<G&T> Modifying Microsoft’s #ProjectOnline #PowerBI Content Pack to Support Your Language – Polish, Russian and now Polish. <180822 – Update> A quick note of thanks to Bartek from Poland for his Polish contribution – the download is still available from here. <\180222 – Update> This article shows you how to modify Microsoft’s standard Project […]
Project Online Content Pack Multiple Language Support

<Flat white> Modifying Microsoft’s #ProjectOnline #PowerBI Content Pack to Support Your Language This article shows you how to modify Microsoft’s standard Project Online Content Pack to support additional languages. Content Pack Overview If you are using Project Online (PJO) then you are probably using the OData feed for reporting purposes, the two most common options […]
Project Online Work and Capacity graphs in Power BI
<Tetley Tea> Project Online Work and Capacity Graphs in Power BI – solution starter A lot of my work now revolves around producing Power BI reports using the Project Online oData feed (you can find my reporting pack for Project Online here) , and of course one of the main goals is to produce great […]
Resource work and capacity graphs in MS Project
<flat white> Creating Resource Work and Capacity Graphs in #MSProject A customer posed the challenge earlier this week of producing a work and capacity report using the Reports feature in MS Project. Using the existing Resource Overview Report I was happy with getting the total work per resource from the project, as this is already […]
#ESC2017 – Take Project Online from 0-60 in 1 Hour
<tea> European SharePoint Conference 2017 At the back end of last year I was honoured to be able to speak at the ESC2017, the second time I’ve spoken at the ESC. The title this year was taking Project Online from 0-60 in one hour… so what does that mean. In a nutshell what I was […]
#Project Online #Power BI Content Pack with Currency parameter
<coffee> Microsoft have very recently released their latest content pack for Project Online and details can be found on the Project Support Blog and the Tech Community Blog. Whilst the new content pack is a big improvement on the previous one, it still requires some work if you are NOT working in English or US […]
#Agile in #MSProject #Scrum #Kanban
<tea> Microsoft Project has long been considered as a tool that can only be used with structured , rigid tasks. Typically this type of project is known as a Waterfall project (despite various blogs showing you how you can use Project to manage an “agile plan”, for example the MPUG publish one here). I’m […]
Link to Planner from MS Project #MSProject #ProjectOnline #MSPlanner
<tea> There has been some speculation that Microsoft might provide a link between MS Project and Microsoft Planner for quite some time, and now it seems that they’ve done it. From the Task tab, you should be able to see the Link to Planner button (highlighted below). You can only link a single task to […]
RAG Status and PowerBI Reporting – #PowerBI #ProjectOnline #O365
<tea> I’ve been a massive massive fan of PowerBI for some time now, and an even bigger fan of Power Query; so much so that here’s a shameless plug for a Power Query course I wrote year ago here. Moving forward it’s fair to say that every Project Online/Server implementation I now do has some […]
Speaking at the European SharePoint Conference 2017 #ESPC17
<coffee> Take Project Online from 0-60 in 1 Hour I’m delighted to say I’ve been selected to speak once again at the European SharePoint Conference which is being held in Dublin during 14-16th November 2017. The session overview is below Take Project Online from 0-60 in 1 Hour Getting started with Project Online sometimes […]
Kyiv Presentations #ProjectOnline #Project
<mineral water> I was lucky enough to be invited back to Kyiv by fellow MVP Oleksiy Prsonitskiy to present at the Ukrainian Project Conference. If you’ve never been to Kyiv, it’s worth the effort with some great sights and great food. https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/4032153?fullName=Oleksiy%20%20Prosnitskiy http://www.project-conference.com.ua/ I presented on two topics, Microsoft Planner and Reporting in Project Online. […]
Hiding Unwanted EPTs in #ProjectOnline & #ProjectServer
<tea> Some of the clients I work with are really big, and some are really small. The smaller ones tend to want things that are really simple and I wanted a quick way to ensure that they can only select a single EPT in order to create projects (who really uses SharePoint Task List projects […]
Gantt Charts in Power BI part II #ProjectOnline #PowerBI #GanttChart
It came to my attention recently that my previous post on Gantt Charts in Power BI needed slight modification in order to display the correct length of the Gantt bar. In the post I used the ProjectDuration to display the duration on the Gantt bar, however this is held in “working hours” and not […]
Editing Enterprise Calendars #ProjectOnline #ProjectClient #MicrosoftProject
<Coffee> Introduction Over the months and years I’ve seen a tonne of issues regarding the ability, or inability to edit Enterprise Calendars. I started a blog about this a while ago https://applepark.co.uk/issues-with-multiple-project-server-accounts/ which provides some troubleshooting issues. This blog is an update to that and I’ll try and keep it updated as I find out […]
Gantt Charts in Power BI
Over the last year or so Power BI has made a real charge to become THE reporting tool for many applications, including of course Project Online. There are lots of great things about Power BI (and some not so great too!), including the very quick release cycle (dare I use the word agile!). Whereas Excel […]
SPC Adriatics 2016 #ProjectOnline #Workflow
<jana mineral water> I’m delighted to be have presented at the SPC Adriatics 2016 on a couple of topics regarding Project Online, and decided to record the sessions so I could share them to a wider audience. Alas I only remembered to record part way through the 2nd session, but it’s sufficient. Also, apologies for […]
Securing Enterprise Custom fields on Project Detail Pages in #ProjectOnline #Project #PPM #PS2013 #Office365
<Tomato Soup> One of the main configuration items with respect to Project Server / Project Online is the creation of project level Enterprise Custom fields and their layout on separate Project Detail Pages. Assuming that you are not using workflow* then by default anyone with read access to the project can see all of the […]
#PowerBI with #ProjectOnline #Office365 #PPM to view Resource Work by day
<Frothy Coffee> Recently I’ve been working with a customer on getting a simple way of displaying resource information. In truth I started with manipulating data in Excel using VBA, but quickly realised that there was a better way to do this using PowerBI. The end result (or rather the 1st iteration) is a report which […]
I can’t delete a project – but I’m THE project manager!
<tea> It’s a bit of a mundane topic this one, but like all of my topics, it’s soooo real world! I have a customer (okay, so I’ve got lots, not just the one!) and this particular customer is only using Project Online, and not Project Pro for O365/Project 2013 Professional. For those of you familiar […]
Top 5 Reasons to Deploy Project Online / Project Server
<San Servolo, Tanqueray & Red Wine – this has been written over a long duration of time!> I was thinking about the top 5 Reasons why my customers, over many years, have deployed Project Server. Just as every organisation needs standardised ways to perform HR, Payroll etc, they all need (but not necessarily desire) a […]
Working with Teams in Project Online/Project Server 2013
<latte> It’s been a while since I last discussed Teams and Team Resources, and having learnt something new recently (kudos goes to Eric Uyttewaal who is always very willing to share his expertise) I thought it was time to re-visit the topic. Introducing Teams The Team feature was introduced way back in Project Server 2007, […]