March 5, 2010

Project 2010 Ignite – Day 3

It was the last day of Project Ignite 2010. It has been a great couple of days. Christophe and Jan have been brilliant. The size of the event was perfect for learning and asking questions. The attendee group was a good mix of Microsoft Partner like integent!, customers, and MSFT employees.

Today covered four report topics, Administration, Operations, and Customization. Another comprehensive day. Christophe and Jan – great job.

These are the highlights from Day 3 that I wanted to share with those that were not able to make it. Enjoy.

-Jacques

Reporting is extremely value and extensible.

Performance Point Services: Features include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Scorecards, and Dashboards
- Very powerful tool
- Can permission per ‘site’ or object in PPS
Visio Services: Visual Refresh of Data Diagrams and Rendering Visio diagram attached to data.
Power Pivot (for Excel): Empower End Users, Features include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Scorecards, and Dashboards

Administrative Enhancements:

Departments: a pre-defined custom field with an empty lookup table in Project Server 2010 associated with a resource and a project.
- Primary purpose is to act as a filter for Projects, Resources, their Custom Fields, Enterprise Project Types (EPT) and Drivers
- Provides EPM Administrator a technique for focusing sets of custom fields for different groups in the organization
Delegation
- What is it?
  - Allows one user to logon with the context
    of another user and act for them
  - Can do *most* of the tasks the other can do
- How to set it up?
  - By default, only Administrators have ability.
  - Have three global permissions and one category permission
- Set Delegation Period – Nice ability to proactively set up future delegation rules
- Delegates
ULS Viewer
- Views
Active Directory Synchronization
- Significant engineering investment into improving performance of this operation
- Re-worked to dramatically reduce the occurrence of SQL Server deadlocking
- Re-worked to reduce the overall number of internal operations required to support synchronization
Project Manager Provisioned Permissions
- Permission by Project – interesting new feature
Bulk Update Project Sites
- Ability to Update Project Sites. Used to re-establish proper associations between data items in Project Server databases over to their associated data items in the project workspaces hosted in SharePoint
Check Permissions Tool in BI Center
- Project Permissions

Operations:

Logs: Best Practice – put Log files on Shared Drive rather than server.
ULS Log: Free download http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewera
Usage Logging: ULS Logs provide administrators with a great mechanism to diagnose what's wrong with the system when something goes wrong, but there are times when you want a overview of what's happening in your SharePoint deployment when things are going well.
- For this, SharePoint 2010 provides you with the 'Logging Database' which contains all the events that are happening in the deployment. This information is collected by a service, the usage service, which collects system usage information and periodically imports them into the database.
SharePoint Health Monitor: Can be used to facilitate troubleshooting efforts by proactively identifying problematic sites, pages, etc. Leverages Usage Logging Infrastructure.
Usage Logging: Provides definitions on four unique categories (Security, Performance, Configuration, and Availability)
Developer Dashboard: The developer dashboard is a useful component included with 2010. It can be used to monitor page load and performance and has three states (On, Off, and On demand)
Password Management: For Farm-level