January 15th, 2010 | 
Author: At the top of the new year, it is very common for most of us to step back and think about what we will do different the next twelve months. Given the economy we live in right now, it is a great time to learn or fine-tune our skills. My company (Pcubed) and Versatile Training have teamed with MPUG – the leading MS Project User Group – to provide free training on Microsoft Project. This is a great opportunity to pick up a new skill using the most popular project management software in the world, well, perhaps next to Excel 
.
We are offering a four-part series on using Microsoft Project, which will start with a beginners course and work its way up to more advanced topics. These free courses are web-based, 90-minute courses and will be presented in the form of a presentation, online demonstrations and live Q&A. Each course will offer 1.5 PDU’s (Professional Development Units) with a total of 6 PDU’s if you take all of them. We are looking at offering more in the near future and are excited to see what the turnout looks like for these upcoming courses.
If you are interested in signing up, you can learn more here:
http://www.mpug.com/Pages/MPUGCertificate2007.aspx
And sign up for the events here:
http://www.mpug.com/Pages/Home.aspx
The courses are titled “Microsoft Project 2007 Essentials”. Here are the direct links to sign up:
Session 1 (1/20/2010): Training presented by myself and includes Q&A with special guest Sam Huffman
Session 2 (1/27/2010): Training presented by Sam Huffman and Q&A between Sam and myself
Session 3 (2/3/2010): Training presented by Sam Huffman and Q&A between Sam and myself
Session 4 (2/10/2010): Training presented by myself and includes Q&A with special guest Jack Dahlgren (a fellow Project MVP)
The sessions will all be held at 10:30AM Eastern/7:30AM Pacific. We understand these time zones are not ideal for some and we will attempt another live re-broadcast at 6:00PM PST for those of you in the Asia/Pacific regions. If there are difficulties in any of the presenters making the second event, there will still be a live Q&A with Myself, Sam or Jack.
Please sign up for these free events and I will make sure they are re-posted as the sessions get closer!
-Bill
In this gripping epic, we follow a heroic Project Manager in dire need of a plan to communicate progress. When The Boss informs our intrepid PM that more details and a Executive overview are required, a new approach needs to be taken. The PM quickly puts together the plan in Project 2010 and outputs an Executive report. Well that pretty much gives away the plot and the whole story line but I still suggest you watch it because there’s fun music. Enjoy! -Bill
When Microsoft released Office 2007, a number of applications no longer used drop-down menus. Instead, they used a new interface called the Ribbon. With Office 2010, Microsoft made an effort to make sure all their applications used this new interface, which has been renamed to the “Fluent UI”.
The link below is a short 10-minute introduction of the new Fluent UI in Project 2010. Since the product is still in beta, please be aware that the final product may be different. Enjoy!
Direct Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL00SINtO-M
NOTE: Apologies up-front as I decided to start using YouTube as a mechanism to share my free videos. The lackluster production quality appears to be due to YouTube reducing the quality when uploaded to save space. I’ll work on improving them in the future. If you have any tips for me, please do hit me up!
While I was testing the pre-beta versions of Microsoft Project, the nice team at Microsoft created virtualized test environments to easily do testing and not worry about installing things and pre-beta software breaking your computer. When the software was in good enough shape, our IT Department made the software available for use in a similar way.
Now that Office 2010 Beta is out, I want to use the products regularly as part of my desktop to start adopting the technology. At the same time, I cannot afford the downtime associated with beta software potentially impacting my work schedule by crashing, a feature not working or other programs not being compatible with it. Also, I have a decent computer – a DELL D630 to be exact – but to run a secondary virtual machine on top of my computer is way too cumbersome and will slow things down tremendously.
What I really want is a dual-boot environment so I can run the beta software locally and if need be, reboot into my standard desktop. Moreover, I do not want to worry about my C: Drive being filled up with software that needs to be cleaned up later. Until recently, the thought of meeting these requirements was pipe dream.
Enter Boot from VHD… If you are running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, you can now create a virtual machine file (one file!) and boot from it. This means you can run Windows 7, reboot your computer and run a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine as if it was installed on the computer as a completely new copy of the operating system (you can also Run WS2008R2 and boot to a Windows 7 VM).
If you have a 64-bit computer with 4-8GB RAM and want to use the Office 2010 Beta as your desktop but still want your regular desktop as a backup, I highly recommend the VHD boot option. It will basically work like you just booted an operating system from your C: Drive and will still allow you to access all the physical drives, USB devices, networking hardware, etc on the computer.
To learn how to set up your computer to boot from a VHD, follow this really nice link to “Keith Comb’s Blahg” — not sure why the spelling but guessing he is from Bahston
-Bill
Microsoft is gearing up for some fairly significant releases next year with Office and SharePoint 2010 being the two most important desktop platform releases. These releases will include significant new features and improvements. Of course the most important applications for Project Management will be SharePoint 2010 and Project 2010.
Project 2010 will offer the new Fluent (tabbed) user interface and more significantly will have a new manual scheduling capability. With the new manual scheduling capabilities, you will be able to create tasks that are not directly affected by the scheduling engine. You can create project plans pretty much the same way you can in Excel, by setting dates that won’t move or even enter text directly into fields that used to be hard coded. For example, if you need to get the duration of a task from your colleague Sharon, just enter “Get detail from Sharon” into the Duration field. If you know tasks should start and end in a certain period but unsure of the exact dates, just type “Beginning November 09” in the Start field and “Sometime in Feb 2010” in the Finish fields.
For a quick overview of the new Project 2010 Features, you can watch a short video I put together here.
Project Server 2010 users will find making updates to plans much easier. For example, if you wanted to do some basic project editing like adding tasks, modifying durations, assigning resources to tasks and the like, you can now do that via the web interface. If you are a Portfolio Server user, you will have the option to stay with the existing 2007 product or you can use the new integrated Portfolio Management capabilities of Project Server but there will be some features no longer available in the newer version. It will be important to install the product and validate the features you need are still in place. The good news of course is Microsoft has provided a really robust set of application programming interfaces (API’s) to build your own functionality into the tool.
In SharePoint 2010, you of course get a more polished and modern user interface. The Fluent (tabbed) user interface has now found its way into SharePoint as well. For PMO’s and those of you running really large programs, you will find significant new improvements in workflows. The new SharePoint Designer is now able to build complex, shared workflows where in the past they were really limited in scope. Since Project Server is a full-fledged SharePoint application, you will be able to create standards-based workflows that enable you to automate manual processes, like change management approvals, status report reviews and the like.
There are too many new features to cover in these Office and SharePoint 2010 products. Keep an eye out here on my Blog and the Videos link at the top of the page for a mostly Project Management-centric view of the new technologies. For a great overview of the products as a whole, check out the links below this post.
-Bill
Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/
SharePoint 2010 Beta Site:
http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx
If you are a MSDN subscriber, the links are now up for you to download the products. Below is a screen capture I took from my MSDN page so you can see the products available. If you do not own a MSDN subscription, I would highly recommend you invest in it.
To download on MSDN, go to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com
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