Hi All,

We had a good time doing a giveaway here last week and am really pleased to announce the winner is Michael from Indianapolis, Indiana!

Mike has won the following great prizes:

• One free copy of Office 2010 Home & Business
• A Flip HD Ultra Camcorder
• A Seagate FreeAgent Desk Hard Drive (1 TB)

Please register for ProjectNation.net (see the link at the top-right of the page) and I will make sure you are notified of any new giveaways.

For everyone that’s been wanting to see the final series of my “Adapting to Project 2010”, I will start posting again on Thursday.

-Bill

Update 2: I received a note from Microsoft just before the holidays that we can extend this event to Tuesday 6/2/2010.  You have one last chance to get in on this great giveaway!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention this contest will continue through Friday, 5/28/2010.

With the release of Microsoft Office 2010, I am partnering with Microsoft to help spread the word by sharing a video that highlights the new features of Project 2010.  Just for watching the video, I am giving away the following prizes:

• One free copy of Office 2010 Home & Business!
• A Flip HD Ultra Camcorder!
• A Seagate FreeAgent Desk Hard Drive (1 TB!)

1. Watch the video below.
2. Register with this ProjectNation.net site and respond to this post with an answer to the following question:
   “UI was a major focus in the development of Project 2010. What new feature has been introduced for ease of scheduling and how does it empower users?”
3. I will randomly select somene to win all three prizes!

Good Luck! -Bill

The fine print:
Due to legal and shipping restrictions, this offer is only available for United States residents only (Sorry Canada and Mexico).

Hi Everyone… I am about to wrap up the final video series on adapting to the new Project 2010 UI and you will see more postings. 

More importantly, please get ready to visit ProjectNation.net this Wednesday (5/26/2010) for a chance to win some really cool prizes!  Don’t forget to check back here May 26!

-Bill

In this sixth of a 10-part video series, I cover the new Resource Management capabilities of Project Professional 2010.  The new Team Planner feature allows you to visually adjust resource allocations and assign tasks to resources.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

Before continuing, I wanted to mention that Today, May 12, Office 2010 formally Launches and will be readily available for any organization to download!  Next month, Microsoft will launch Office for the general public.

In this fifth video in my 10-part Adapting series, you will learn about a very cool new feature called Inactive Tasks.  The concept behind Inactive Tasks is essentially that you have a task which can basically be taken out of the plan but still exist in the schedule.  It will look like this when inactive and even if you have predecessor/successor links to it, Project will ignore it.

I bet some people will come up with real interesting uses for Inactive tasks, but here are the two popular ones I’m sure will be used commonly:

1. Scope Management – Very often we delete tasks from our plan because we changed scope or any number of other reasons.  Then, as often is the case, they suddenly need to be done again.  Instead of deleting the tasks, you can leave them in your schedule and just “Inactivate” them.
2. Risk Mitigation – If you are tracking risks that are likely to happen, why not plan for them in your schedule and keep them Inactive?  If the risk occurs, you simple Activate these tasks and incorporate them into your current WBS structure.  This could very likely be a nice fix for a common problem where Project Managers keep two completely separate project plans with and without more tasks to account for project risk.

If you like this video, please subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

UPDATE: For some reason YouTube shrunk the screens on this video.   Click on the video and watch it in full-screen directly from YouTube for best results.