I’m Back

OK, first off I will get the obligatory list of excuses for why I have been absent from blogging for so long: work out of the way up front and spare you the boring details: work, travel, family, more work, east coast work travel, more family and then more work. The last 6 months has been a blur to say the least.

But on with the good stuff. During these past few months I have been doing a lot of work around SSRS reporting against Project Server 2007 and 2010 so I will have some things to say on that front as well as maybe some sample reports. I’m working on on 2 different 2010 deployments right now so I will also have some things to share about my experiences doing that as well as some coverage of how my customers are making use of some of the new features.

So over the next few weeks I hope to get some posts up on the following subjects:

Lessons Learned around SSRS and Project Server
including using a SharePoint document library as your report center instead of using SSRS Report Manager

Expansion of Christophe’s work on Program Level Issue Reporting
A while back Christophe wrote this post on the subject. I had a similar need for both issue and risk reporting across sets of projects. I will write something up on how I did it and share my SSRS Reports.

SSRS report for showing the ‘health’ of Deliverables across projects
A report that examines the relationship between the “source” task dates, the published deliverable date, and the “receiving” task dates and uses color coded formatting to provide visibility of if the deliverable is up-to-date and if the '”receiving” task is scheduled to start before the deliverable is scheduled to deliver.

Use of Inactive tasks feature for contingency planning scenarios
Inserting a set of tasks that will only be used if a certain risk or other event occurs. We can have the whole set of tasks in place, with resource assigned and with links in place but have them marked as Inactive so that the schedule ‘collapses’ around them until they are needed.

Fiscal Period setup in the OLAP cube
Nothing exactly new here but I want to cover it anyway for those that have not done it before

Using Excel 2010 workbooks against Project Server 2010 OLAP cubes
Again, not new but a good thing to cover for those that have not done it before.

Some posts about how my deployments are going
I will share tidbit and things I find as I’m doing my deployments so that you can have some insight to how things are going in real-world deployments of 2010