Well, it is strange that someone keep the same mode before and during the vacation time. In fact, I am not from that type, I used to switch myself into Vacation Mode in the first minute of my vacation time. Refreshment is mandatory for continuity. In other simple words, i am relaxing now and one of my relaxing activities is reading and accordingly BLOGGING:) . Do you agree with me that Blogging is another cool thing you can do it while relaxing??

Anyway, for the sake of not being boring I just wanted to share with you one important article i read it from Office Online Help site

here we go

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA102130271033.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal Okour, Jordan, Irbid

Hi All,

It will be my pleasure to announce the launch of our specialized training courses in MS Project Professional 2007. Those courses are new as i have  introduced three level of the courses, they are short terms courses that fit the busy users and of course all are most cost effective.

Three levels (Beginner, intermediate and advance) are designed to facilitate the flexibility by providing different options according to each interest needs.

Later on I will be announcing the MS EPM 2007 courses very soon, be tuned

For more information please feel free to download the course details from the link at the top of this post

Check this link and enjoy the great links collection all about MS Project 2007. The site owners put great efforts in this post

http://mscanadaepminfo.com/EPM2007.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal okour

as per Christophe Fiessinger’s latest post in his blog, the MS EPM SP2 webcast recording is now available in EPMConnect site

read more in Christophe blog at

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2009/05/14/project-2007-service-pack-2-recorded-webcast-and-deck-are-now-available-on-epmconnect.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

I have started getting more and more involved in updating my twitter page with my latest or MS EPM latest. Twitter is somehow a “light blogging + RSS subscribers”. the beauty of twitter is that it is easy to write, easy to read and easy to share. The challenge now is how to find a time to keep up with Facebook, my blog, my twitter, my linkedin, and my old hotmail account. Getting connected to the people around the world is something pretty good and it enrich my knowledge dramatically.

For those who would like to follow me on twitter please follow http://twitter.com/ebilal

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Hi folks,

Microsoft has announced the release of MS project 2007 (Server,Professional and WSS 3.0) Service Pack 2. To read more information please visit this post from the official blog of Microsoft Project Team

http://blogs.msdn.com/project/archive/2009/04/28/announcing-service-pack-2-sp2-for-microsoft-project-2007-and-microsoft-project-server-2007.aspx

Here are the download links (As per the official blog of Microsoft Project Team)

Service Pack 2 (SP2) Download Center Page

Office Project 2007 (x86)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7DF323E-73B8-4344-826A-A01E6F920B1B

Office Project Language Pack
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7DF323E-73B8-4344-826A-A01E6F920B1B

WSS (both x86 and x64)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=79BADA82-C13F-44C1-BDC1-D0447337051B&displaylang=en

WSS Language Pack (x86)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=085E5AC8-58F6-4CF9-8012-33B95EE36C0F&displaylang=en

WSS Language Pack (x64)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2C2B6CAF-B46D-45EB-AC4D-DEAAA48C3A2C&displaylang=en

Office Servers (x86 and x64) (contains Project Server SP2)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082&displaylang=en

Office Servers Language Pack (x86)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=01C6A3E8-E110-4956-903A-AD16284BF223&displaylang=en

Office Servers Language Pack (x64)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=66C5026F-9F47-4642-8378-2526918009FA&displaylang=en

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

If you have done good job in designing your own tables/views  or you have utilized the available table/views in Microsoft Project 2007 Professional then the next step for you is getting those tables/views printed as reports. The good thing is that you can design your own reports to show those tables in reporting layout. Having those customized report will make it easy for you to extract/distribute and publish your reports in a printed formats.

So the idea that I will illustrate in this post is summarized as the following

• Customize your own table with the specific fields that your boss is looking for
• Customize your own report to show this view/table as report
• Make this report available for all projects

Step 1 : Customize your table

1. Click on View => Table:  => and select More Tables
   
   
2. In the dialog below click on New
   
   
   
3. Enter the table information as per the image below
   
    
4. Click Ok to save your table, remember the table name “Track Summary Report”
5. Click Apply to see your table

Step 2: Create Your Own Report

1. On the menu bar, click on Report => Reports then click on Custom
   
   
2. The dialog will list all the available reports, we will not use any of them, we will create our own, right? So click on New
   
   
   
3. Select Task, remember that we will design a report that will show the Tasks’ Tracking Information
   
   
   
4. Fill in the information for your report as per the dialog photo below
   
   
   
5. Click Ok after finish and click in Page Setup, usually you need to select the Landscape layout to be able to print as much information as you can in a single page. Don’t forget to set the paper size to A4
   
   
6. Click in Header and Footer tap and feel free to edit the look and feel of your report header and footer
   
   
   
7. Click OK, then “Preview” to preview your report
   
   
8. You are done, click Ok several time to go back to MS Project Pro 2007 main menu

Step Three: Make this report available to all projects

1. On the main menu Click on Tools => Organizer
   
   
2. Select Report tab, select the “Tracking Summary Report” and then click << Copy to copy it to the Global template. So it will be available for the other projects
   
    
3. Done

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Hi,

Here are some basic shortcuts for MS Project 2007 that can speed up your daily experience with MS Project 2007

The complete list of the shortcuts can be found here

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HP101550121033.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Microsoft announced recently that  MS SharePoint Designer 2007 is available for FREE. As per the official web site of Microsoft (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/FX100487631033.aspx )

For EPM 2007 customers and administrators they can change the look and feel of the projects workspaces to reflect their organization image layout.

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

I think that the third show of the InfoCenter yearly event have been done this year with a lot success indicators.

1. It introduce wide range of sessions with different topics (51 sessions as I remember)
2. New speakers shown up
3. New attractive topics. There was one about Leadership and another one was about Internet Marketing
4. Catering Service was good in general :)

Audience low size was the only bad side of this event and I believe it was because people in Kuwait love to do anything in Non-working day, yes any thing except attending events! Next time I would like to suggest the organizer to consider working days for such big event.

Any way, as an overall evaluation, it was a BIG success. See you next year inshalla and don’t forget to register in my session at that time :)

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Microsoft Dev Nights, Kuwait, 1st of April

Best Regards 
Bilal Okour

This is what happened with me while demonstrating MS Project 2007 features, OOPS!. I went home back and start googling for some good time. I found the solution and it was really interesting for me to share it with. 

Please go through the following link and follow the steps

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA101636871033.aspx

Hi, I found this list of a very fantastic videos with each of 3-5 minutes duration. I am sure that you will start watching one and continue till you watch all.

Now I will leave you with this collection

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/CH100740881033.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Dear All,

I would like to take this opportunity to invite you and your teams to register and attend the FREE deep  dive workshops that took place on a yearly basis at InfoCenter.

Also feel free to register in my session “ Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (MS EPM)”  using the below link

http://www.infocenter.com.kw/InfoEDUDAY2009/infoEducation%20Day/ProjectManagement.htm

For more details please read below ..

50 FREE Deep Dive Workshops @

Info Edu Day 2009

Saturday March 28, 2009

Kuwait City, Duwalia Building, 5^th Floor

Infocenter Institute

Seats Are Limited, Register Now!

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

A nice article that list a lot of links for useful Support & Reference links

http://projectserver201.blogspot.com/2007/08/microsoft-epm-enterprise-project.html

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

A series of 8 video (shot ones) that covers the project management life cycle using MS Project.

it covers the basics of Project Management and will illustrate the Project 2007 interface. It also explain how to start new project, how to define tasks, how to assign resources to tasks, how to estimate the cost and how to report the project progress

here is the link

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA102820011033.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

A good tips collection from CriticalTools 

http://www.criticaltools.com/Tips.htm

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

This is one of the best articles that I ever read, it is highlighting the most BIG MISTAKES that might result in bad outcome of using MS Project

http://www.pmconnection.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=32

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

At IT Evolution 08, get a front row seat as we unveil technologies like Hyper-V, App-V and Virtual Machine Manager that will help you ride the hottest trend in IT today -Virtualization.
Come and attend this big show as per your country schedule below

A cool article that brings you back to basics, but still it is very important to understand

Subject: Back to Basics: Understanding task dependencies

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Microsoft published new Quick reference guide for Project Managers and another one for Team members. These are really great where I have been asked by a lot from my customer to provide with such a quick references

Here are the links

For Project Managers: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC102865051033.aspx

For Team Members: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC102880551033.aspx?pid=CT101441451033

now they are free and in Word format

Best Regards

I have installed the latest infrastructure update for both SharePoint WSS 30.0 and Project Server 2007. I was really impressed with the GREAT enhancement that has been done through.

The most feature I liked was the Timephased view. But I faced one problem where suddenly this view was not showing and i was back to the normal view before applying the infrastructure.

Needless to mention what I did to fix this out but finally I figured it out.  So the reason behind not showing the Timephased view (Calendar view) was because I have modified the My Assignment view and have removed the "Progress [Assignment]" field in the related view.!

This field should be there to get the Timephased view showing correctly, for me I was trying to make this screen simple for my customer and % Work Complete was the main field. That is why I removed the rest.

As a conclusion, don't change the default selected fields for this view in order to get the My Tasks page shows the views as expected.

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Did you get the chance to explore the Project server Database, if yes then I am sure that you wonder why there are 4 databases created for each instance of the PWA. I will not answer why but I will till you in brief what is the purpose of each

 

1. The Draft database contains tables for saving unpublished projects from Project Professional and other applications. Project Web Access does not show project data in the Draft database.
2. The Published database contains all of the published projects as well as enterprise resources, the enterprise global template, and other project templates. Published projects are visible in Project Web Access. The Published database also contains tables that are specific to Project Web Access (timesheets, models, views, and so on), and global data tables (outline codes, security, and metadata).
3. The Archive database saves backup and older versions of projects and other data.
4. The Reporting database is the staging area for generating reports and OLAP cubes. Data in the Reporting database is comprehensive and is updated nearly in real time. The Reporting tables are optimized for read-only report generation.

For more details please read this article

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms513875.aspx

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

Microsoft announced the latest Infra Structure update and it contains a fixes to the claimed bugs.

For more details please visit MSDN Official blog for Project 2007

To download this infrastructure you can follow this link . Install Infrastructure update for Project Professional

Best Regards

Bilal Okour

I have some implementations of the EPM where I used the Forms authentication to authenticate the EPM users. I have wrote my notes and would like to share it with you regarding this

Why to go for Forms Authentication

1. Some of the EPM users are not part of the organization domain
2. There is no Active Directory
3. The user can not access the organization domain

Why NOT to go for that?

Well, do you want me to speak technically or from implementation prospective?

I guess you said both?

• Technically
1. leakage of information for MS Sharepoint Forms Authentication as it is not embedded by default
2. Poor user control functionality.
3. No out of the box tool for editing users online
• Implementation
1. Poor approach to design the security Rules for passwords
2. Most of the customer forgot their Forms Passwords but they don't do the same with AD passwords
3. Accordingly getting the users accounts locked, this is not the issue, the issue is the poor approach to get them back.
4. Integration with Outlook is another bad thing, once you open the outlook and entered your AD password you will get asked to enter your forms credential. Most of my users consider it as a double job that they don't like

Best Regards

Bilal Okour