old projectified

Live Writer is Amazing (Now)

When I first tried Live Writer a while back it was 'OK' but just 'OK'. It did most of the things that other posting apps did but it did not blow me away.

I just downloaded it today after being reminded about it in Christophe's post today. Wow. They did a lot of work on this application.

One of the things I like the best is that it has a Web Layout view that obviously goes up to your provider and gets your template layout and sizes the editing page to match the settings of your blog.

It also does the things you would expect like grabbing your categories and doing things like spell check and other formatting. It also does a good job of making image insertions easy. It has built in defaults for auto-thumbnailing your images but also makes it easy to save your preferences as the new default.

It also provides an addin model so you can extend the functionality of the tool. Addins include adding custom "BlogThis" extensions to various browsers (as you would expect) but also to tools like Visual Studio (making it easier to blog your code directly from VS.) Others include an addin that makes it easy to post links to items in SkyDrive, insert streaming Sliverlight applications or link to Flickr pages.

Nice Work Team! Check out the Writer Team Blog for the scoop.

The Rest of the Man Cage

Some people asked about the Man Cage. Here it is in full context. You can see that it goes all the way up the first flight. The last thing you want is bears on the roof! This picture also shows how the building is up on pilings so there is a lot of room under the building where someone on the stairs cannot see.

Programmatic Access to Enterprise Custom Fields in Project Server 2007

If you have poked around VBA in Project Professional 2007 you may have noticed that there is not what I would call "direct" object model access to the enterprise custom fields you create in Project Server 2007. For one thing these fields are not like they were in Project Server 2003. In 2003 you got 30 Outline Code fields and you renamed them but via VBA you still accessed the field as OutlineCodeXX. In 2007 you create enterprise fields 'from scratch.' They are not just renamed fields. They are new fields. The object model is not dynamic in a way that allows it to add new members as they are created. This means that you cant just get to a field by the old method: Activeproject.Tasks(1).OutlineCode1.

To access an Enterprise Task field called "Task Alignment" you would use the following code:

Activeproject.Tasks(1).GetField(FieldID:=Application.FieldNameToFieldConstant(FieldName:="INSERT FIELD NAME),FieldType:=pjTask)

You use the GetField method. This method requires the FieldID. To get the FieldID (since it is unlikely you know it) you use the FieldNametoFieldConstant method.

Default Assignment Owner

There are situations where the team members that are doing the actual work on tasks do not have ready access to a computer. This makes their use of Project Server Web Access to report status on their task assignments impossible or at least highly unlikely. In the past situations like this would require assigning the tasks to a supervisor and then having the supervisor submit status for the resources. But this was not a great solution as it obscured the usage levels of the actual resources and was confusing for the supervisor to keep track of who was assigned to any given task. Project Server 2007 adds a feature that makes this kind of situation much easier to handle.

Every Assignment on a project in Project Server has a property called "Assignment Owner" that contains the name of the Project Server user that will be entering status updates for that assignment. If the Assignment Owner for an assignment is "Brian Kennemer" then it will show up on my "My Tasks" page in PWA. Every resource in Project Server has a property called "Default Assignment Owner." This property defines the default name that is put into the Assignment Owner field when that resource is assigned to a task. By default it is the name of the resource but you can put any active user into the field for a resource. So in our situation above the solution would be to put the name of the supervisor into the Default Assignment Owner field for each of their team members. Then whenever a task is assigned to one of the team members that assignment will show up on the My Tasks page of the supervisor.

With this solution the tasks are assigned to actual team members so their usage and availability can be accurately tracked and the assignments show up on the supervisors My Tasks page for easy status updates (the name of the assigned resource shows up in the view to help the supervisor keep track.)

If you have this situation in your deployment look into this feature. If you need a hand drop me an email.

Blogging from Word 2007, Again

OK. Maybe I'm the only one that does not know this already but I will post it just in case I'm not the only one. ;-) During the beta of Word 2007 I first looked at blogging from Word 2007. It was pretty cool but it killed me that it did not go up and get my categories from TypePad (my blog provider.) I brought it up as a feature request pretty early and the response was that it was not likely to make it. I never thought about it again. After I upgraded to the RTM version Word must have been using an old set of account settings for my blog provider because it was still not giving me my categories. So today I deleted the account and created it again and it gave me a different set of options for connecting and sure thing, when I create a post now the category list is populated from my TypePad categories. Shazaam!

The "Man Cage"

I'm more than a little afraid of the kind of search hits this post is going to get me but here it goes: This is the Man Cage. It is a VERY sturdy solid steel cage around the outdoor stairwell to the control room of this facility. Why would you want a giant steel cage around a stairwell you ask? So in case there is a Polar Bear hanging around under the building (you can see on the left that the building is up on 'stilts') where you can't see him from the door you don't get killed! ;-)

Arctic Hummer

Not sure what I would do with it but this is just cool!

Projectified on the Arctic Coast

Hanging out on the north coast of Alaska. Click on the picture and look at the distant white horizontal line about the level of my ears. That is permanent pack ice in the distance. In less than a month the water behind me will be solid ice. Pretty damn cool.

Nice view but the swimming is horrible. ;-)

Colby Africa is Blogging Project Server Development!

So there is a new blog that will be of interest to those in the Project\Project Server world. Colby Africa is now blogging about various things including developing around Project Server. Colby has a long history in the project management software world. He worked for Microsoft in the Project product group back in the Project 98 days. He then joined Pacific Edge a short time after I did and took part in some of the best work that PacEdge did around portfolio management software. He is now working for IIL and is doing some integration and customization work around Project Server and is blogging his experiences.

This will be a must read. Colby is crazy smart and knows his stuff. Check it out.