In order to follow up on our promise to provide you with more Project Server 2010 role guide content, we are pleased to announce the recent publish of the Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide for Project Web App. Much like the Project Server 2010 Administrator's Guide that we released earlier this year, this guide was created with great consideration given to the great customer feedback we've received.  In putting together this guide, our writing team addressed the three big asks customers had for this content:

• It is graphical.  We've Included a lot of screenshots of the user interface, making it easier to see where you are at within a procedure.
• It is customizable.  We have it in Microsoft Word format to make it easier for customers to customize parts of the guide to train their own users.
• It is downloadable in .docx, .pdf, and .xps file formats.   Feel free to print it off and read it at your convenience.

The Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager's Guide for Project Web App provides detailed information about how to use Microsoft Project Web App (PWA) to work with Microsoft Project Server 2010 data and to perform project management-related tasks. This guide helps project managers in your organization to better understand elements of project management in PWA, such as projects, resources, tasks, approvals, updates, and notifications. It includes many step-by-step procedures and accompanying user-interface screen shots of Project Web App.  It is important to note that although Microsoft Project Professional 2010 can be used with Project Server 2010 to perform many project management tasks, this guide only covers procedures done through PWA.

The Microsoft Project Server 2010 Project Manager’s Guide to Project Web App contains the following seven chapters:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1, “Navigating Project Web App”
• Chapter 2, “Managing projects in Project Web App”
• Chapter 3, “Managing resources”
• Chapter 4, “Managing task updates”
• Chapter 5, “Managing issues, risks, and documents”
• Chapter 6, “Managing status reports”
• Chapter 7, “Configuring e-mail notifications and reminders”

File size: approximately 3 MB

• Download the guide as a .docx file
• Download the guide as a .pdf file
• Download the guide as a .xps file

We're happy to announce the publish of a new white paper by Chris Vanderluis of HMS Software for the "From the Trenches" column in the Project Server 2010 TechCenter and the Project Server 2007 TechCenter. This latest white paper -  "They Say They Want a Resolution" - describes some common challenges you may face when scheduling projects. It describes coming up with the best approach when you try to determine how long tasks should be and how many tasks there should be to optimize a project schedule. It discusses how different industries typically require different types of schedules (for example, software development, EPM (engineering, procurement, and construction), and plant shutdown).  It also discusses several factors in choosing project resolution (for example, length of project, resources involved, management or division of resources, speed and effort required in collecting data, and data update schedule). 

Here is some bio information about the author:

Chris Vandersluis is the president and founder of Montreal, Canada–based HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. He has an economics degree from McGill University and over 27 years’ experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and helped found the Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec chapters of the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUGA). Publications for which Chris has written include Fortune, Heavy Construction News, Computing Canada magazine, and PMI’s PMNetwork, and he is a regular columnist for Project Times. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University and often speaks at project management association functions across North America and around the world. HMS Software is the publisher of the TimeControl project-oriented timekeeping system and has been a Microsoft Project Solution Partner since 1995.

Chris Vandersluis can be contacted by e-mail at: chris.vandersluis@hms.ca.

If you would like to read more Enterprise Project Management related articles by Chris Vandersluis, see his blog: EPM Guidance.

We recently published a series of nine articles about how to test a Microsoft Project Server 2010 deployment as an enterprise project management system administrator or solution tester.

Use the series as a guide to test the functionality of a newly deployed Project Server 2010 instance. The articles in this series discuss the functionalities that are on the Server Settings page, and some initial tests that you can run to connect and check server communications by using the Project Professional 2010 client application.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502592.aspx