The language pack options for Project 2013 and Project Server 2013, and the upcoming Online version - currently in preview - are very similar to those that went before for both Project and Project Server, 2007 and 2010.  There is one additional language, Romanian, both for the client and the server.  For the client the options are practically identical – both in the installation where the client language pack is bundled with the Office and Visio as before, and in usage the layout and features are identical.  For the server the language pack works in much the same way – you install the bits on all servers in the farm for each language pack you want to support and then run the configuration wizard.  Like 2010 you can then decide which languages you want to make available for each site – but what is different for 2013 (and Online) is how the user ‘chooses’ which language they will see.  More detail on that further down the blog – first I’ll walk though the experience of loading a language pack on the client and server. 

I will also be updating the blog with reference to download locations once they are available – currently I just see these in the MSDN download center and the preview versions for SharePoint Server 2013 on the Microsoft Download center.

For the client the when the executable is run you will first see a dialog like the following.  This one happens to be Russian – but whatever the language the Microsoft Project bit should be readable – and it will be the middle option.

After excepting the End User License Agreement (or at least getting someone who can read the language you are installing translate it for you and accepting it) then you can either install or customize the install.  Once installed, then you can either repeat if you want to add the Office or Visio language pack – or go right ahead and configure it.  The option can be found in Windows 8 by going to Start and typing Office 2013 – and the Office 2013 Language Preferences icon will be listed – or for Windows 7 -  Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office 2013 Tools, Microsoft Office 2013 Language Preferences.

The look of the preferences application is very similar to the 2010 version

The top section still controls the editing languages, and the lower section – more applicable to Project UI controls the display and help languages.  So for example in this configuration Project will display in French, but if I bring up help this will be in Russian.  This can be useful where an organization uses a specific language for the UI and prefers everyone to do the same – for ease of support – but the user can choose a Help language that may be more familiar to them. 

You can also choose to let the Display language match Windows, and Help match the Display language.

For the server the installation is similar to 2010, and like 2010 the Language packs are combinded for SharePoint and Project Server and the  – running the executable brings up the EULA, accepting and clicking continue (this example is the Romanian language pack) will install the bits.

Once complete it will prompt to run the configuration wizard:

Looks like the is a slight bug here with the UI and possibly due to the fact that this is a new language for Project Server.  If the language is also applicable to Project Server as well as SharePoint Server then the heading should say Language Pack for SharePoint and Project Server 2013 – and not just SharePoint 2013.  As for 2010, there are some languages that have language packs for SharePoint that do not add the full support for Project Server.  Thai and Hindi are examples of these.

Back to the main story – the configuration wizard will go through 8 steps – the length of time it takes somewhat dependent on the volume of data you have (number of PWA instances for example) as it will be adding extra data to some of your tables, as well as laying down some extra web pages.  Once it has finished it should say Configuration Successful, and then to make the language you have added available you can go to Site Settings (from the gear in the top right corner of the screen)

then Language Settings

and I can put a check next to Romanian so that users can select as their display language.

The next step is where things get different – in 2010 you could select the display language from the drop down under your user name – whereas in 2013 you still start at the same place – but you then go to your ‘About me’ page – then edit your profile and within your profile you can select your display languages by clicking on the ellipses and selecting Language and Region

Here I have added Romanian and also moved it to the top of my list of display languages, then scrolled down to Save all and close.

Here I get a message that the changes have been saved, but they may take some time to take effect.  Don’t worry if you don’t see them right away.  I say OK to this message an go back to the PWA site.

After a few minutes we have it – our PWA site in Romanian!

The full list of languages for Project Server 2013 is:

Arabic, Chinese – Traditional, Chinese – Simplified, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), Romanian (New in 2013!), Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Currently looking at the Project Online preview I see you have the options to make the following languages available to your users.  I am not aware of current plans to extend this range.

Arabic, Chinese – Traditional, Chinese – Simple, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean,  Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish.

Also with online the choosing of languages is slightly different currently (not sure if it will change as we move out of preview…) in that the Display language option is just a single language rather than a table of preferences – but it is also driven by the IE language preference.  So for example if my O365 Display Language is Spanish – but I have not made Spanish available for my PWA, and I have French set as my preferred IE language (and I have made French available for my PWA) then I will see my O365 pages in Spanish, but my PWA in French.

One final word of warning – if you are playing about with IE settings and you have Windows 8 – and you sync your settings between PCs then I’d suggest that whenever you set a new language in the IE settings that you also set the keyboard to the actual keyboard in front of you.  In my testing of Language Packs I made the mistake of setting the preferred language with the ‘local’ keyboard setting of a language other than English (and not with a QWERTY keyboard…) and I did this on my desktop machine.  Shortly afterwards I couldn’t understand why I’d lost my ability to type on my laptop – then realized that my laptop had also inherited these new settings! (And just got caught out again – my Windows Phone 8 app on my laptop has gone French…)

Thanks to Marc for the original research and posting this item on the French blog - http://blogs.technet.com/b/frenchpjblog/archive/2012/12/24/3542467.aspx and to Jorge for the Spanish version at http://blogs.technet.com/b/elfarodeprojectserver/archive/2012/12/26/project-server-2010-se-paran-y-desactivan-los-servicios-de-eventos-y-cola.aspx.

For those whose English is better than their French or Spanish – read on.  This is something we have seen quite a few calls on, and the initial symptom is that Project Server 2010 queue jobs were not getting processed, they were just ‘waiting to be processed’.  Nothing appeared to be blocking these queue jobs and no ‘processing’ jobs were seen.  One closer examination, even though the Project Application Service was started within Central Administration – if you actually looked in the Services applet in the operating system you would see that the Services "Microsoft Project Server Event Service 2010" and "Microsoft Project Server Queue Service 2010" were not only stopped, but disabled.

And even if you enabled and restarted the service they would get disabled again – and the queue would stop processing.

Marc’s research showed that the disabling of the service occurred when the Hourly Health Analysis job was executed by the SharePoint TImer service;

specifically the rule that checks for services that have started or stopped unexpectedly;

To validate if this is indeed the issue causing your queue problems (as there could be other causes) you can just select the rule and ‘Run now’.  You should then see the services stopped and disabled and in the ULS logs the following rows can be found:

The rule is somehow detecting that the service should be disabled and so is making the change.  Again, Marc did some great detective work here and discovered that even though the Service Application was ‘Started’ as per the screen shot above, the following PowerShell commands would return ‘Disabled’

((Get-SPFarm).)Services| where {$ _.}Name - match "ProjectQueueService14"}) .instances

((Get-SPFarm).)Services| where {$ _.}Name - match "ProjectEventService14"}) .instances

This inconsistency in the state of these services was leading to them being disabled by the Health check.

We still have no good explanation why this situation occurs, but there is a way to stop it happening.  Again we use PowerShell and we need to run the following command on all the servers on which the services are installed:

Start-SPServiceInstance - Identity < Id >

where Id is the Id returned by the earlier Get-SPFarm command for the specific services,  Sometimes we have seen that this will still not resolve the issue immediately and you may need to clean the configuration cache and then stop and start the service instance:

Stop-SPServiceInstance - Identity < Id >

Start-SPServiceInstance - Identity < Id >

As mentioned earlier – there can be other reasons for a slow or stopped queue – see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2012/09/19/when-your-project-server-queue-slows-down.aspx for some examples, but glad that Marc managed to clear this one up.  Thanks again Marc, and to Jorge for reposting in Spanish.

Welcome to the new site for the Project Support blog,  Still the same authors and great information – just a new url to bookmark and subscribe to.

I am pleased the announce the release of (most of) the 2012 December Cumulative Update (CU) for Project 2010, Project Server 2007, Project Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010.  The SharePoint Server roll-up package will be delayed, as noted. Feel free to open a support case if you have any questions around this or need assistance getting these patches deployed.  Remember that this release for the 2010 products, like the August 2012 Cumulative Update, has a hard requirement on Service Pack 1 – see notes below.  In most of the KB articles the term hotfix is used in place of Cumulative Update.  They tend to be interchangeable terms – a Cumulative Update is just a hotfix built to a schedule.

As the were issues with the October release of the Project Server 2007 package you should use the December one which contains all the same fixes – and a few more.

Project and Project Server 2010

This include a number of fixes, so Microsoft strongly recommends that you test this in a test environment based on your production environment before putting this fix live in production.

The article below provides information on how to deploy the Project Server Cumulative Update.

You can read about the fixes included in the Project and Project Server August CUs from the following articles:

Server Rollup Package(Recommended): Delayed – hopefully out by the end of week of 12/17 *** Update - released 12/22 ***

Description of the Project Server 2010 cumulative update package (Project server-package):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596956

Individual Project Server Package:

Only required if you do not install the Server Rollup.

Description of the Project Server 2010 hotfix package (Pjsrvwfe-x-none.msp): December 11, 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553504

The version number is 14.0.6131.5000 and you can also expect to see the databases updated to this version number.

You may also come across a KB 2553268 for Project Server 2010 – this is just a subset of the one listed above and we would recommend installing the 2553504 package.

Project 2010 Client Package:

Description of the Project 2010 hotfix package (Project-x-none.msp): December 11, 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553188

The version number is 14.0.6131.5000, in case you want to limit the connection of certain patched release to Project Server 2010.

More information on deploying the Cumulative Update:

The article below provides information on how to deploy the Project Server Cumulative Update.

Updates for Project Server 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/projectserver/gg176680.aspx

As Project Server 2010 is now based on SharePoint Server 2010 we strongly recommend that you install the Project Server 2010 Server Rollup Package as there are a large number of individual server packages for SharePoint Server. The Project Server 2010 Server Rollup Package contains all the patches released in this Cumulative Update for SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010.

As mentioned above, and at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2012/07/18/project-server-2010-from-august-2012-cumulative-update-onwards-you-will-also-need-to-load-sp1.aspx – the August Cumulative Update requires your client and server to already be at the Service Pack 1 (SP1) level – if you get a message saying the patch does not apply to your system then this may be the reason.

SP1 for the Project Server 2010 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26636

SP1 for the Project Professional 2010 client can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26635 for the 32-bit and http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26627 for the 64-bit.

For those accustomed to Project Server 2007 Cumulative Updates, you should note that the MOSS Server Rollup Package does not contain the Project Server patches.   As in Project Server 2007, the Server Rollup Packages are much larger but they will greatly simplify your Project Server patch deployment.

Client Installation:

Installation of the client patch is straightforward and is the same as it was in Project 2007. The instructions for installing the client patch are below.

NOTE: Microsoft strongly recommends testing within a NON-Production environment prior to rollout.

1. Download the hotfix from the link in the KB Article.

2. Extract the patch package by running the .exe file that you downloaded.

3. Run the extracted .exe file to apply the patch to your Project Professional/Standard client.

Project Server 2007

This include a number of fixes, so Microsoft strongly recommends that you test this in a test environment based on your production environment before putting this fix live in production.

You can read about the fixes included in the August CU from the following articles:

Server Rollup Packages:

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cumulative update server hotfix package (WSS server-package): December 11, 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760571

Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 cumulative update server hotfix package (MOSS server-package): December 11, 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760570

Individual Product Packages:

Description of the Project Server 2007 hotfix package (Pjsrvapp-x-none.msp): December 11, 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596757

Project 2007 Client Package:

Description of the Project 2007 hotfix package (Project-x-none.msp): December 11, 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2596808

More information on deploying the Cumulative Update:

The article below provides information on how to deploy the Project Server Cumulative Update.

Deploy cumulative updates (Project Server 2007)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239177.aspx

Server Pack 3 for Project and Project Server 2007 has been released.  While not required for the August CU, we strongly recommend that you install it as it contains a number of patches to improve performance and reliability.  The following blog goes into more detail about SP3.

Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 3 Availability

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2011/10/25/office-2007-and-sharepoint-2007-service-pack-3-availability.aspx

SP3 may be optional, however, Service Pack 2 for both WSS and Office Servers 2007 are required for this Cumulative Update. The KB articles below provide information on how to download and install SP2 if you have not already done so.

Description of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack SP2

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953338

Description of 2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 and of 2007 Microsoft Office servers Language Pack Service Pack 2

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953334

The Server CU is released in two different versions. The first version is in Individual Packages specific to a particular product like WSS and Project Server. These are smaller downloads but they do not include language packs or patches for other products so patches for those products would have to be downloaded and installed separately.

The second version is the Server Rollup Packages. This is a set of two rollup packages which contains all the fixes for WSS, Project Server and MOSS. These packages should be used when MOSS is part of the deployment and/or you have language packs installed. The Server Rollup Packages are much larger but they will greatly simplify MOSS patch deployment.

Client Installation: (For reference – there were no fixes released for Project 2007 client in this cycle)

In order to install this hotfix, you will need to have Microsoft Project 2007 SP2 installed on the client.

Description of Office Project 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and of Office Project Language Pack 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953326

Once we know that SP2 is installed, you will install the hotfix by performing the following steps:

NOTE: Microsoft strongly recommends testing within a NON-Production environment prior to rollout.

1. Download the hotfix from either the KB Article.

2. Extract the patch package by running the .exe file that you downloaded.

3. Run the extracted .exe file to apply the patch to your Project Professional/Standard SP1 client.

Feel free to open a support incident at http://support.microsoft.com if you run into any issues with the installation and we will be happy to help!