Project Server 2013
Project 2013
Project Server 2010
I spotted this strange behavior on my own server – and after being put right by Adrian and realizing what the real issue was I thought we should share. If you have migrated from Project Server 2010 to Project Server 2013 then you should take a look at your administrative backups – just to make sure they are working. I took a look at my server which had half a dozen or so PWA instances all with different names (obviously) – yet when I looked at my timer jobs I saw what I initially thought were my 6 admin backups for the 6 PWA sites but all with the same name!
However, this is correct (almost) – and there is a job for each of the different items that you can back up – or 5 if you are in SharePoint Permissions mode. One ‘gotcha’ on the Project Server permissions view – the Categories and Groups option should not be there as it isn’t actually hooked up to anything – so don’t rely on having a backup of your groups and categories…
But what threw me, was that I have 6 different PWA sites, and if I look at the Daily Schedule Backup options for one of them show that I should have 2 Project versions backed up – and each of my backup items is set to schedule! (You can ignore the category and group settings option here too – it doesn’t do anything here either…). But nothing recent in my backup – last time was before migration…
It is not until I click save that I see the extra timer jobs for this other PWA instance (called PWS) created (visible through central Administration, Monitoring, Timer Job Definitions)
So if you are using Project Server 2013 always a good idea to check that you see these timer jobs – and also go in to Administrative Restore and see if there are backups showing with dates that make sense. Always better to find you have a good administrative backup before you need it – rather than after…
As we approach the anniversary of Project Online’s release I thought it was worth highlighting a few of the usability changes we have made over the intervening months. Thanks to the product group for making this happen – but thanks also to our customers for some of the great feedback that has led to some of these changes. The latest changes first – and we have made it far easier for users of PWA that also have a license for Project Pro for Office 365 to find the download – now we have it right in the Get Started carousel. This one is rolling out right now – if you don’t see it yet then it should be to your Project Online environment within the next week:
And the hover over tells you what this gets you – richer views and reports!
If you’ve already removed the Get Started carousel and want to take a new look – then just clicking the Gear icon and the Getting Started menu item will show you the same things.
And if you want it back on your home page – it is a Web Part so you can edit the page and find it listed under the Project Web App category.
You may have noticed another recent addition in the Get Started carousel too – just to the left of the Project Pro for Office 365 download link – the ‘New to Project Online?’ link.
This will take you to our TechNet page with plenty more useful information to help your journey with Project Online. If you’ve got this far then you (or someone in your organization) has already carried out step 1 – but steps 2 and 3 will help get people and projects into your new online environment.
What else? Well sometimes a blank page can be daunting – so we added some guidance if you aren’t seeing any projects to your Project Center:
Clicking ‘changing your view’ will bring the ribbon into play and show you the views dropdown:
Or ‘add a project’ will bring up a wizard to get you started with a new project – Or offer some other ways to get projects into your system:
*** Update 1/23 – even I got caught out with the new stuff here and didn’t have the lastest UI – so swapping out the next screenshot for the new ones. This is the same experience you will see if you click on the left hand tile in the Get Started carousel – Create or import projects
Here we see the out of the box SharePoint Task List and Enterprise Project – as well as a couple of extra Enterprise Project Types I have added to my system. I select Enterprise Project and click next:
Then I enter my project name, as well as any other information a different Enterprise Project Type might need in terms of custom fields, then click finish. It will show working on it…, and then Hold on, creating he project and will then take you to the schedule page to begin entering your tasks:
end of updated screen shots ***
(We have also added wizards to the New Project experience in Project Center.)
*** Update 4/16/2014 - All fixed up - the new project wizard will be coming back over the next few days or so ***
*** Update 1/23 - There is a slight issue with the New Project experience from the ribbon in Project Center right now, and users may see the 'Working on it..." dialog just carry on spinning. You should find that if you go to the Project Center it will have actually created your new plan. Sorry for this inconvenience - I understand a timing issue with some required css updates led to this - but it should be resolved soon. ***
More magic to come – if you are creating a SharePoint Task list project then we take you straight to Edit mode – the original experience didn’t make it clear what you needed to do next. So you get this:
rather than this:
Much better I think!
And there’s more… After you add your first task – it will automatically be added it to the timeline – just so you get the idea how it works and where to go to add further tasks to the timeline.
Another very useful addition to the project site is a way to get back to the Project Center – the ‘Projects’ link in the left navigation pane:
And following that link back we can get to one more of our new additions – more call-outs in Project Center. Each project now has a quick way to see status, open or share the plan – or a few more quick links to delete, edit the resource plan, build team or go to the project site.
I hope you are finding all these changes useful and if you think we are still missing some tricks then I’d be more than glad to have comments. Also thinking that we should switch gears and start pre-announcing some of this stuff so you know what is coming. Thoughts?
Project Online does have a slightly different feature set than Project Server 2013 – and one feature that I know many of you are missing is the task notifications and reminders. As we now replicate the tasks from the plan to the Project site there are some ways to get some of this functionality back via that list – and one of our Virtual Technical Specialists, and Partners, Ray Letts from Arbutus Solutions, has shared some details of how he achieves this for his customers. Also Doug Welsby – one of our Senior Solution Specialists – has shared some extra steps to ensure you can get these alerts to the right e-mail addresses if you do not also happen to use the associated Exchange Online domain for e-mail.
But first, I wanted to give a little insight to why that feature isn’t there. With any software release we have choices to make on where we invest – and for that feature there were some challenges that it didn’t already use the same notifications infrastructure as SharePoint, and the existing architecture would have given us some performance concerns – particularly in a multi-tenant environment. I know plenty of you are reading and thinking – yes, but we wanted that feature. Unfortunately even Microsoft has limited resources – and the challenge is that I am sure all of you would have chosen to sacrifice some different feature to get this one – you can’t please all of the people all of the time…
On to the other ways of achieving similar results – first from Ray Letts:
This article will show how we can enable notifications on task changes to team members for Project Online.
Project Online has a lot of great new features. That and being ‘married’ to SharePoint 2013 as an underlying platform brings along even more functionality.
One of the new features we can use in Project Online is the new SharePoint feature that alerts can be triggered off of a view. Previously alerts were based on changes to items in the list or library as a whole. Now by having views in the mix we can have smarter alerts that trigger based on a variety of conditions that fit your business process.
By default Project Online does not send emails to resources when they are assigned to a task. Some people want this feature on and some do not want to read the many emails that can possibly come in. So we can be a little creative and use this new functionality to give people what they want, notifications or not, in a self-serve manner that will make everyone happy.
One new feature essential to this is that Project Online synchronizes tasks for a project to the project site Task list (as well as Outlook tasks but that is another storyline.) With this great new feature and SharePoint’s alerts based on a view we can send email alerts to resources for their tasks only. To do this we just have to perform a couple of steps.
Steps in detail:
a. Go to your project site tasks list.
b. On the Lists ribbon select ‘Set alert on this list’.
c. Choose the options you like on this page to get notifications immediately as you please. The important area we are discussing is what changes to send alerts for. Choose the last ‘view’ option and select the ‘My Tasks’ view.
d. Note I had to ‘Modify’ the My Tasks view to get it to show up here. Just go in and immediately save it with no changes.
2. Test the alert Assign yourself to a task. Save and publish. You should receive an email if you set the alert to send immediately.
2. Test the alert
d. Above is the email alert I received by just adding myself to the task. You can see what fields were changed and all 3. Save as template (optional) Once you have your project site template the way you want it with views, custom lists and fields you can save it as a template. Then in the PWA settings you can edit an EPT (Enterprise Project Type) and associate your new template with that EPT. Now when you create a project and associated site the custom views will come along for you to set alerts to. Alerts do not come along with the template. This makes sense in that you may not even be on the project and thus would not want to receive alerts. Conclusion In this short blog we’ve seen how new features and functionality in both SharePoint and Project Online (2013) can be used together to allow notifications on tasks to the team involved. Now that Project Online synchronizes tasks in a schedule to the project site tasks list and now that SharePoint allows views based off of alerts we can be creative and link the two features to send alerts that match your business to the right people. Good luck and all the best in the New Year! Ray Letts, MCTS, Arbutus Solutions
d. Above is the email alert I received by just adding myself to the task. You can see what fields were changed and all
3. Save as template (optional)
In this short blog we’ve seen how new features and functionality in both SharePoint and Project Online (2013) can be used together to allow notifications on tasks to the team involved. Now that Project Online synchronizes tasks in a schedule to the project site tasks list and now that SharePoint allows views based off of alerts we can be creative and link the two features to send alerts that match your business to the right people.
Good luck and all the best in the New Year!
Ray Letts, MCTS, Arbutus Solutions
Now for some extra points contributed by Doug Welsby around setting the right e-mail address for your notifications:
On my Project Online demo site, my user account has a default domain name of @<mytenant>.onMicrosoft.com. I had to modify this domain name in my email address attribute in order to start receiving alerts at my @Microsoft.com account instead of the Project Online domain. It’s not obvious where to do this, but here you go:
Thanks again to Ray and Doug for sharing. I am certainly anticipating that I might get quite a few comments on this topic and we certainly welcome the feedback. I’m not aware of the future direction of this feature – but having good constructive feedback certainly helps us make decisions on feature choices.
I’ve run into this “Token contains invalid signature” issue with SharePoint and Project Server 2013 workflows a couple of times, and also referred to in the logs as Invalid JWT token – and the error shows “invalid client” too. The symptom is the workflow starts but then shows as cancelled – and hitting the additional workflow information page for Project Server workflows and the information icon will give the error at the foot of the posting (for search engine consumption…) – and the forums tend to say that just wait a day and it goes away but no one that I could find knew what the overnight change was…. Well today wasn’t a day I wanted to wait – so I had a look around for which daily timer jobs might help things work. I tried a few service restarts first – but finally found the “Refresh Trusted Security Token Services Metadata feed” timer job – clicked the Run Now button – then tried another workflow and all was good!
I hope this helps someone – and I’d also like validation if this does work for you as I am not 100% sure it was what fixed my issue. With these things that can just start working again it could have been something else. Change in the wind perhaps?
*** Update 1/14/2014 - Thanks to Hans Bellen of UMT for validating that this is the timer job - and he also had some other guidance:
- Make sure you run the WF as a non-system account
- If this is a new farm, run the following timer jobs in SharePoint
1.Workflow Auto Cleanup 2.Notification Timer Job c02c63c2-12d8-4ec0-b678-f05c7e00570e 3.Hold Processing and Reporting 4.Bulk workflow task processing5.Refresh Trusted Security Token Services Metadata feed [Farm job – Daily]
*** End Update
Here is the full error information:
RequestorId: ab0ccadd-86a9-592e-40cb-22e59fbbf08d. Details: System.ApplicationException: HTTP 401 {"x-ms-diagnostics":["3000006;reason=\"Token contains invalid signature.\";category=\"invalid_client\""],"SPRequestGuid":["b70e7628-6c00-49b5-a06a-db91bcf2c0ec"],"request-id":["b70e7628-6c00-49b5-a06a-db91bcf2c0ec"],"X-FRAME-OPTIONS":["SAMEORIGIN"],"SPRequestDuration":["114"],"SPIisLatency":["1"],"Server":["Microsoft-IIS\/8.0"],"WWW-Authenticate":["Bearer realm=\"5418e74f-0449-4a4c-a1be-ba58377ac362\",client_id=\"00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000\",trusted_issuers=\"00000005-0000-0000-c000-000000000000@*,00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000@5418e74f-0449-4a4c-a1be-ba58377ac362\"","NTLM"],"X-Powered-By":["ASP.NET"],"MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices":["15.0.0.4535"],"X-Content-Type-Options":["nosniff"],"X-MS-InvokeApp":["1; RequireReadOnly"],"Date":["Mon, 13 Jan 2014 22:15:08 GMT"]} at Microsoft.Activities.Hosting.Runtime.Subroutine.SubroutineChild.Execute(CodeActivityContext context) at System.Activities.CodeActivity.InternalExecute(ActivityInstance instance, ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager) at System.Activities.Runtime.ActivityExecutor.ExecuteActivityWorkItem.ExecuteBody(ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager, Location resultLocation)
and the ULS logs will say something like:
01/13/2014 14:15:09.25 w3wp.exe (0x2FB8) 0x1E88 SharePoint Foundation Application Authentication ajez0 High SPApplicationAuthenticationModule: Invalid token or signature. Exception: System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityTokenException: Invalid JWT token. Could not resolve issuer token. at Microsoft.IdentityModel.S2S.Tokens.JsonWebSecurityTokenHandler.ReadTokenCore(String token, Boolean isActorToken) at Microsoft.IdentityModel.S2S.Tokens.JsonWebSecurityTokenHandler.ReadActor(IDictionary`2 payload) at Microsoft.IdentityModel.S2S.Tokens.JsonWebSecurityTokenHandler.ReadTokenCore(String token, Boolean isActorToken) at Microsoft.SharePoint.IdentityModel.SPApplicationAuthenticationModule.TryExtractAndValidateToken(HttpContext httpContext, SPIncomingTokenContext& tokenContext) 529744b4-b81b-4728-b2f7-ddaebb0e6e1e
01/13/2014 14:15:09.27 w3wp.exe (0x2FB8) 0x1E88 SharePoint Foundation Application Authentication ajezq High SPApplicationAuthenticationModule: Error authenticating request, Error details: Header: 3000006;reason="Token contains invalid signature.";category="invalid_client", Body: {"error_description":"Invalid JWT token. Could not resolve issuer token."} 529744b4-b81b-4728-b2f7-ddaebb0e6e1e
01/13/2014 14:15:09.27 w3wp.exe (0x2FB8) 0x1E88 SharePoint Foundation General 8nca Medium Application error when access /PWA/_vti_bin/client.svc, Error=Invalid JWT token. Could not resolve issuer token. at Microsoft.IdentityModel.S2S.Tokens.JsonWebSecurityTokenHandler.ReadTokenCore(String token, Boolean isActorToken) at Microsoft.IdentityModel.S2S.Tokens.JsonWebSecurityTokenHandler.ReadActor(IDictionary`2 payload) at Microsoft.IdentityModel.S2S.Tokens.JsonWebSecurityTokenHandler.ReadTokenCore(String token, Boolean isActorToken) at Microsoft.SharePoint.IdentityModel.SPApplicationAuthenticationModule.TryExtractAndValidateToken(HttpContext httpContext, SPIncomingTokenContext& tokenContext) 529744b4-b81b-4728-b2f7-ddaebb0e6e1e