Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Content Publishing News : Content

New performance best practices white paper

robert.m.hoover — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Performance and capacity planning best practices

This download contains two white papers:

Performance testing white paper
Performance and capacity planning best practices white paper

Performance testing white paper

This white paper contains a description of an actual performance testing lab for Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.

The first chapter (“Running a Project Server 2007 Performance Test Lab”), describes how to run performance tests against a Office Project Server 2007 deployment by using Visual Studio Team System 2008 and a set of community-based tools built for the purpose.

The second chapter (“Test Environment”), documents the specifics of the lab environment that was used for the tests we ran for collecting data for this white paper.

The third chapter (“Test Results”), describes in detail the test scenarios that were conducted, and it summarizes the data collected for every scenario.

The paper is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

Download size: 4 MB

Performance and capacity planning best practices white paper

The purpose of this guide is to extend the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 Performance Testing Lab white paper by providing best practices and recommendations.

This paper examines a wide array of system objects, including:

Platform-related objects — including the farm, shared service providers, application pools, web applications, databases, disks, network, memory, CPU, logs, and performance counters
Data-related objects — including projects, tasks, assignments, resources, custom fields, and security
User-related objects — including localization, workloads, queue job processor threads, and interface feeds

For each system object, the following information is provided:

Definition — The definition of the object
Guidelines for acceptable performance — The best practices and supporting statements
Calculation factors — The performance and scalability calculations to support the best practices
Scope of impact — A list of objects affected in the system when best practices are not implemented

Hyper-V Security Guide

robert.m.hoover — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:38:00 GMT

The Solution Accelerators team has just released a new Hyper-V Security guide that may prove helpful in designing secure Project Server deployments in Hyper-V.

The guide is available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2220624b-a562-4e79-aa69-a7b3dffdd090&displaylang=en

Secure your virtualized server environment with the Hyper-V Security Guide

For organizations that seek cost-effective operations, the benefits of virtualization are more evident than ever. Microsoft Hyper-V technology allows consolidation of workloads that are currently spread across multiple underutilized servers onto a smaller number of servers. This capability provides you with a way to reduce costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead while creating a
more dynamic IT infrastructure.

Virtualization technologies are causing enterprise organizations to shift their thinking about IT. The Hyper-V Security Guide can help you elevate the security of virtualized Windows Server® environments to address your business-critical needs. This accelerator provides IT professionals like you with recommendations to address your key security concerns around server virtualization. The guide provides authoritative guidance that relates to the following strategies for securing virtualized environments:

Hardening the Hyper-V role. The guide provides prescriptive guidance for hardening the Hyper-V role, including several best practices for installing and configuring Hyper-V with a focus on security. Among these best practices are measures for reducing the attack surface of Hyper-V as well as recommendations for properly configuring secure virtual networks and storage devices.

Delegating virtual machine management. The ability to safely and securely delegate administrative access to virtual machine resources within an organization is essential. The guide highlights several available methods to administer different aspects of a virtual machine infrastructure and ways to control administrative access to
different servers and at different levels.

Protecting virtual machines. The guide also provides prescriptive guidance for securing virtual machine resources, including best practices and detailed steps for protecting virtual machines by using
a combination of file system permissions, encryption, and auditing.

Newly Published Content!

robert.m.hoover — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:09:00 GMT

After a short publishing hiatus, here is some content that we've been working on:

Deploy Project Server 2007 updates This article provides an overview of available Project Server 2007 updates.

Checklist for deploying Project Server 2007 updates This checklist describes the general sequence in updating a Project Server 2007 farm deployment to the most current update. It also gives references to other articles that provide detailed guidance and procedures for installing various type of Project Server 2007 updates.

Office Project Server 2007 performance counters This technical reference article provides a list of performance indications you can monitor in Project Server 2007.

Inventory of SQL Server databases for a typical Project Server 2007 deployment This technical reference article provides a list of databases that are created in a Project Server 2007 and Portfolio Server 2007 deployment.

Video demo: Using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services with the Project Server 2007 Cube Building Service This two-part video demonstration walks through the steps necessary to configure the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 cube building services for use with SQL Server Analysis Services 2005.

Walkthrough: Deploy Project Server 2007 to a server farm environment This article contains a white paper and a four-part video series which provide a walkthrough of a typical Office Project Server 2007 deployment. The white paper contains step-by-step instructions for each step necessary to successfully deploy Office Project Server 2007. While the scenario described in the white paper may differ from the deployment scenario that you plan to use for your organization, you can gain significant hands-on experience by following the steps described herein in a test environment.

Virtualizing Project Server 2007 This section includes six topics that explain hyper-v architecture and best practices for planning, installing, and configuring a Project Server 2007 deployment on Hyper-V.

Project Server 2007 webcasts This set of articles describes and links to archived Project Server TechNet Webcasts. Topics include server administration, network communication, workload scenarios and reference architecture, and data flow.

Deploy cumulative updates (Project Server 2007) This article has been updated to provide information regarding client update requirements for cumulative updates that include the Project Server 2007 infrastructure update. It also provides information about cumulative update server packages for Project Server 2007 integrated with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Deploy the infrastructure update for Office Project Server 2007 This article has been updated to reflect Project 2007 client requirements for the Project Server 2007 infrastructure update.

Deploy Service Pack 1 for Office Project Server 2007 This article has been updated to reflect Project 2007 client requirements for the Project Server 2007 infrastructure update.

Migration best practices for Project Server 2007 This article has been updated to describe the best practice of applying the latest update to the Project Professional 2007 client from which you run the migration tool to ensure that it has the latest updates.

Prepare for migration to Project Server 2007 This article has been updated to describe the best practice of applying the latest update to the Project Professional 2007 client from which you run the migration tool to ensure that it has the latest updates.

Requirements for using SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services with the Project Server 2007 Cube Building Service This article has been updated to refer to the Feature Pack for SQL Server 2005 – December 2008. The Analysis Management Objects installed with the SQL Server 2005 Management Objects that were in earlier versions of the SQL Server 2005 Feature pack required a workaround in order for the Cube Building Service to function correctly.

EPM University

robert.m.hoover — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:01:00 GMT

I just wanted to quickly call out a recent post from Jan Kalis on the Project Programmability blog about our EPM training offerings at EPMU.

The post is located here: http://blogs.msdn.com/project_programmability/archive/2009/03/27/do-you-epmu.aspx

New Project Server videos!

robert.m.hoover — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:26:00 GMT

Mike Plumley here on our team has just come up with some awesome high quality videos that walk through a Project Server 2007 farm installation as well as the configuration of the Project Server 2007 Cube Building Service.

You can download these videos from the Microsoft download center here:

Installing Project Server 2007 (four parts)

Using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services with the Project Server 2007 Cube Building Service (two parts)

Please comment and let us know what you think. You can also email Mike directly at mike.plumley@microsoft.com with any comments or requests for future topics.

Here are a couple screenshots:

Newly Published Content for December and January

robert.m.hoover — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:52:00 GMT

Back up and restore the Project Server 2007 farm

The articles in this section offer prescriptive guidance and how-to topics dealing with farm level backup and recovery for Project Server using both built-in tools and SQL Server tools.

Migrating a Project Web Access instance (Project Server 2007)

The articles in this section offer prescriptive guidance and how-to information for migrating Project data.

Newly Published Project Server Content 11/08

robert.m.hoover — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:19:00 GMT

Enterprise disaster recovery for Project Server 2007

This series of articles describes procedures and best practices for backing up and restoring Office Project Server 2007 using SQL Server tools.

Deploy cumulative updates (Project Server 2007)

This article describes how to install Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 cumulative updates.

Plan for disaster recovery in Project Server 2007

This series of articles describes best practices for planning a disaster recovery solution for Microsoft Office Project Server 2007. It has been updated to include specific guidance about when to use SQL Server tools and when to use SharePoint Products and Technologies tools.

Planning for fault tolerance and availability in Project Server 2007

This article provides planning guidance for fault tolerance and availability in a Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 deployment.

Cube building process overview

This article describes the process for building OLAP cubes and available cubes. It has been updated to provide further guidance and best practices around using the cubes.

Office Project Server 2007 Technical Library in Compiled Help format

The entire library for Office Project Server 2007 is now available as a downloadable .chm file. This download includes all content in the library as of November 6 2008. This download will be updated monthly.

Plan for administrative and service accounts (Project Server)

This article describes the accounts required for a Office Project Server 2007 deployment. It has been updated to specify that service accounts require permission to log on interactively on the computers running the service in question.

Deploy Project Server 2007 to a server farm environment

This article describes how to deploy Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 in a farm environment. It has been updated to reflect the fact that SQL Server connections over named pipes are not required for Office Project Server 2007.

Newly Published Project Portfolio Server Content for October

robert.m.hoover — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:02:00 GMT

Environment Migration Guide

This guide describes how to migrate Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 from one environment to another one. This scenario is frequently used to duplicate a production environment as a QA or Development environment.

Gateway Guide

This guide describes the Gateway functionality for syncing Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 with Microsoft Office Project 2007.

Understanding Workflow

This guide describes the workflow functionality and configuration for Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 and provides examples for the workflow setting.

Newly Published Project Professional Content for September

robert.m.hoover — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:05:00 GMT

Create a custom field

Use this article to learn how to create, import, insert, and rename a custom field.

Watch this: Create a custom field

This video walks you through the process of creating a custom field that is associated with a list, and that uses graphical indicators.

Work with the Gantt Chart view

This article provides information on how to use each part of the Gantt Chart view.

Project Server Quick Reference Guide for project managers

This quick reference guide displays all the tasks a project manager is likely to do with Project Server. A team member version is due out soon.

Podcast: Britney Spears, the ultimate project manager

This is a link to an external podcast about Britney Spears as the ultimate project manager. It is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but makes good points about project management skills in general.

What’s all this talk about Web 2.0

This Office Hours article discusses Web 2.0 and software plus services model.

Newly Published Project Server Content for September

robert.m.hoover — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:19:00 GMT

GPS Assistance in Roadmapping an EPM Deployment: How do you create a roadmap for an EPM implementation?

This is the latest white paper by Chris Vandersluis in the "From the Trenches — Deploying the EPM Solution in the Real World" column on the Project Server TechCenter page.

Project Server 2007 Hyper-V guide

This downloadable, 37-page document provides IT administrators with information about how to set up Project Server 2007 in a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environment.

Database maintenance plans for Project Server 2007

This chapter describes best practices for creating database maintenance plans for Project Server 2007 databases.

Newly Published Project Server Content for August

robert.m.hoover — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:29:00 GMT

Plan for using Project Server 2007 in a Hyper-V virtual environment

This article compares virtual server environments to physical server environments and explains special considerations for deploying and using Microsoft Office Project 2007 in a virtual server environment.

Manage Active Directory synchronization in Project Server 2007

This article has been updated to include additional best practices and resource references.

Microsoft Project Server Hyper-V Guides

robert.m.hoover — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:56:00 GMT

I just wanted to leave a note on here for readers that we are currently working on getting a Project Server Hyper-V guide published within the next couple weeks.

This week expect to see a "newly published" post that includes a link to a new article on TechNet titled "Using Project Server 2007 in a Hyper-V virtual environment".