I'm doing a free webcast on some of the new ways to work with MS Project 2010 on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 8:00 AM Pacific Time. You can register in advance at this link:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032434176
I'll post the slides after the presentation.
In case you missed the live event, here is the link to the webcast I did earlier this month:
http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/epm.aspx?tab=Webcasts&seriesid=51&webcastid=12426
It covers how you can best use some of the new functionality in Project 2010 including the new interface, the team planner view, the timeline view and using active tasks to do scenario-based planning. Active tasks fill a big hole in Project and allow you to do what-if analysis in a quick and intuitive way.
Go take a look!
To accomodate the new features in Project 2010 there have been some new fields introduced. Here they are with some idea of what they are used for:
Active - Used to designate if a task is active or inactive. A great new way to deal with conditional schedules, agile development, what-if analysis. I'm working up a post on this.
Task Mode - Used to determine if a task is to be manual scheduled or whether they should follow the built-in CPM scheduling algorithm.
Scheduled Start - Used for Manually scheduled tasks. Start, Finish and Duration are optional for manually scheduled tasks.
Scheduled Finish - as above
Scheduled Duration - as above
Warning - Used with manually scheduled tasks if the timing or sequencing of tasks would be considered an issue (ie: dependency issues, summary doesn't match subtasks etc.) - See my webcast in the previous post for an example of using this field.
Ignore Warnings - Pretty much what it says....
Baseline Estimated Start 0-10 - Estimated Baselines are how manually scheduled task information is stored in a baseline. Regular baselines are used for automatically scheduled tasks.
Baseline Estimated Finish 0-10 - as above
Baseline Estimated Duration 0-10 - as above.
Note that the Active field is a Project Professional only feature, so if you have Project Standard you may not be able to do anything with it. I'm not sure how Project Standard will handle reading a file from Project Professional which uses this feature but I'm sure we will find out when it is released.
Latest news is that Office 2010 (and Project, Visio and Sharepoint 2010) are on track to release to manufacturing next month. Unless something unexpected happens, they are supposed to be released to businesses on May 12, 2010. Regular users who don't have enterprise agreements will have to wait until June for the software.
I'd expect that they would be on MSDN at the May 12 date as well if history is any guide.
To keep sales from completely stalling while people wait for the next version, Microsoft has also announced a "tech guarantee" which will give you a free copy of the 2010 version if you buy a 2007 version after March 4, 2010. Details are here: http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/tech-guarantee/
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Project in the Microsoft Project 2010 category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
Examples is the previous category.
MS Project Tips is the next category.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
