Behavior of editable My Tasks shared web part

[andy.novak]

I think I have a good one for you this time. Several people were
complaining that as the My Tasks items list grows, they were having to
go through multiple pages and submit their progress multiple times.

On the My Tasks page, I found that you can edit the shared web part,
so I did the following:

Site Actions | Edit Page | Edit Modified Web Part

Under the Project Web Access section, I changed the following:

1. Items Per Page - increased to 90 from original number

2. Work Format - changed from days to hours so that Remaining Work is
compatible with the daily entry

Some of the users are saying that at one time, all their assignments
were on one page, but now some are saying that they are having to
revert back to selecting multiple pages - and Remaining Work is
displayed in days, not hours.

Let me repeat, SOME are experiencing this whereas I have one user who
has everything displayed on one page and shows Remaining Work as hours
instead of Days.

What gives???? This seems to be pretty inconsistent although I
expected the change I made to be universal.

Please share if you have experienced this and/or know of a solution.

Best,
Andy Novak
UNT

 

[andy.novak]

I think I have a good one for you this time. Several people were
complaining that as the My Tasks items list grows, they were having to
go through multiple pages and submit their progress multiple times.

On the My Tasks page, I found that you can edit the shared web part,
so I did the following:

Site Actions | Edit Page | Edit Modified Web Part

Under the Project Web Access section, I changed the following:

1. Items Per Page - increased to 90 from original number

2. Work Format - changed from days to hours so that Remaining Work is
compatible with the daily entry

Some of the users are saying that at one time, all their assignments
were on one page, but now some are saying that they are having to
revert back to selecting multiple pages - and Remaining Work is
displayed in days, not hours.

Let me repeat, SOME are experiencing this whereas I have one user who
has everything displayed on one page and shows Remaining Work as hours
instead of Days.

What gives???? This seems to be pretty inconsistent although I
expected the change I made to be universal.

Please share if you have experienced this and/or know of a solution.

Best,
Andy Novak
UNT

Let me add more to this. I went into one of my projects and added
several hundred tasks just to see the max lines I was able to display
as a user (I had set the max at 500).

What I noticed, even now after I deleted the "test" tasks/assignments,
is that when you select My Tasks, there is quite a bit of "thrashing"
going on to where at the bottom left hand side of the screen, it keeps
flashing the following URL:

http://servername/_layouts/pwa/images/blank.gif

After quite a long time, there is what looks to be like a countdown of
some sort, after which the assignments are finally displayed in the
browser. Is there a performance-related configuration I need to be
aware of for PWA?

Could someone please comment on this as well as the behavior
originally mentioned above??

I'd really appreciate it.

Andy Novak
UNT

 

[Bryant Likes]

[snip]

After quite a long time, there is what looks to be like a countdown of
some sort, after which the assignments are finally displayed in the
browser. Is there a performance-related configuration I need to be
aware of for PWA?

There are some issues with the My Tasks view in PWA that we came across. One
of the things that I found helped to speed things up was the defrag the
indexes on the project databases. These seems to become heavily fragmented
because they use non-sequincial guids for the primary keys. We actually
created a job that would do this every night.

However, even this did not give us the speed we needed for this page. The
slowness combined with the fact that if you save any change you have to
navigate back to the page you were on caused us to seek an alternative
solution. What we ended up doing was writing an add-in for Excel that pulls
all of a users tasks into Excel using the PSI. It works really well and puts
people in an environment they like.

Let me know if you would like more info and I'll see what I can post.

Could someone please comment on this as well as the behavior
originally mentioned above??

I can't really comment on the other behavior except to say we had lots of
issues with the My Tasks view and decided to not use it.

 

[andy.novak]

[snip]

After quite a long time, there is what looks to be like a countdown of
some sort, after which the assignments are finally displayed in the
browser. Is there a performance-related configuration I need to be
aware of for PWA?

There are some issues with the My Tasks view in PWA that we came across. One
of the things that I found helped to speed things up was the defrag the
indexes on the project databases. These seems to become heavily fragmented
because they use non-sequincial guids for the primary keys. We actually
created a job that would do this every night.

However, even this did not give us the speed we needed for this page. The
slowness combined with the fact that if you save any change you have to
navigate back to the page you were on caused us to seek an alternative
solution. What we ended up doing was writing an add-in for Excel that pulls
all of a users tasks into Excel using the PSI. It works really well and puts
people in an environment they like.

Let me know if you would like more info and I'll see what I can post.

Could someone please comment on this as well as the behavior
originally mentioned above??

I can't really comment on the other behavior except to say we had lots of
issues with the My Tasks view and decided to not use it.

Bryant, are they entering their time through Excel?

I wonder if the Outlook Add-In would improve things?

 

[AmWall]

I would be interested in knowing this:
Our users are complaing that it takes so long to enter the task updates for
multiple tasks and projects. So, please let us know the etails

[snip]

After quite a long time, there is what looks to be like a countdown of
some sort, after which the assignments are finally displayed in the
browser. Is there a performance-related configuration I need to be
aware of for PWA?

There are some issues with the My Tasks view in PWA that we came across. One
of the things that I found helped to speed things up was the defrag the
indexes on the project databases. These seems to become heavily fragmented
because they use non-sequincial guids for the primary keys. We actually
created a job that would do this every night.

However, even this did not give us the speed we needed for this page. The
slowness combined with the fact that if you save any change you have to
navigate back to the page you were on caused us to seek an alternative
solution. What we ended up doing was writing an add-in for Excel that pulls
all of a users tasks into Excel using the PSI. It works really well and puts
people in an environment they like.

Let me know if you would like more info and I'll see what I can post.

Could someone please comment on this as well as the behavior
originally mentioned above??

I can't really comment on the other behavior except to say we had lots of
issues with the My Tasks view and decided to not use it.