Can't see some new projects in PWA "Assign Myself to an Existing Task"

[Don]

We are publishing new plans for the new year, and we are having a
problem of some of the plans not showing up in the Project drop down
list on the "Assign Myself to anExisting Task" page in PWA.

We are receiving no errors on the Project servers.
We have republished the projects several times.
Other new plans are showing up in the list.

These are plans that were used last year and have been purged of data
and renamed (no illegal characters) for the new year.

Any suggestions on what to look at would help. Thanks.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Don:

We strongly recommend against re-using plan files on Project Server. Our
experience tells us that there is no way to completely "purge" data from a
plan file once it has resided on a Project Server instance. You should
rebuild these by copying textual data only. Do not copy by row. You can copy
the task name column, but understand that you'll need to re-build the
summary task structure manually. You can also copy columns such as work,
duration and predecessor, but never select calculated datea columns.

 

[Don]

Thanks for the suggestion Gary. I am trying to get accurate
information from my project managers on what they are actually doing.
It is easier for them to blame it on the server than fix the plan.
However, if other plans are publishing fine, this would indicate
nothing is wrong on the server side and they do not want to accept that.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Don:

With the stand-alone tool, reusing plans to create templates is a
long-standing best practice. Even still, it requires a very methodical
cleansing to do this effectively. We cover this procedure in our new Project
book, Ultimate Learning Guide to Microsoft Office Project 2007, that starts
shipping week after next. The issue with Project Server is that the binary
project record cannot be fully purged of its previous existence on Project
Server. Therefore, the system sees these as previously published. With a
plan like this, you need to start with "Republish" rather than "Publish."
Even if this solves your immediate problem, I'm loathe to tell you that this
is acceptable practice, rather than recommending a best practice.