Creating tempates in addition to Global Enterprise

[toymoto]

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but I have not yet been able to start
properly researching this and am being pressed for an immediate answer:

Within the organization I am working at, IT controls the administration of
MS Project Enterprise; the department that I am in uses Enterprise for
Projects that I am managing; We are not able to add any resources ourselves,
not allowed to delete old projects, not allowed to make any changes to any of
the settings on the admin panel relating to our projects. For anything other
than simple managing of the projects we have no rights to do anything and
must go through IT to make those changes (i.e. add a resource to the
Enterprise Pool, change a label in Project Web Access, change the working
calendar etc). A lot of the time the resource in IT who supports Project
Enterprise doesn't know how to do it and has to go to their outside
consulting support company...turnaround time for the SIMPLEST of changes
therefore takes upwards of a week.
I want to avoid this; I want us to be able to add people to projects (via
Enterprise Pool), I want us to be able to add labels, categories etc to
things in Project Web Access. Complicating some of this is the refusal to
allow us access to certain things such as the ability to nest projects within
other projects on the Enterprise Server as IT says that this will bugger up
their project plans.

Short of running an entirely separate version of Project Enterprise (which
cost and practical reasons dictate against) I am trying to look at what other
options may be; for example, I believe that you can set up templates in Proj.
Enterprise so that we have certain rights within that template to be able to
do things on the server so that we can add users to our Projects, we can make
changes that only affect our Projects that run off our template...does anyone
have any experience with this, or any advice for my situation in how to
handle this from within Project Enterprise?

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi toymoto ,

Try posting on the server newsgroup. Please see FAQ Item: 24. Project
Newsgroups. FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information
can be seen at this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

toymoto --

In the future, please post your Project Server questions in the
microsoft.public.project.server newsgroup, as this newsgroup is devoted to
the Microsoft Project desktop application only. To answer your question,
your IT people are taking a very "locked down" approach to managing Project
Server, which is not all bad. However, as they are currently managing the
system, they have created an environment that is clumsy at best and futile
at its worst.

To set the permissions that you seek, your IT people would need to add you
to the Administrators group in Project Web Access. This would allow you to
add resources to the Enterprise Resource Pool, create custom enterprise
fields and outline codes in the Enterprise Global file, and create custom
Views in both Microsoft Project Professional and PWA, for example.

Since I am a consultant and trainer professionally, I believe your company
would be WAY AHEAD FINANCIALLY if they would have one or two people from
your part of the organization, along with one or two IT people, to go
through a formal Project Server administrators class. Believe me, there are
many Project Server administrators "out there" who are non-IT people who
come into that role from the project management side of the company, so you
would not be alone as a non-IT person in that role. After successfully
completing the class, I would recommend that your IT people add you and the
other non-IT Project Server administrator to the Administrators group in
PWA. This will allow you to administer Project Server for your
organization, and would only require the involvement of IT when you need
specific IT skills, such as examining application Event logs or creating a
query in the SQL Server database, for example.

If you are interested in training for Project Server administrators, click
either of the two links in my signature block. We offer virtual classes
over the Internet, on-site classes at your company, or open enrollment
classes at our HQ in New York City. Let us know if we can help.

 

[toymoto]

I am going to move this over to the appropriate group...sorry for missing the
target first time around.