Local custom fields disappearing from projects

[John Bridgman]

We have seen the following problem a few times. I think it may be related to
poor maintenance practices on Enterprise Global but not sure :

1. Project manager customizes some Task fields locally (by renaming user
Text and Flag fields), adds them as columns in their default Gantt view, and
enters data into the columns.

2. Periodically the data in some or all of the custom fields disappears, ie
when the project is loaded from Project Server the columns are blank. In at
least one case it seemed that the project was loaded (data OK), was NOT
saved, then was loaded again and the data was missing.

In parallel with this we have had some problems with new admins maintaining
Enterprise Global and accidentally adding local views (eg. Task => Entry) to
the Enterprise Global. This results in a warning message which the PM
sometimes ignores, choosing "Replace" which blows away their local copy of
the Entry (Gantt) view. PMs are starting to learn that hitting "Replace" is
a Bad Thing but I think I still have one admin running around telling PMs
that "it's OK, you won't lose anything".

So, here's the big question. I fully understand that hitting "Replace" and
overwriting the local copy of Entry will blow away any customizations the PM
might have added, but I wouldn't expect the underlying field contents (the
data entered into the columns) to be lost. Then again, I have only a tenuous
understanding of what an MS Project "table" really corresponds to -- I
assumed it was more like what we normally call a view but after the last few
data losses I'm starting to doubt that.

Note that I do not have any smoking gun proof that the data loss was related
to the PM over-writing a local copy of Entry but the three dates of data
loss do correspond exactly to the three days I know Enterprise Global was
messed up.

Comments appreciated.

Thanks,
JB

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

John:

It seems to me that you've laid out a plausible explanation for the lost
data. The key is to stop the accidental pollution of the Enterprise Global
by at least implementing an QA testing step after any change.

 

[TGG]

John,

One of the things we advise our PMs to do is to create a separate table and
view for custom views rather than modifing the default views. As we do have
a need from time to time to modify the default views, separate table and view
customizations prevent overwriting from occurring.

So, I have a Gantt - TG view that I've configured and is based on the Gantt
view. But now I don't have to worry about it being overwritten.

As for your other problem, I wondering if somehow the enterprise global has
been contaminated. We had an instance in 2002 where two local non-enterprise
custom fields somehow got modified in the global. In our case, they would
appear in the fields tab under Organizer. While they didn't overwrite data,
we had a devil of a time getting rid of it. We also had issues changing the
global since it would tell us there were local non-enterprise fields present.

If you had something along those lines, it would overwrite the local custom
field on open. However, as Microsoft told us, we probably were one of a
handful of people worldwide that had this issue and we never tracked down how
it occurred. Once we converted to 2003, we never saw the issue again.

TGG