PM's are not getting task changes by Resources

[San Diego]

Hi,
We have about 30 people working on our projects and any % changes to their
tasks are not getting sent/updated to the project.

One other thing. My resources permissions are limited to only allowing 2
items in their category permission table. I have only allowed - See Projects
in Project Center & See Projects in Project Views. These folks have the "Team
Member" security access that I have heavily restricted. Maybe I have
restricted their category permissions too much. Are there any other
permissions that I should be allowing so that my Resource folks task updates
get to the PM?
Thanks,
Gary

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Gary --

So far, people are not responding to your series of posts on this subject,
so I'll try to start a conversation with you, but I invite others to assist
if they have ideas.

First of all, I do not believe the permissions for Team Members are the
source of this problem. So, let me restate your problem if I may: Team
members are updating actuals to their PM's, but the PM's are not getting
e-mails, and PM's cannot see those updates on their Updates page in PWA. Is
this correct? If so, were PM's ever able to receive updates from their team
members? And are you seeing errors in the server's application event log?
Let us know.

 

[San Diego]

Your description sounds correct. Another bit of information is: During my
testing, I would change a percentage of work complete in the task screen, I
would then put my cursor over the left column and this note would come up....
"An update for the this task has been sent to Gary Krater on 10/25/05 but has
not yet been updated in the project"
Question on errors, yes there are some and here are details of one of those
errors:
Product: Exchange 2000 Management Pack Objects -- The Microsoft Exchange
Messaging and Collaboration Services component is not installed on this
Exchange 2000 Server. The installation program may be running on an Exchange
2000 Server administrator-only computer.
Is there a certain type or number of error I should be looking for??
Thanks much for your help Dale!!!!
Gary

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Gary --

1. Are your team members actually clicking the Update All or Update
Selected Rows button in the View my tasks page to send their updates to the
PM? Yes or No.

2. Can the PM ever see these task updates on their Updates page in PWA?
Yes or No.

3. Please post the exact error messages you are seeing in the server's
application event log. I will invite our technical specialists to look at
the error log and see if they can diagnose your problem.

Let us know.

 

[San Diego]

Hi,
1) Yes
2) Yes & No Yes - when I go into the Task tab, I see the changes.
No - when I go into Projects, open and view the project , there are no
changes.
And of course within Project, the PM's project is not showing any % changes.
I will get you the error codes tomorrow.
Thanks,
Gary

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

San Diego --

You didn't answer question #2. What I need to know is whether your PM's can
actually see the task updates on their Updates page in PWA. They DO NOT go
to the Projects page; they need to go to the Updates page. From there, the
PM's need to either approve or reject each task update, and then click the
Update button to "push" the task changes into the actual project plan in
Microsoft Project Professional. Are your PM's actually using the process I
have detailed? If not, then they are doing it wrong. Let us know.

 

[San Diego]

Dale,
No they were not doing this process. I had one of them testing this and they
went ahead and setup a rule. But we think it worked great before they setup
the rule. Now the process i.e. she is not getting emails once again since she
setup the rule, so we are testing more without the rule to see if she gets my
email notices. Then she will go in and follow the process that you provided.
Thanks for your help and will update you if and when we get this working
consistently. Is this process addressed in you book? - Administering and
Enterprise PMO
Thanks Gary

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Gary --

I would strongly recommend AGAINST the use of Rules to process task updates
in PWA. You need to realize that when a task update does not meet the
requirements of a rule, the system does not process the task update, and it
remains unprocessed on the Updates page. That might be the source of your
PM's problems.

Also, we recommend that PM's manually process task updates on the Updates
page of PWA so that they can more easily understand what their team members
are trying to tell them through their task updates. Furthermore, we
recommend processing the task updates from only one project at a time, so
that the PM can understand the impact of actuals on that one project before
attempting to process task updates for other projects .

The process of handling task updates in PWA is well documented in our
Managing Enterprise Projects Using Microsoft Office Project Server 2003.
Sounds like you should consider buying it. Hope this helps.

 

[San Diego]

Hi Dale,
We are still having issues with PM's not being notified of task changes. We
made all the changes you asked us to do such as getting rid of the rules in
the update area. Still when I update a task she sends to me we I get the
usual " An email will be sent to your PM, but has not been updated in Project
yet". Here is an error we are getting:

#50070: Unable to connect to the database OGTWSS on cvxsql03.cv.hp.com.
Check the database connection information and make sure that the database
server is running.

Thanks,
Gary

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Gary --

Please post your error message as a new message in this newsgroup. This
will allow our technical experts to try and determine the cause of your
problem. Thanks.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Gary:

On its face, the error seems to be coming from SharePoint, so I'm going to
assume that you've installed Project Server on the same virtual server as
Project Server. What may be happening is that WSS is intercepting the call.
Have you added the Project Server virtual directory and the MDAC virtual
directory to the exclusions in the WSS managed paths? As this is a testing
deployment, I suggest that when you go into production with Project Server
2003, that you install WSS on separate virtual server running on a different
port.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

That should have read:

The same virtual server as WSS.

Sorry for any confusion.