Project 2007 Auto-Publish

[Germex]

Our Project Managers are not very pleased with the way the server is acting
when dealing with published project. Any changes they make on an already
published project, they need to republish to apply the changes and make them
visible to the whole team.

Does anybody know of a way to auto-publish in Project 2007? I know there
was a feature in Project 2003 to do that.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Germex --

There is no way to autopublish in Microsoft Project 2007. This is a
training and performance issue. Hope this helps.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Germex:

If the PMs want to Save and Publish each time, tell them to select File >
publish, which will do both if the project hasn't been saved immediately
prior to selecting publish.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
For Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
For Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com

 

[Germex]

Guess we have to write our own routine.

Thank you all for your responses.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Germex --

I don't see what the big deal is. I certainly don't think it would be worth
writing a macro to automate the publishing. I mean, it saves a whopping two
clicks of the mouse! And you certainly don't want to write an
Event-driven macro that would automatically publish on every save, since
this would publish the project on the initial save, even if the PM is not
ready to publish the project. Why don't you tell your PM's to quit their
belly-achin' and learn how to click File - Publish at the end of every
session of updating actuals into their projects? I think that would be far
simpler, although it would require two extra clicks of the mouse!

 

[DM]

There is a situation where you'd want to auto-publish - if you open several
plans into a container plan and make changes to them. You then have to go
into PWA and publish each plan seperately. It's a shortcoming we've recently
found and will lead to a heap of belly aching!!

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

DM --

If you open a master project and publish it in Project Server 2007, it
publishes each of the subprojects as well. Does that solve the bellyaching?

 

[DM]

It could help, but we don't want to save the master project - it serves no
purpose in our workflow and just makes for extra work to manage yet more
files! They way we'd work is that we'd open several project plans (stages)
at once as a 'project', however we may add extra project plans to the
overall project and we'd have to then have a workflow for inserting these
plans into the master project.
I've spotted that Techassociates have some utility for doing this, but why
should we pay for something that should be included as standard? From what I
understand, this was built in as an option into Project 2003!!!

: (

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

DM --

I don't work for Microsoft, so don't blame the messenger. When you use a
new version of any software package, there are almost always feature changes
that require process changes by the users. I guess this is one of those
situations. Therefore, why don't you create master projects so that you can
publish all of the subprojects? Hope this helps.

 

[DM]

Thanks for the message - it does indeed work, but adds another step in the
workflow which we didnt really want, but we'll look at this in the absence
of a customisation which would be the best route, though not necessarily
preferred due to cost.

ps - I never shoot the messenger!