Server 2007 SP2 and Task Updates

[MAS]

We recently upgraded to SP2. We use actual hours per day for progress
reporting. We are only using taks updates and we are not using timesheets at
all. After the upgrade to SP2, we can no longer enter hours in the boxes in
the gird. You can click on the grid but anything that is typed is not
recorded. All of the tasks show up and the dates are all there going across
the top but the grid does not appear to be editable. Thanks in advance for
your help.

 

[Shane]

See here -
http://blogs.msdn.com/brismith/arch...ivity-plans-and-timephased-time-tracking.aspx

 

[DogLBer]

I was doing some testing of SP2 tis morning and spotted the same condition,
which makes it a fatal flaw to our use. I am testing at a client SP1 level.
Will upgrading to SP2 on the client make a difference? If not we have to put
the server upgrade on hold.
Your blog, while interesting, did not seem to outline any course of action.
Is MS going to address this issue? If so is there a timeframe in mind?

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

MAS:

Do you have the correct tracking method set for the project? Service Pack 2
closes down some holes in the application logic that allowed the use of
hours by day tracking for projects that were not set to track this way.

--
----------
Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
Project Server Training: http://www.projectservertraining.com
Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
Project Server Help Blog: http://www.projectserverhelp.com

 

[Michael Brown]

Gary,

This is somewhat confusing to me right now. We had our method set to
"Actual hours plus remaining work" for every project (we don't use activity
plans currently). We had been using the time phased grid to enter our
day-by-day work, and then building the timesheet at the END of the week - it
made for far more consistent time reporting. No matter what default setting
i have in server settings for "task settings and displays", I am not able to
enter any actual hours into the time phased grid at the moment. Hmmmmm...

 

[DogLBer]

I agree with MB. We have used the same procedure as he has stated to update
the projects fo rour company and now in SP2 the edit ability has been
removed. I'm curious how MS missed this in testing their release. This is a
complete lack of functionality. Does anybody know what MS plans might be on
this subject??

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Do you also have Resources should report their hours worked every day
selected under reporting display? If so, does deleting the browser cache or
republishing the projects have any effect?

--
----------
Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
Project Server Training: http://www.projectservertraining.com
Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
Project Server Help Blog: http://www.projectserverhelp.com

 

[DogLBer]

For our install, no, we do not have"every day" checked and republishing did
not have any effect, deleting the browser cache had no effect and I tried
creating a new project to see if that may be a factor. It wasn't.

 

[Michael Brown]

Team:

I had an "Ah ha!" moment when playing in our development region which seems
to have worked for now.

I did the following - which is not "ideal" but it works.
1) Under server settings, "task settings & display", i changed our reporting
from "Actuals and remaining" to "hours by period."

2) I then REPUBLISHED in PROJECT PROFESSIONAL (you have to do this thru Pro,
versus project center) - each project plan.

We were then able to use the time phased grid to post our day-by-day hours.
As to Gary's question, yes, we do have the settings set to have resources
post hours each day. It appears that the system wants you to set this up as
report status as "hours by period" and then you have to republish the plans
to get the plans to synch up with the server settings accordingly.

On our "My task" page, we do have the following columns:

WORK
ACTUAL WORK
REMAINING WORK
START DATE
FINISH DATE

so theoretically, the resouces can still update remaining work after having
posted their time in the time phased grid.

Based on Microsoft's 'best practices', we found it far better to have
resources post their hours on the "My task" page and THEN build their
timesheets at the end of the week, in the event that an assignment changed
during the week. What we found is that by having resources create a
timesheet on Monday and use THAT as the input mechanism, we ran the risk that
an assignment changed AFTER the timesheet was created, and the hours then do
not update in the plan accordingly - hence our recommendation to use the "My
task" page as the primary data input.

 

[DogLBer]

Kudos to your "Aha"s! We do not have "each day" selected but your process
worked for us also. Republishing every plan will draw some grumbles, but
managable. Thks, and also to you, Gary for your usual patient pointers.

 

[MAS]

Michael, Gary, and Doug,
Thank you for your help. I am not in our office now so I can not try what
Michael suggests but I am optimistuc about it working. We were experiencing
the exact same results with the same settings. I hiope this works. I will
post an answer after I have tried it. Thanks again to everyone.

 

[Michael Brown]

Glad it worked! i'm still a bit concerned as to the downstream effect. We
still want resources to report actual hours AND remaining work effort. On
the task page, we do have both columns, and both are editable, so i assume if
a resource books actual hours by period AND updates remaining work effort,
that may accomplish what we're looking for, but i have to see what it looks
like in the plan to confirm. i've got calls out to the "mother ship" in
Seattle so we'll see what they say on this one more to come!

 

[Mvisscher]

Solution!!!

Hello all,
for several customers we encountered problems in being able to report time
in My Tasks per day, although the project and server setting were set to
"Track progress per day". We managed to solve this by setting the
tracking_method directly to "track progress per day" in the projectserver AND
projectpublished database by using the following query in SQL Server
Management Studio. We had to do this directly in the database because a bug
in MS Project is that it does not modify the tracking method in de database
as seen on the screen in MS Project.

!Please take care when directly modifying database tables, make a full
backup prior to attempting this solution. Also test this solution in a
seperate test environment!

update msp_projects
set wproj_tracking_method = 0

After that we removed all local cache files from the %appdata%/Microsoft/MS
Project/Cache folder on the client machine.

Finally we opened the problem project in MS Project and published it again
and that solved the problem.


Marcel Visscher
Consultant at
www.DBSProject.nl