Archiving Projects

K

Kelly O

What have organizations been doing to archive projects? I've heard of saving
projects as .mpp files, moving projects to an instance that replicates
Production, or at year-end delete respective projects before next d-base
backup job is ran. Has anyone done anything?

Thanks
 
K

Kelly O

Thanks for the response! I was hoping to hear if any organization has
tried one or the other and what were the pros and cons. For example, I'm
concerned that if project data is deleted from Production, but backed up to
tape, if the project information was needed later, it can be a tedious
process to get the information back for reporting. If you do this, do you
use a archive instance that mirrors Production?
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

Kelly O --

One approach is to create a new instance of Project Server using the
EditSite tool. You might call this instance Archived or something like
that. You would need to import the existing Enterprise Global file into the
instance, along with importing the resources from the Enterprise Resource
Pool. After doing this, you can save completed projects as .mpp files,
delete them from the production instance, and then import them into the
Archived instance. Just a thought. Hope this helps.

--
Dale A. Howard [MVP]
Enterprise Project Trainer/Consultant
Denver, Colorado
http://www.msprojectexperts.com
"We wrote the book on Project Server"
 
K

Kelly O

Thanks for the help! What you described is how we thought we would go about
archiving the projects, but I wanted to confirm our thinking.
 
V

Ville Vakkilainen

Hi Kelly,

we have a more custom approach for this, since we're running MS Project 2000
as our "production environment". As the Project 2000 has _very_limited_
reporting capability, we're replicating the Production DB as a
reporting/history DB to MS Project Server 2002. The transfer is
automated/semi-automated DTS-based process and is run twice a week currently.
This enables us to use the more advanced reporting capabilites and the
OLAP-cube without actually having to change the production environment.

We've run this setup for a year now and it seems to work fine - whenever
we're archiving something, the MS Project plan and related instances (Project
Central timesheets, Resource Pool linkages etc) are deleted from the
Production DB but retained in the Reporting/Archive environment.

However it would probably be better with two similar versions MSP Srvr
2003/2003 as this would also serve as a backup instance (as pointed out
earlier by Christophe Fiessinger).

Ville Vakkilainen
 
K

Kelly O

Thank you for the response!

Ville Vakkilainen said:
Hi Kelly,

we have a more custom approach for this, since we're running MS Project 2000
as our "production environment". As the Project 2000 has _very_limited_
reporting capability, we're replicating the Production DB as a
reporting/history DB to MS Project Server 2002. The transfer is
automated/semi-automated DTS-based process and is run twice a week currently.
This enables us to use the more advanced reporting capabilites and the
OLAP-cube without actually having to change the production environment.

We've run this setup for a year now and it seems to work fine - whenever
we're archiving something, the MS Project plan and related instances (Project
Central timesheets, Resource Pool linkages etc) are deleted from the
Production DB but retained in the Reporting/Archive environment.

However it would probably be better with two similar versions MSP Srvr
2003/2003 as this would also serve as a backup instance (as pointed out
earlier by Christophe Fiessinger).

Ville Vakkilainen
Click to expand...
 
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