Automatic calednar update for everyone

A

asadim

In Project Server 2007 is there a way to link resources' calendars to a base
calendar so that each time the base calendar changes the resources' change as
well? For instance in our company we have 3 offices in 3 countries. We want
to have a separate calendar for each branch and its employees. What's the
standard way of doing this in PS 2007?

Also how do you differentiate holidays from vacations from tranining
sessions in the calendar? Seems like everything can either be working or
non-working. But someone who's in training IS WORKING but not present in the
office.

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

asadim --

This is an excellent question, my friend! In your situation, I would
recommend that you use three Base Calendars, one for each office, with the
correct company holidays specified for each office individually. For your
home or corporate office, I would recommend you use the default enterprise
Standard calendar that ships with Project Server. You should begin by
adding company holidays for the home office on that calendar by completing
the following steps:

1. Log into PWA with administrator permissions.
2. Click the Server Settings link in the Quick Launch menu.
3. Click the Enterprise Calendars link in the Enterprise Data section of
the Server settings page.
4. Select the Standard calendar from the data grid and then click the Edit
Calendar button.

The system launches Project Professional 2007, logs you into Project Server,
and then opens the Standard calendar for editing in the Change Working Time
dialog in Project Professional.

5. In the calendar grid, select the date of your first upcoming company
holiday for the home office, and then enter a name for that holiday in the
grid on the Exceptions page.
6. Click the Details tab and then set up the range of recurrence for the
holiday, such as 5 years into the future for example.
7. Repeat steps #5 and #6 for every company holiday during the current year
and into the early part of next year.
8. Click the OK button when finished.

The system returns you to the Enterprise Calendars page. Now you need to
create two additional calendars, one for each of the other two offices.
Assuming that all three offices do not share the same company holidays, you
will need to create two new calendars. Click the New Calendar button and
work through the steps detailed above to set the company holidays for the
selected office.

After you do this, you will need to check out the resources in the
Enterprise Resource Pool and set the Base Calendar value for each resource
to the calendar for the office where they work. If for any reason there is
a change in one of the office calendars, such as adding a new company
holiday, then all resources who have that calendar as their Base Calendar
will automatically receive the new holiday on their personal calendar in
Project Server. Hope this helps.
 
A

asadim

Thanks Dale for your assistance. What if the staff want to display their own
set of off-times in their calendars, in addition to local holidays? We are
mainly thinking of exporting everyone's calendars from their Outlook into
Project Server 2007. I'm not sure whether I should assign a base calendar to
everyone, or should I make a copy of the base calendar for each person? So
instead of the base calendar "Vancouver" for a Vancouver employee I'd create
a duplicate and call it "Mr. X's".

Please let me know.
 
A

asadim

First of all, there is no way to import a resource's calendar from Outlook
into their personal calendar in Project Server. So remove that thought from
your head! :)
Click to expand...

There's an add-in for Outlook that is supposed to synchronize Outlook with
PS2007. So if it doesn't do what were thinking it would, then what's its
purpose?!
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

asadim --

First of all, there is no way to import a resource's calendar from Outlook
into their personal calendar in Project Server. So remove that thought from
your head! :)

If you want vacation time on each resource's individual calendar, someone
with administrator permissions must enter this on the resource's calendar in
the Enterprise Resource Pool. At this point, even Project Server 2007 does
not provide an automated way to do this. So, you will need to assign a Base
Calendar value to every resource in the Enterprise Resource Pool so that
everyone inherits the appropriate company holidays, and then add vacation
time manually to teach resource's calendar individually. Hope this helps.
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

asadim --

The Outlook Add-In allows the user to view and report on Project Server
tasks in Outlook. That's all. Hope this helps.
 
D

Dennis

Besides the question of whether it's a good idea or not: the resource
calendar exceptions are exposed by the PSI WebSvcResource web service as
ResourceDataSet.CalendarExceptionsDataTable
(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/li...ourcedataset.calendarexceptionsdatatable.aspx).

I have also kicked around the idea of synchronizing an Outlook calendar with
Enterprise Resource Calendars (we have a shared Outlook calendar tracking all
vacations). Obviously, an external program/script is necessary to talk to
Exchange and the PSI to implement the synchronization mechanism.

Dennis
 
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