Offline / Checkin Behaviour

[David F-H]

I am having difficulty with Project Professional 2007 when I keep projects
checked out (after closing Project Prof) and subsequently try to open them in
offline mode. Some projects open OK, while others consistently display an
error message "This project cannot be opened in read/write mode because a
previous checkin is not complete. ... " ?? If you click the open dialogue
box, you can see them flagged as "Checkin Pending", but this is simply not
the case - they are checked out and I haven't tried to check them in. If I
then go online again and go into "clean up cache" they are showing as checked
out to me. The queue in PWA also simply shows that the last thing done for
them was a save (successful). If I remove the project from the cache, I
still can't open it until I do a force check in in PWA - even though it is me
that has it checked out !?! I have also found other times where a project is
marked as "Checkin Pending" and the only way to open them (Read/Write) is to
clear the cache for them.

Can someone explain this behaviour, as this whole area seems to be very
suspect to me?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

David F-H --

I have seen this behavior personally as well. The Local Cache and the Queue
are two "problem children" right now with Project Server 2007. At least you
are figuring out how to work around these problems. Let's hope that SP1
fixes some of these annoying issues. Hope this helps.

 

[Ben Howard]

It is always best to close a project by the File | Close menus, rather than
just hitting the top right x to close the window. This method appears to
minimise the problems.
--
Thanks, Ben.
http://appleparkltd.spaces.live.com/

 

[Gaurav Wason]

David,

We are having issue with our projects and we are using MASTER projects. One
work around we have found in addition to Ben's recommendation is wait to
close the application after a minute or two. Looks like cache is waiting for
a response back from server and by closing the application "cache" is never
updated that the plan is checked in. So we get the message of checkin
pending.

Another workaround, we found is to open the plan read-only as it does
updates the cache and then close project application and try to open again
does clears the message of checkin pending.
--
Gaurav Wason
(e-mail address removed), MCP - Project Server, MCTS, http://proj2007.blogspot.com
Project Made Easy (Project Server Archive Tool) and (Project Owner Tool)
http://projectmadeeasy.com

 

[Jack Derrico]

Hi Dale,

We're newly implementing Project Server 2007 and having the 2 "problem children" problems. Has Microsoft fixed them in 2007? Or do we need to upgrade to 2010?

Should we upgrade to 2010 at this point?

thanks,
Jack

I am having difficulty with Project Professional 2007 when I keep projects
checked out (after closing Project Prof) and subsequently try to open them in
offline mode. Some projects open OK, while others consistently display an
error message "This project cannot be opened in read/write mode because a
previous checkin is not complete. ... " ?? If you click the open dialogue
box, you can see them flagged as "Checkin Pending", but this is simply not
the case - they are checked out and I haven't tried to check them in. If I
then go online again and go into "clean up cache" they are showing as checked
out to me. The queue in PWA also simply shows that the last thing done for
them was a save (successful). If I remove the project from the cache, I
still can't open it until I do a force check in in PWA - even though it is me
that has it checked out !?! I have also found other times where a project is
marked as "Checkin Pending" and the only way to open them (Read/Write) is to
clear the cache for them.

Can someone explain this behaviour, as this whole area seems to be very
suspect to me?

On Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:46 AM Dale Howard [MVP] wrote:
David F-H --

I have seen this behavior personally as well. The Local Cache and the Queue
are two "problem children" right now with Project Server 2007. At least you
are figuring out how to work around these problems. Let's hope that SP1
fixes some of these annoying issues. Hope this helps.




news:[email protected]...

 

[Carl Dalton]

There have been lots of fixes in this area but IMHO its never been
"completely fixed". Certainly Master Projects continue to be
problematic, but you can minimise the impact by delaying the closing
of the app (although I know that this is not always possible)

I've generally found with non-masters that the issue can occur 1/30
times or so (approx!!). If you have 1/2 particular projects that are
having problems with check-ins, I would suggest attempting a data
clean up of those project files and retesting to see if theres some
dodgy old data stuck in there somewhere

I haven't run enough use cases on 2010 as of yet to have a view on
whether this is improved.

Carl

 

[Carl Dalton]

Oh and if you;re referring to the Queue as an issue (in general) then
it would probably be useful to understand the WHAT, eg X type of queue
job fails in Y scenario, as personally I have seen very few major
queue issues over the last 18m

HTH

Carl