Opening Workgroups Projects

[Shane]

We have a situation where a project manager has left the firm. The new PM
taking over has noticed that the old PM had published a lot of workgroup
projects. he would like to take a look at them before he deletes them to see
what they are about but cannot do so without changing the plan owner to his
name. When he goes to open any of the project sin project center or indeed
edit it to change the plan owner, an error pops up stating "The selected
project(s) could not be opened".

Is there any way to get these project plans?

Any help welcome...

Shane

 

[Richard L. Warren]

A couple of questions:

(1) Did your IT team disable or delete his Active Directory account?
(2) What kind of PWA security model do you use?

=====
Richard Warren [MBA, PMP, MCITP for EPM]
http://richardlwarren.info


-----Original Message-----
From: Shane [mailto:[email protected]]
Posted At: Monday, August 11, 2008 12:52 PM
Posted To: microsoft.public.project.server
Conversation: Opening Workgroups Projects
Subject: Opening Workgroups Projects

We have a situation where a project manager has left the firm. The new PM
taking over has noticed that the old PM had published a lot of workgroup
projects. he would like to take a look at them before he deletes them to
see
what they are about but cannot do so without changing the plan owner to
his
name. When he goes to open any of the project sin project center or indeed
edit it to change the plan owner, an error pops up stating "The selected
project(s) could not be opened".

Is there any way to get these project plans?

Any help welcome...

Shane

 

[Shane]

Hi Richard,

Yes his AD account is disabled.

i'm not sure waht you mean by security model.

We have Terminal Servers in place that project managers and admins use to
accept time etc - is that what your looking for??

let me know if you need other info.

Tks,
Shane

 

[Crook]

Hi Shane,

this is just a guess, but try opening the projects through MS Project Pro
and republishing them.

Hope this helps,
Crook

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Shane --

I believe that because you are seeing Workgroup projects in your Project
Server database, this indicates a severe problem. To understand the nature
of the problem, you need to understand what constitutes a Workgroup project.
A Workgroup project is any project NOT stored in the Project Server
database, such as an .mpp file stored on the user's hard drive or network
drive, but actually published to the Project Server database. The default
permissions in Project Server 2003 DO NOT allow project managers to publish
non-enterprise projects, but it sounds like your Project Server
administrator changed this permission to allow users to publish
non-enterprise projects. If so, this was a foolish action and the result is
the problem you see.

To resolve this problem, the Project Server administrator will need to do
the following:

1. Log into PWA with administrator permissions.
2. Click Admin - Server Configuration.
3. Select the "Allow only enterprise projects to be published to this
server" option.
4. Click the Save Changes button.

The above steps will step this problem from occurring again in the future.
Next, the Project Server administrator will need to delete the published
Workgroup projects by completing the following steps:

1. Click Admin - Clean up Project Server database.
2. Select the "Projects and To-do Lists" option.
3. Select the "Delete the SharePoint team Web site for the specified
project" option.
4. In the data grid, select the first Workgroup project.
5. Click the Delete button and then click the Yes button when prompted.

NOTE: The above action WILL NOT delete the original projects stored as .mpp
files; it will only delete the published information in the Project Server
database for the Workgroup projects. Finally, the new PM will need to find
the .mpp projects created by the original project manager. These .mpp
projects will be located somewhere on the hard drive of the original
manger's PC or on a network folder to which he/she had access. From there,
the new PM can import them into Project Server using the Import Project
wizard (Tools - Enterprise Options - Import Project to Enterprise) or merely
open them and examine them. Hope this helps.

 

[Richard L. Warren]

With the account only disabled, I'd work with your enterprise IT folks to
allow him to logon with a new password under the originator's credential
to "take a peek" at what the workgroup projects were about. If they're
something work migrating to his ownership, they can be culled from the
look-see. It's the simplest and most straightforward way of quickly
solving the problem.

=====
Richard Warren [MBA, PMP, MCITP for EPM]
http://richardlwarren.info

-----Original Message-----
From: Shane [mailto:[email protected]]
Posted At: Monday, August 11, 2008 2:04 PM
Posted To: microsoft.public.project.server
Conversation: Opening Workgroups Projects
Subject: Re: Opening Workgroups Projects

Hi Richard,

Yes his AD account is disabled.

i'm not sure waht you mean by security model.

We have Terminal Servers in place that project managers and admins use to
accept time etc - is that what your looking for??

let me know if you need other info.

Tks,
Shane

 

[Shane]

Hi Guys and thanks for your comments...

Dale,

About your comment and on a related note we sometimes see "ghost plans"
after the project takes a plan down. I know this isn't a recommended practice
but what is the reason for this happening?

The project has been doing this for some time but the issue of ghost plans
occurring when they take plans down is a recent thing which is why we find it
strange.

Thanks again for your help
Shane

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Shane --

I have no idea what you mean by "the project takes a plan down" or by "ghost
plans." You'll need to clarify exactly what you mean by these two phases
before I can even hazard a guess. Also, would you please tell us whether
any of our responses yielded the correct answer to your orginal problem?
It's no fair to let people continue to guess how to solve your problem if
one of us managed to solve it for you already. Let us know.

 

[Shane]

Ok Dale....

When I say "takes the plan down" the people in charge of the plan save it to
local and then delete the plan from project server. They make changes to the
plan and then reimport the plan. Again I know its not a good practice but I
think there may be a necessity to do this from the customer/client side

When I say "ghost plan" in this or any context, it means when you look at
"clean up project server database", you see version <blank>, type "Enterprise"

So what I mean here is that the project saves the plan from project server
to local but when they try to delete it from server, there is no published
version and is impossible to delete.

To address the earlier problem of workgroup projects, we were able to use
the server admin people to retrieve the files from his terminal server
profile.

Thanks again for all your help.

Regards,
Shane

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Shane --

Thanks for the detailed clarification. First of all, I'm glad to know that
you found the Workgroup projects. So, I'm a little bit happy that I was
able to correctly diagnose your problem. Regarding your process, I
think what is happening is that your people are actually publishing their
non-enterprise projects directly from their hard drive. This is very, very
bad and is definitely not the proper way to use Project Server. I recommend
that you enable the permission that only allows users to publish enterprise
projects. Then, you will need to teach your PMs to import projects into the
Project Server system using the Import Project Wizard. Hope this helps.

 

[harry]

Hello everyone..

can some explain or point me towards the right direction regarding the below:

' what is the difference between workgroup project and enterprise project ?'

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Harry --

An "enterprise project" is any project saved in the Project Server database.
A "workgroup project" is a project stored on the user's hard drive or
network drive as a local project, but which has also been published to PWA
by the user. This is very BAD practice, as you have probably noted in this
thread. The default permissions in Project Server 2003 DO NOT allow PMs to
publish local projects, but someone changed that permission at the company
of the person who asked the first question in this thread, which lead to all
of the other problems. Hope this helps.

 

[harry]

Mr. Dale, thanks for your explanation! Now it makes sense... and this should
probably go in thier/our lessons learned process

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

harry --

You are more than welcome for the help, my friend!

As an aside, when I began my computer training career in 1994, my first
official training job was teaching computer classes for 3 and 4-year old
children at four day care centers and pre-schools. My official name at each
location was "Mr. Dale." That is what all the children and staff called me,
and no one has called me that name that in years. Thanks for reminding me
of the formative beginning of this career!