Show Start and Finish Dates with Planned and Actual Indicators

If you regularly show ‘Actual Start‘ and ‘Actual Finish‘ dates alongside ‘Start‘ and ‘Finish‘ dates in order to show what has actually happened, here is a display technique that can save you some real estate in a view or report: placing a “P” next to the date to indicate that it is still planned or Read more about Show Start and Finish Dates with Planned and Actual Indicators[…]

Format Date Data for Accounting-Style “Year_Month#” Columns in Your SSRS Reports

So, you have a requirement to create a report on planned or actual cost data by month, by year, and your report requester would prefer that the column headings be formatted accounting-style, such as 2014_01, 2014_02, 2014_03, etc. No Problem! Place the following code into your SQL SELECT and GROUP BY statements, sum your cost Read more about Format Date Data for Accounting-Style “Year_Month#” Columns in Your SSRS Reports[…]

SSRS REPORTS ERROR WHEN LARGE NUMBER OF PARAMETERS ARE PASSED

Today we will be talking about a nasty error message that you may encounter when running certain SSRS reports that have a big list of multi choices parameters or a lot of parameters. That error message will might say something like Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object or in Read more about SSRS REPORTS ERROR WHEN LARGE NUMBER OF PARAMETERS ARE PASSED[…]

Capturing Performance Counters for SharePoint and Project Server into the Logging Database (Part 2)

Last Blog, I have showed you how to setup the performance counters for Project Server and SharePoint to start recording into the SharePoint Logging database. Today, I will walk you through how to query the data in the Logging DB to extract the performance counters and their values. The new Performance Counters we created last Read more about Capturing Performance Counters for SharePoint and Project Server into the Logging Database (Part 2)[…]

Capturing Performance Counters for SharePoint and Project Server into the Logging Database (Part 1)

Capturing Performance Counters One of the best practices when working with Windows Servers, SharePoint, and Project Server is to track the performance of each server in your SharePoint farm. This will help identifying any bottlenecks and give you a better view of what is happening behind the scene. The problem with performance monitoring that is Read more about Capturing Performance Counters for SharePoint and Project Server into the Logging Database (Part 1)[…]

Speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User Group

Quick post to announce that, I will be presenting at our local SharePoint User Group on  Wednesday, August 28, 2013. If you are in the area, make sure you stop by. Here are the details: Topic: Business Intelligence in SharePoint and Project Server 2013 – Em‘Power’ the ‘Power’ User We have seen all the demos- Read more about Speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User Group[…]

Yellow – Just Another Reason to Argue

Red, Amber, Green or maybe Red, Yellow, Green. Whatever colors you use for your indicators, most organizations typically have 3 colors. You might call this your “RAG” indicator or “Traffic” indicator or maybe even your “Stoplight” indicator. This has been the “standard” for many years at many companies.  However, is it really necessary for you Read more about Yellow – Just Another Reason to Argue[…]

Building a Custom Dashboard in Project 2013

I recently presented a webinar demonstration of the new reporting feature in Microsoft Project 2013 for MPUG.  As a follow up to the presentation, I am going to demonstrate how I created the custom dashboard seen in the webinar. Below is an example of a dashboard that I created. As you can see, it has Read more about Building a Custom Dashboard in Project 2013[…]