SharePoint for Project Managers March 11, 2011

We are currently using SharePoint for many things like collaboration, portal, custom solutions, requirements gathering and project management.

As our current usage of SharePoint for project management is not public and process heavy I looked around and find a good blog about how to use SharePoint for Project Management. The following posts are not only doing that, but actually they provide a great step by step introduction to the world of PMs.

So if you are a beginner and want to learn more about PM or you are an expert in using Microsoft Project  but want to learn how SharePoint can help you to make others understand the complex plan that you put together follow the recipe for a simple and transparent way of managing projects.

 

PM Guide – (1) Initiate the Project

• (i) Get the Project Approved and Resources Allocated
• (ii) Decide the Project Management Process
• (iii) Create a Collaborative Project Site

PM Guide – (2) Plan and Setup the Project

• (i) Plan the Project
• (ii) Desk Check the Project Plan
• (iii) Notify the Team of their Responsibilities

PM Guide – (3) Work on the Project

• (i) Find Work
• (ii) Do Work
• (iii) Update Progress on work

PM Guide – (4) Track and Re-Plan the Project (continuously until project closure)

• (i) Check and understand the project’s progress
• (ii) Find and Manage Exceptions (e.g. issues, risks and change requests)
• (iii) Re-Plan the project

PM Guide – (5) Close the Project

• (i) Run Project Post-Mortem and Track Lessons Learnt
• (ii) Close out the Project site
• (iii) Capture any useful modifications made to the project site for use on future projects

And he does not stop here but continues with the guide into the depths of Project Management:

 

PM Guide – (6) Project Management and Your Leadership Style

They even provide you with the templates (for a price) or you can actually build your own.

 

PM Guide – (7) Collaborative Project Management Sites

PM Guide – (8) Exercise – Build Your Own Project Management Approach

 

Hope this will help people understand how they can use SharePoint for Project Management as for sure if you read this blog you already have SharePoint.

Not sure if you are aware but if you one of the very experienced Project Managers out there Microsoft Project (Server) does integrates nicely with SharePoint Server.

 

I recommend SharePoint for project management for one single reason(ok two): Visibility & Transparency.

 

Want to dig deeper into this world?

SharePoint for Project Management How to Create a Project Management Information System (PMIS) with SharePoint By Dux Raymond Sy Publisher: O’Reilly Media Released: October 2008 Pages: 256

Moving your boot from VHD to a bigger drive June 27, 2010

The most important thing when using boot to VHD is that all your system files are located into a single VHD file on your physical HDD. This will let us easily upgrade the HDD by copying the VHD file from one to another then fix the boot for the new HDD.

Following are the detailed steps to accomplish this:

Attach the new HDD as an external one or as a second one if your computer permits.

Server Manager -> Storage -> Disk Management

New Simple Volume (format NFTS, quick) mount as f:

Mark Partition as Active

Command prompt

Bcdboot c:\windows /s f:

Bcdedit /export f:\backup.bcd

Reboot

Boot from Win7 or Windows 2008R2 DVD

After "windows loading files…" message when the initial setup screen is displayed press SHIFT+F10 for command prompt

Copy vhd file from old disk to new one (you need to find the drive letters again as they might not match)

Usually

C: is the internal HDD

D: is the DVD

E: is the external HDD

Xcopy /J c:\win2k8R2.vhd e:\ (wait… it will take a while)

NOTE: Or you can copy now the entire hard drive including the hidden folders using xcopy /H

I am only copy the vhd so I can get my computer up and running faster then I will copy the rest of the file later in background.

Close command prompt -> cancel installation (ALT+F4) -> shutdown the machine

Remove old hard drive and replace with the new one.

Start computer.

Boot from install DVD again and start the command prompt

Bcdedit /import c:\backup.bcd

Fix the entry

Bcdedit /set {default} device vhd=[LOCATE]\win2k8R2.vhd

Bcdedit /set {default} osdevice vhd=[LOCATE]\win2k8R2.vhd

Reboot and

Voala!

Why Boot from VHD is not virtualization November 25, 2009

Because of the marketing and the current buzz about virtualization many people think that Boot from VHD means that virtualization is used and thus a performance hit will be on your system.

Let me explain how Boot from VHD really work:

Any operating system has a boot loader that will need to recognize the file system and start loading the bits for your OS. This is the first software that is starting after the BIOS is completed.

The boot loader uses either BIOS calls or special drivers to load all the files from the OS and what Microsoft have done here is to include not only support for NTFS file system but for the VHD format too. So the boot loader can locate the VHD file then read the data from inside as needed.

Once the OS is started another driver, this time a windows driver, is used to continue and read the files and Microsoft have implement here a special disk driver that recognizes the VHD file format.

So there is no virtualization involved here, all is involved is another layer of redirection until getting to the real data on the disk. What the driver does is to locate the location of the file inside the  VHD file then map that location on the host NTFS file system to be able to read the data for the real HDD. Now there is know for years already that there is actually even another redirection inside the HDD itself too, and the reason there is to be able to hide the bad sectors by remapping them.

There are few types of VHD formats:

• Fixed VHD: This one allocates the entire size on the physical HDD and is the fastest. I would recommend to always use this type when
• Dynamic VHD: The space gets allocated on demand however when booting from VHD is enabled the boot loader will enlarge this to the maximum specified size thus making a little bit slower because of the time that it takes to enlarge the file during boot and then resize it back when shutting down. The other problem with this type when used for boot from VHD is that  if there is not enough space you get an error and you can’t boot from it until you make the required space available. There is no much gain from using this type to boot from and lots of pain so I recommend using this type only for Hyper-V VMs.
• Differential VHD: This type introduce yet another  redirection to a base VHD as it only contains the modified bits from the parent. This is very useful if you have multiple VHD that have small differences between them. One problem with it is that you can’t just path the parent VHD and have it propagated to all the rest. The parent VHD  should be treated as a read only and replacing it will require to replace of the differential ones too.   I don’t see much use for it in our situation as usually your VHDs are very different from each other, however in a QA environment there is much to gain from it.

In conclusion Boot from VHD is a great technology that was finally implemented in Windows (this is available in Linux for decades now). The main performance impact is actually because of the old fragmentation issue both inside VHD file and outside on the host NFTS file system. My recommendation would be to use the fixed size VHD and don’t try to gain a little bit of space by using Dynamic or Differential VHD as it does not worth the headache.

Windows 7 boot from VHD October 10, 2009

I have start playing with the new feature (boot from VHD) available in Windows 7 and windows server 2008 R2.

Until now I always created a separate partition for the operating system, now by using the boot from VHD feature I can have a single partition and have the OS installed inside a single VHD file.

There are some things to be aware of when doing a setup like this:

1. Be aware when using Dynamic VHDs that when the computer boots up the VHD gets expanded to the maximum size so if you created a dynamic VHD and specified 127Gb as the maximum size you better have that much space free on your hard drive or the operating system will fail with an ugly blue screen. My recommendation would be to use fixed size VHDs.
2. There is no easy way to move from physical to boot to VHD due to the expansion of the VHD so trying to create a  VHD from a big partition with a lot of free space and then store it on that partition will fail due the VHD being expanded just a little bit more than the space available due to header information in the file.
3. The way that I recommend doing a migration from physical to boot from VHD is to use Disk Management –> Shrink Volume before migration and then just do a Windows Backup to VHD (available starting with Windows Vista) then expand the partition back again using Disk Management thus giving you enough space for the VHD.
4. If you try to reuse the same VHD images to run them under Hyper-V you are out of luck as the files are exclusive locked by the system and they have the physical drivers installed.
5. I was happily surprised to see that the Swap file get stored to the main hard drive next to the VHD instead of being stored inside. This was a great improvement as it does speed up the OS, and not even mentioned during the launch event either.

In the end boot to VHD is great because it only virtualizes the HDD access giving me the possibility to have both Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 on the same machine. Who knows maybe in the future I will be using boot to VHD for my development machines instead of Hyper-V.

RePDC 2008 October 15, 2008

Today Bob Familiar announced at MSDN Road Show in Waltham that on January 22nd 2009 the best of PDC 2008 will be arriving in Boston. So if you are like me and can’t make it there this year make sure that you mark the calendar for this great event.

Thank you Bob for your hard work on putting this together and make it happens. I really enjoyed the ReMIX07 and I am looking forward to it.

My first CodePlex Project October 3, 2008

I am already using this application for a while now.

I just released a Sharepoint Site Collection Backup utility on Codeplex.

Please take a look at: http://www.codeplex.com/SPSitesBackup

I find this utility very usefull if you have multiple site collections in your farm.

You can use it for MySites to keep a backup of each separatelly. and then when you need to restore one you can restore just the one for the user that requested it. You can even use this for the outboarding process (just keep a copy of the user personal site and delete the site from the Farm).

However I want to stress that you will still need to have a full farm backup because this utility is not a replacement for that.

If your application contains multiple projects each on a separate site collection (my recomandation) then you can use this utility to archive them separatelly.

If you find this usefull please leave me comment and tell me how you are using it.

Hello world! March 16, 2008

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