Solution: Spaces removed when SSRS Report exported to PDF

Me and some of my workmates have come across this issue quite a few times so thought about sharing the solution with everyone.

 

Problem:

When a SQL Server Reporting Services 2005, 2008 or 2008 R2 report gets exported to PDF, the spaces of a Project Server Multiline text fields appear so condensed that it looks like a long line with out any spaces. The same report looks fine on screen and exports with proper spaces to Microsoft Word. This is apparently an SSRS bug. Follow the solution below to fix disappeared spaces problem.

 

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Project Server Security Scenarios – Part 3

Part 2 of this blog can be read here

 

Scenario 5: PM to only add Generic resources to their Project Team whereas Resources Managers should be adding specific resources.

 

Bob the PM Should not directly be assigning actual people to its Project. Instead, he should be assigning Generic Resources. A resource manager can later add specific resources. Once specific resources are added, PM should be able to assign tasks to those specific resources as well.

 

Solution:

1) PMs by default have permission to assign any resource. To remove this permission, Go to Server Settings -> Manage Groups,

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Project Server Security Scenarios – Part 2

Part 1 of this blog can be read here

 

Scenario 3: Bob should access SharePoint Project Site for some Projects (But shouldn’t access Project details in PWA)

 

Bob is a user who’ll only be accessing SharePoint based Project sites to work on Risks, Issues and other SharePoint related stuff in Project Sites. He’ll only be using PWA to access Project Site and won’t be using any other Project Server Feature.

 

Solution 1:

The best way is to add Bob in that Project’s Project Team. If Bob doesn’t have any task assigned to him then he’ll get reader access to that project. If Bob requires Contribute access (so that he can add content to the Project Site), then there must be at least 1 task assigned to him on that Project.

However, under default configuration, Bob will also get Team Member permissions on that Project, which means he’ll be able to see Project Schedule, can create new task assignment etc.

Refer to Solution 2 below, if you want Bob to access Project Sites but you don’t want to allow him anything else to do in PWA.

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Project Server Security Scenarios – Part 1

In this blog series, I’ll talk about implementing some specific security requirements in Microsoft Project Server 2010 / 2013. I’ll assume that you already have some basic idea about Groups, Categories & Permissions but if that’s not the case, you can learn about Project Server 2010 Security Model (also applicable on Project Server 2013) through this excellent article by Ben Howard
http://www.applepark.co.uk/project-server-security-explained/

Project Server 2013 also offers a new permission mode known as SharePoint permission mode. As the name suggests, it is managed via SharePoint 2013 permissions model. It is a simplified model which can quickly be implemented, but it is not possible to implement the scenarios I am going to cover in this blog and hence the rest of the blog will only talk about classic Project Server permissions mode.

Scenario 1: Bob should access all Projects managed by his Department
By “Project managed by his department”, I mean the projects where the Project Manager belongs to Bob’s department. We don’t want to give access to Bob on the projects where his resources are working as a team member but not managing the projects.

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Project Online – What it does and doesn't do.

Though Project online is less than a year’s old offering by Microsoft and at the time of writing this , not yet launched in Australia, it is based on a proven Microsoft Project Server technology which has come a long way over last decade and has kept pace with demands of maturing PPM practice worldwide.

Being nascent in its cloud hosted variation, Microsoft Project Online has yet to re-factor some of its features to make the product more usable and valuable for its growing customer base.

Here is a list of differentiating features which still make Project 2013 on-premise more viable solution to decision makers who are looking to gain real value out of a PPM Investment.

Business Intelligence: SSRS + direct DB access is not supported with Project online. The alternative supported tool i.e. Excel + oData has some cool uses but its quite slow and doesn’t cover many key reporting scenarios

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What’s old in Project Server 2013

[Classic Project Server functional limitations that prevail in 2013]

It seems Microsoft do listen to its customers feedback and have provided some great new features in Project 2013. These enhancements directly address most of the key limitations customers faced using Project Server 2010.

My favourite amongst these features is the ability to define Project Governance workflow in SharePoint designer 2013. Power View has a great WOW factor. True multi browser support is awesome and despite some limitations , the only practical issue I came across in my extensive (Ahem! 3 weeks ;) )  usage of Project Server 2013 on Google Chrome was that I couldn’t use Explorer view for my SharePoint libraries.

Other than that, ability to set baseline with in PWA, developer improvements (CSOM), mobile access views, oData feeds are all welcome additions.

 

But if you earn your bread by configuring and customizing Microsoft EPM (oh, I meant PPM) Solution like me, you would notice that some pain areas have survived and ‘successfully’ migrated to 2013 version. Here is a (not exhaustive by any means) list of such points.

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Project Server 2013 – Reporting Story

Introduction

Tracking Project / Portfolio Progress and forecasting future performance are the cornerstones of all project management methodologies. While the reporting requirement itself is so common and generic in nature, yet every organization has some specific PM practices which demands unique reporting & that results in anywhere from little to very significant custom reports development in Project Server. Therefore, Microsoft Project Server has always provided reporting tools with rich capabilities not only to create and distribute Traditional or Analytical reports but also to facilitate power users to generate ad-hoc reports based on unplanned requirements.

The latest version of Project Server (i.e. 2013) has introduced some new reporting methods. In addition, reporting possibilities of Microsoft Hosted version of the project Server (i.e. Project Online via office 365) is not exactly same as its on-premise counterpart and hence it is essential to analyse, plan and architect reports according to its deployment scenario.

This article summarises the key reporting capabilities of Project Server 2013 for both on-premise and hosted solutions.

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