Hi,
In tis Post I will try to explain how to exchange Project Information between MS PROJECT 2010 PROFESSIONAL and SharePoint.
First, why should you use SharePoint while managing your Project? Well, there are three levels of using MS PROJECT 2010.
- When you have small (or big) Projects, not many of them, and you do not have Project Portfolio, and you do not want to share information with others you will use MS PROJECT 2010 as “stand alone” tool
- When you find a MS PROJECT SERVER 2010, and MS Project Web App (PWA) as overkill, and you do not have enough time to implement it to your performing organization, but you want to share some Project information with others, then you will use MS PROJECT 2010 and MS SharePoint.
- When you have large Projects, many of them, and you want much more than MS PROJECT 2010 Professional can give, and you are managing Programs, and Portfolio, then MS PROJECT SERVER 2010, and MS Project Web App (PWA) is right solution for you
I will NOT explain how to install, and setup SharePoint. I will give just a few examples how to use it with MS PROJECT Professional 2010. And very soon I will start with posts about MS PROJECT SERVER 2010, and MS Project Web App (PWA) !
OK! Let’s go! You can create Project Task lists in SharePoint like this:
- First, open SharePoint, and log in! You will get something like this (depend of your SharePoint settings):
- Then click on the Site Actions, and choose View All Site Content:
- On the screen click on the Create button:
- On the screen, scroll down, and click on the Project Tasks, and then type a description for the Project Task list:
- Finally, you will get:
Here is the place to put your Tasks! Notice that you can not put task in Auto scheduled mode, but only in Manually scheduled mode! This is because SharePoint doesn’t have a schedule engine!
I will put three Tasks in Task list and I will link them:
Now I can sync those task list with MS PROJECT PROFESSIONAL:
Now I must to login (it depends of your SharePoint settings:
Finally I will choose SharePoint Task List which I want to synchronize:
and I will get:
Task are converted to auto scheduled (because I set up in MS PROJECT PROFESSIONAL 2010 that all new Task are in Auto Scheduled Mode). All Tasks has Start no Earlier constraint, because in SharePoint start Date field I was enter values! If you compare Gantt Chart above with Gant Chart in SharePoint:
you will notice that in MS PROJECT 2010, Task 2 is first, Task 1 is second, and Task 3 is third in Gantt Chart. This is odd!
Now I will add three new task in MS PROJECT 2010:
I will sync it with SharePoint on the same way I did it before:
and I will get, in the SharePoint:
As you can see, Task from MS PROJECT 2010 are now in SharePoint, and in Manual mode!
What If you change some Values (for example start date or duration) in SharePoint or MS Project 2010? There will be a conflict between those two Projects. Don’t worry, there is the easy way to solve this Problem. How? Read my next Post.
Regards,
Nenad Trajkovski 
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This is great, as far as it goes. The shortcoming is that the SharePoint list won’t accept tasks with dependencies. That severely limits the MSproject plan – it becomes just a list of tasks, not a robust project model. I expect MS is working on that.
In the meantime, I Wrote a simple VBA macro to export the tasks from Project and use MSAccess to update a SharePoint list. It is not full two-way integration, but it DOES allow publishing the tasks from ANY MSProject plan in SharePoint, retaining all the robust project planning capabilities of Project AND with all the sort and filter capabilities of SharePoint. I have SharePoint views showing tasks by person, by MSProject Resource Group, by “due within x weeks”, “Past due” etc. and a “My Tasks” view since I use the ADname SharePoint recognizes as a resource attribute in Project. I do all that by creating some special calculated fields in Project and exporting them for use in SharePoint. Since SharePoint can’t filter on “finish date less than one week from [today]” I calculate “finish minus one week” in project, and let SharePoint compare THAT resultant to [today]. Two-way data flow is a possibility as well; Access could pull user inputs from SharePoint and put them in a file to be imported to Project using UID to synch.
The VBA in MSProject and Access is very simple. I’d be happy to share. dbc3@dbc3.com
Thanks for the writeup. We created out IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project 2010 to address the following:
http://www.teamdirection.com/mspaddin
Resource Name to SharePoint Member mapping
Automatic Scheduling support
All task dependencies supported
Any special character in task name handled
Finally, we have an IntelliGantt Web Part to presents a full hierarchy in SharePoint and also has a bevy of features.
http://www.teamdirection/igwebpart/sharepoint_index.html
Finally, we added to our MS Project 2010 Add In with the following ‘most requested’ features:
Automatic Synchronization
Field level bidirectional data flow control (fields that ‘write only’ or ‘read only’ with SharePoint)
Share a piece of a project plan to a task list using a summary task as a root
Share the same project plan to multiple SharePoint lists
Share master projects to SharePoint lists
Read Only operations
Write Only operations
And, just because SharePoint 2007 is still out there, we made sure to support that as well.
Let me know if you ever want a demo.