Hi,

as I promised I will start with Groups and Categories in MS PROJECT SERVER 2010. When you install MS PROJECT SERVER 2010 it comes with seven built-in groups, and five built in categories.

Groups are:

1. Administrators  – Users in this group have all permissions to do everything. BE VARY CAREFUL when you assign user to this group!
2. Executives – They can view project data, but they can not do any changes. This is very useful for high-level users to see what is going on, but who are not a part of the project team
3. Portfolio Managers – They can change and add data, but they do not have administrators privileges! They can see and edit all projects and resources as well
4. Project Managers – They can manage Projects, but they have limited resource permissions
5. Resource Managers – They are mainly responsible for maintaining resources, and they performance on the projects
6. Team Leads – Those people are team leaders and usually they do not perform any task on the projects. They have also limited permissions about adding tasks to the projects, and status reports
7. Team members – They can use Project Webb Access, but they have limited permission on the project-level permissions. When you add new user on the system this is the default group for him/her!

Categories are:

1. My Direct Reports
2. My Organization
3. My Projects
4. My Resources
5. My Tasks

Before I explain the difference between them, you must know that each built-in category is in “relationship” with one ore more group. Defaults are:

• Category: My Direct Reports is in Resource Managers group
• Category: My Organization is in Administrators, Executives, Portfolio Managers, Project Managers, and Resource Managers group
• Category: My Projects is in Project Managers, Resource Managers, and Team Leads group
• Category: My Resources is in Resource Managers group
• Category: My Tasks is in Team Members group

  So, where is the  difference between Group and Category? Let me show you. I will open Groups:

and I will get:

Now I will click on Project Managers group, and I will get:

On the first section of the screen you can enter Name and Description of the group. You can also add Users that belong to this group. You can see that users Project Manager #1, and Project Manager #2 are already in this group. Keep in mind that I did not add them to this group from this screen, but I added them when through Manage Users screen, which will be part of some of my next Posts! Also notice that this group is in “relationship” with My Organization, and My Project Categories, which I mentioned before.

I will now expand Global Permission section on this screen, and I will get (I can grab the whole picture at once, so I will show you in more than one picture):

Now, the explanation!!! Group permissions are Project Web App Permissions (which I had explained in my previous post), and you can change them here for each group!!! And those permissions are what can you do as a, in this example, Project Manager. You can see at the bottom of the screen Set permissions with template where you can choose predefined Templates and apply permissions from this template to specific group! I will cover that also in some of my next posts!

For example, Project Managers group has New Project, Open Project, and Publish Project permissions, but NOT Approve Timesheet permission. If you want him to have that permission click on Allow!

OK! Now we know that particular group tell you what can you do! What are Categories?

Categories are…. read my next Post!

Regards!