sobota, 27 października 2007

EPM Adventure - 1st Chapter

Mood: That is Saturday!
Music: The best videoclip ever and one of the best song

The topic of the day is to remove the EPM project. The task seems to be easy, but as some the things in real world it is not as simple as it seems.

1. Quick introduction
Within our installation of the EPM, there are three types of "projects":

A. Proposals - these are things, which you establish before the project is opened. It is very useful to plan and report the prepartion period and/or offering process etc.
B. Projects - that is a real project, with a regular project plan in MS Project
C. Actions - that is set of post-project tasks like support and/or closing things, which have not been included into the project period

The categorization has some special meaning as only Projects can have the real, advanced schedule, which you edit in MS Project. Proposals and Actions has just some simpler Web schedule editor which has limitations like you can not add two persons to one task.

2. The case

The problem is that user with "Project manager" role can easily remove his Proposal and Actions, but there are some big problems with Projects. As there appeared more and more out-of-date projects, I was willing to clean my desk up.

The first lead was saying that it is enough to change a status of the project...but the field was uneditable :(

The next lead was about finishing the work flow...but that did not change much and published projects, where still visible.

Couple of words about SharePoint workflows in here. That is truely a cool, new feature of MOSS. I strongly advice to take a second and have a look at two workflows implemented by default in EPM - acceptance and feedback collection, they truely work fine. Unfortunatelly just limited number of ready-to-use things is available for now and if you want to create some consistent, customized set of workflows you need to involve some SharePoint programmer - there is still not too many on the market.

But coming back to the main case... I had to make couple of other unsuccessful tries (like tring to remove all reources from the project, but I could not remove myself :( ), before finding out that the simplest solution is the best. It is enough just to open MS Project and right click on the project :)


3. Conclusion 1 - from administrator
And now the most funny part of the whole adventure. I came to my SharePoint administrator, told him about all my problems and my succcess. He looked at me, a little bit surprised and said...

- Well, you should be able to do something like that even with your privilleges

This short setence explains, why removing Proposals and Actions was so easy comparing to Projects. On the other hand it means that EPM has some security whole and even when the "delete projects" privillege is not added you still can do a trick from the MS Project - it is just enough to have the privillege of managing projects from that tool. How slimy bastard am I ?! :)

4. Conclusion 2 - project archivization
Just next step after I found out how to delete projects, the question has appeared how to archive the content and unfortunatelly the EPM does not provide any tool for it. If you have various type of 20-30 libraries per project and number of various documents distributed among them, lack of such a tool is quite painful. It is the next proof that EPM is quite a young solution and I hope that engineeres from Redmond will come up soon with some cool rocket science, which will allow me to do a trick with one click just for some extra 100$ in new version of EPM 2011 or 2012 ;)

5. Links
Just by the way I have found couple of nice links, which my be useful to you

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