I had a few questions following the post on the new default behavior coming to Project Online - Project Online- Some changes coming to task sync for enterprise projects– whereby your enterprise projects by default will not sync with your task lists in the project site. The main reason for the change is that the sync adds some time to publishing, and even creating projects if they are based on a template that has lots of tasks – and in the process uses a lot of server resources. And particularly for large projects, having the task list may not be that useful. Making it a conscious decision to sync will avoid some poor performance scenarios.
The questions I had were “Is this feature also coming to Project Server 2013” – and if not – how do I achieve the same thing. The same change will not appear in Project Server 2013 in a Cumulative Update – but like many of the new features and changes that have appeared in Project Online, they may certainly appear in the next release. But you can already control the task sync today in a number of ways – and these are described in the KB Article - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2954895– titled Project Publish jobs remain at 80 percent for a long time before completing.
The article talks about the PowerShell commands that can be used on-premises:
- Get-SPProjectEnterpriseProjectTaskSync
- Disable-SPProjectEnterpriseProjectTaskSync
- Enable-SPProjectEnterpriseProjectTaskSync
For example if you had a large project (MyLargeProject) where you were not using the task list and didn’t want to take the extra time when publishing you could execute:
Disable-SPProjectEnterpriseProjectTaskSync –Url http://servername/PWA/MyLargeProject
The article goes on to give more heavy hammer approaches – which were useful for Project Online before the changes happen – such as removing the Task list, which could even be incorporated into a site template for specific Enterprise Project Types (EPTs) (if you can incorporate something by its absence…). One thing to note – the link architecture for linking issues and risks to tasks uses the task from the SharePoint task list as a proxy for the ‘real’ task – so not having these tasks in the list does also stop you from linking to the tasks.
If you are not familiar with running PowerShell commands for SharePoint and Project Server 2013 then please see”
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806878(v=office.15).aspx - Use Windows PowerShell to administer SharePoint 2013
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee890097(v=office.15).aspx - Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Project Server 2013 (Although not updated with these new cmdlets)
If you are new to PowerShell – or even if you are not – the Scripting Guys blog is a great place to hang out - http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/. For more specific Project related scripting stuff I find Paul Mather is probably most active in that space - https://pwmather.wordpress.com/category/powershell/– and the script center on TechNet (SharePoint category) - https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/site/search?f%5B0%5D.Type=RootCategory&f%5B0%5D.Value=sharepoint contains many of his and plenty of others that I am sure people will find useful.
One PowerShell command I expect to blog about soon (as we are seeing a few cases where we need to use it!) is the Set-SPProjectPCSSettings. This is for on-premises Project Server 2013 installations and allows you to change some of the default parameters of the Project Calculation Service (PCS) – which is the server-side scheduling engine used when you are working in the schedule web part (and other background scheduling stuff – such as applying status updates). More on that later…