Project Server 2010 Solution Starters - feedback from customers

After being involved in Project Server 2010 Solution Starters development, we are always pleased to see that companies who are implementing / using Project Server 2010 utilize some of the solution starters. From our experience, most popular ones are Dynamic Workflow, Bulk Edit and Bulk Import.
Here I wanted to share some ideas / problems from customers who are using them.

Dynamic workflow

• ability to send email when moving between stages

Bulk Edit

• Works slow on big number of projects (over 50) (we have customizations with reading data from RDB but writing via PSI)
• Some customers want projects to be checked-in after editing
• Correct handling of session end (we heard one comment from user on this and it is more our guess

Bulk Import

• using custom fields with lookup tables and populating values.

Maybe community should ask MS to implement some of those changes?

Problem Project Professional 2010 - Workflow enabled fields and multiline fields

For some reason, workflow-enabled fields are not visible in MS Project Pro as well as multiline text. I can find logical explanation why MS did this; But - why not to go one step ahead and make them visible and read-only?

Project Server 2010 - Dynamic Approvals Workflow

In February 2010, our team completed  migration of Project Server 2007 system to Project Server 2010 platform with additional customization work. Original system contained over 1000 projects with about about 300 active projects in execution phase.

As part of the migration, our client wanted to perform number of improvements in their current project initiation process, so we designed and implemented a workflow for that.

There are number of nice features that I wanted to highlight:

• Ability to define up to five approvers and dynamically specify if their approval is mandatory. This is done by utilizing 10 custom fields for approvers and requirement for approval with some front-end javascript code for making all fields as required.
• On every change of ownership / action required system sends emails to all parties notifying of required actions.
• Most of the approvals have 3 states - approve, reject, request for more information.
• We've implemented detailed log trail for audit and maintenance using Event Log.

Challenges

• Dynamic project permissions management - since there are several owners during project life cycle plus number of additional key resources that need ability to access specific project only, we are dynamically give permissions for this project for specific users, this is done by workflow.
• Customer wanted Auto ID  (user friendly of-course) generation - done with event handler and SharePoint list.
• There are number of project types (EPT), and depending on selected EPT, workflow routes project to specific manager in PMO. This is done with special routing table.
• Force check-in on ownership change: When workflow changes owner, it should do force check-in and publish, so another user can edit / provide information.