Hello everyone. It’s been some time, but I’ve got another situation that I’d love to hear everyone's feedback on.
A very unusual issue has surfaced surrounding users and their personal modifications of fields within their project. We have a very active user base using MS Project 2010 and Project Server 2010. By active, I mean that the users spend a good amount of time thinking of ways to personally change the look, feel and more importantly, thefields within MS Project to their individual liking. Here are the steps one user took in this particular situation that is causing an issue:
- The user opened their project, selects aView and inserts an unused Text27 column.
- Right clicked on thatText27 column and selected Custom Fields.
- Renamed... theText 27 field to (lets say Operations)
- Changed theCustom Attributes to Lookup and then created some lookup values for that newly defined attribute.
- Retuned to their current view, chose some tasks, and went about selecting those values they had just created in the modifiedText 27 field.
- Saved and published their project.
Here’s the unusually part. They continued to do this for some time, claiming the values were retained each time it was saved and published. Then one day...they opened their schedule to find that the values they had selected previously were now replaced with (please excuse my ignorance) what appears to be Chinese characters. I’ve seen plenty of strange behaviors, but this particular circumstance is new to me. That leads us to our simple questions:
a. Is this behavior expected or unexpected?
b. What do you believe would cause this behavior?
c. How would you go about remedying the situation?
Below are the two proposed recommendations coming from two different angles. Let me know what you think (theses are just summaries):
Recommendation 1 - Modifying columns and particularly their intended values by the users is not recommended. With heavy manipulation of fields from users we generally see a higher occurrence of issues surrounding those projects. Text 27 is defined in our Project Server settings (Enterprise Global) as a text filed. It should be left as such. If the user desires to have a new lookup field added to the Enterprise Global they may introduce that recommendation at the next change request meeting. Until then we should inform, educate and encourage the users not to perform these types of behaviors in MS Project connected to the Project Server. From experience, we have seen that the more advanced the personal modification, the more likely a corruption may arise.
Recommendation 2 - Backup, cleanup and then restore the Enterprise Global template. Some have demonstrated success with these sorts of issues by making a backup of enterprise Global. Backing up the Enterprise Global views to a local file. Navigating to the published database and Executing Stored Procedure for dbo.MSP_WINPROJ_DELETE_EGLOBAL_PROJECT. Commenting out some lines from in the E-Global.sql file. Running a macro within MS Project. Then begin the process of restoring your views to the Enterprise Global. This has been tested and appears to resolve this issue.
There you have it, two different ways to deal with this unusual situation. I was under the impression that user modification of fields and columns, on a personal level was generally a no-no for the most extent, for these very reasons. And that a Global Template rebuild was more of a DR related proceedure. But since I’ve never run across this exact situation before, I wanted to see if you the the community had seen this behavior before, and how did you deal with it?
As always, I very much appreciate the feedback.
Chris Addis - MCTS