Tips and Techniques Blog

Having Problems Printing Gantt and Timeline Charts

John Filicetti — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:47:00 GMT

I have heard some people are having problems printing Gantt and Timeline charts as they span many pages. Hopefully the attached files will help you with this task. I have modified these reports to be able to print the same number of pages as if you were printing from Microsoft Project Professional. The Timeline Gantt was fashioned to look like the Timeline Gantt in the Executive View. The other Gantt charts focus on day, week, and monthly time periods. The attached file is called Gant Charts.zipsend because many environments won't let you receive a zipped file. Download the file, rename it it Gantt Charts.zip and unzip to create TXT and PDF files for each chart type. To use the TXT files: 1) Open the TXT file 2) Press Ctrl and a (select all) to select all information in the file 3) Press Ctrl and c (copy) to copy the file to clipboard 4) Open Advanced Report Builder and select Blank Report 5) Click on Tools Open Report From Clipboard 6) You will need to associate your report file with this report by clicking on File, Report Package (***BE SURE YOU DO THIS STEP OR YOU WILL GET AN ERROR WHEN TRYING TO RUN THE REPORT!***) 7) You should now see the report and you can run it 8) Once the report runs, you can click on File, Save As and name the report the same as the file name (don't put in .txt)

Revitalize your solution!

John Filicetti — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:11:00 GMT

In 2010, for a fee, Daptiv Consulting Services can review your current PPM-PMO-PM processes; your current goals and the goals you had when you purchased a solution, and work with you to architect a roadmap for success including a revitalized process, training, and dashboards with the ability to drill-through from Enterprise to project with levels in between. We can help your organization move up the maturity ladder and see a larger return on your investment! To set up an appointment, contact John Filicetti at jfilicetti@daptiv.com or contact your Daptiv salesperson.

Project Carryover -- How to handle multi-year projects in Daptiv

John Filicetti — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:20:00 GMT

When a project closes during your current year, you can mark it as completed and archive it. I don't like archiving projects since I want to reference all the information for reports. Daptiv has added some functions allowing reporting on archived projects, but if you want to work with a project once archived, you have to reactivate it before you can work on it. I normally just change the status to Completed and filter out this status on most views. I like projects available for a year for reporting before "hiding" them by archiving them. If a project is going to carryover from this year to next, I have two choices: 1) Close out the project this year and have full accounting for finanials and other metric and then present the carryover project as a new project for next year to be considered and scored alonside all proposed and active projects (this is a good time to re-evaluate if this is a good project to do and clean house if necessary). I like closing the books at the end of the year and scoring active projects alongside proposed projects for the new year. 2) Treat the project as a multi-year project and keep tracking things. The problem with this choice is it makes it hard to tie financials to fiscal years (if your fiscal year is off of the calendar year, you may want to make these changes with your fiscal year). If you are worried about having the deal with project carryover on multi-year projects, manage your projects on a month-by-month basis and close the books and status each month. This is a great time for your Governance group to evaluate the performance of the project team and evaluate if the project is still viable and the same priority.

Updating the Community Site!

John Filicetti — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:44:00 GMT

I am in the process of updating many sections of the Daptiv Community. I am starting with Dynamic Applications (DA) in the Solutions Library. My goal is to provide a picture of the fields and layout for each DA along with the reasoning behind the DA. I am also going to do the same for ARB reports. I want to create category folders and organize the reports into logical folders. Finally, along the way, I plan on providing more Best Practices. I have posted a number of them on my website at http://home.comcast.net/~projectmgmt and will post more on the Community. Let me know if other updates are needed.

Understanding how costs and hours roll through Daptiv in the Status pane for each project

John Filicetti — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:19:00 GMT

When you provide your estimates in the Project Request, you fill in three fields for the Status: * Estimated Work (this is in hours) * Estimated Labor Cost (this is a calculation of the estimated hours by each resource type times their internal "Cost" rate) * Estimated Labor Revenue (this is a calculation of the estimated hours by each resource type times their external "Revenue" rate, in other words, what you can bill someone for your time) When you apply resources to to the tasks in the Task application, you get another three figures once you update your status: * Total Scheduled Work (the total number of hours of scheduled time) * Total Planned Labor Cost (again, you take the internal rate times the scheduled hours to get your "Cost" of work) * Total Planned Labor Revenue (you take the external rate times the scheduled hours to get the "revenue" you can gain if you bill a customer) When you update tasks and then update your status, you get: * Total Acutal Work in hours * Total Actual Labor cost which is the Total Actual Work times the internal rate for each individual. Everything is dependent on your updating the Project Status. This action pushes all hours and expenses through the system.

Creating a report that lists all report authors

Kevin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:36:00 GMT

Have you ever needed to know who else in your organization is a report author? Ever wondered if they had the answer that you're looking for. but you didn't know who else creates reports? This simple report will allow you so see who else in your organization is a Report Author or Advanced Report Author. You do need to be a report author to create the report.

In Daptiv, click the "Reports" tab, and "Create Report".
In the left side navigation pane, expand the folder named "Enterprise User", and then the subfolder inside named "Users".
You should see an option for "Full Name" and "Report Author License"; drag or "Insert" both of these into your report on the right.
You can include other data items if you wish depending on your needs (such as "Status" or "Supervisor"); when you're done, choose "Save As", name the report something descriptive and save it to an appropriate location.

You'll now have a report you and anyone else in your enterprise with access to the Reports tab can run when they need to check on who has WI Authorships.

Some New Tips and Tricks for You!

Kevin — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Hi Everyone,

Today marks the beginning of a new initiative here in the User Education team. We're going to begin posting some tips for common problems that you may run into with Daptiv PPM. Some of these may be documented elsewhere, but we are working with the Support team to get some of the more common problems addressed here. We'll get these out to you as they come up, hopefully at least one a week. These will be in addition to any other tips from other areas of the company.

If you have been through something and would like us to add it to the blog for others to see, feel free to email me directly at ktate(at)daptiv.com.

Our first tip is about seeing new project types in custom views. When you create a new project type and create some projects of that type, remember that the custom views you have set up for the Projects tab won't automatically display those projects until you include the project type in the definition of the view.

To Update Your Custom View:

Click the Projects tab.
Click More Views and select the view you want to edit.
Click Edit Current View.

The Edit Custom View window will appear, listing all the current project types in your enterprise.
Check the box next to the project type you want to include in your custom view.
You can make other changes to your view by clicking Next Step or you can click Skip To..., then Name and Save to finish the change.
Click Finish and Save.

Expanding your thoughts and capitalizing on your Daptiv investment

John Filicetti — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:59:00 GMT

With the new power of the Work Intelligence (WI) Advanced Report Builder (ARB), I am asking you to take a look at the possibilities you now have to create new reports and perform analysis within Daptiv. Many users have come to me asking how to capture or put more information into Dynamic Applications (DAs) to create views and reports. In many cases, the information is already in Daptiv and you have to shift your paradigms to think about harvesting and analyzing this information by using ARB.

Task work and task cost details are in the solution, you may just have to whiteboard what you are trying to accomplish and use the power of ARB to accomplish your goal. The process I suggest you take is:

Whiteboard your data input, the processes you want the data to go through, and then your data output.
Next, work backwards and be sure the data you want out is actually in the solution. If not, you may have to add custom fields or aggregate information from applications by using the aggregated custom field.
If the output data is not in the form you desire, you may have to transform it in Daptiv or transform it when you run your report.
Design your report format on the whiteboard or prototype it using MS Visio, MS Excel, or MS Word.
Create your report.

Status reports currently taking hours per project per week may be a click away and will soon be able to be scheduled to run when needed. If the Daptiv administrator puts their minds to work, WI can provide immediate return and a TON of information and decision support.

Integrating eProject Dynamic Applications with Salesforce.com, Part 1

emarone — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:51:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of articles on how to send information from Salesforce.com (SFDC) to eProject. In this example, we’ll use a simple eProject Dynamic Application (DA) web form to create a SFDC S-control for creating a new eProject record from SFDC data.

Note: The bulk of this work takes place in SFDC, so implementing this kind of integration requires experience with SFDC administration, particularly with S-Controls, and HTML formatting skills.

Getting Started

For this example, I’ll use an RFP request Dynamic Application for a professional services organization. The workflow is that when a services RFP is requested as part of a sales opportunity, the Sales Executive will generate a new RFP request in SFDC by clicking a custom link on the SFDC Opportunity record. This will load the DA webform in SFDC and pre-populate it with key data from SFDC, eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring data consistency between the systems.

I’ve included screenshots illustrating this process. Click the inline thumbnails to view the full-size screenshot.

Step 1: Create the Dynamic Application

Here is the DA, already created in eProject, with some sample data to demonstrate the field types:

Step 2: Create the Web Form

From within the project where you wish to manage the data, select Configure Web Form from the DA menu. Check the Enable Web Form checkbox, select the fields you wish to collect, and set your success/fail redirects:

Click Save and Generate HTML, then copy the code to a blank text file:

You don’t need to save the text file as an HTML file. You just need to capture the form code so you can move it over to SFDC.

Step 3: Create the S-Control

In the SFDC Setup area, click Build -> Custom S-Controls, then click the New Custom S-Control button to begin. Give the S-Control an appropriate Label, Name, and Description. Set the Type to HTML, and then paste the web form code into the Content field:

Click Save, and you’re now ready to associate the S-control with a custom link

Step 4: Create the Custom Link

Navigate to Customize -> Opportunities -> Buttons and Links and click New in the Custom Buttons and Links section. Give the link an appropriate Label, Name and Description. Select the Detail Page Link, or you may choose to create a button if you wish. The end result will be the same. Select the desired link behavior (for this example, we’ll show it in the existing SFDC window), select Custom S-Control as the content source, and then select the correct S-control:

Click Save, and click OK to clear the page layout notification, and you’re almost ready to test your new S-Control.

Note: Although you can create the webform directly in the link definition, I prefer to use an S-Control, which can then be reused elsewhere in SFDC, and it makes it much easier to “upgrade” the link by simply swapping out the S-Control and not having to rewrite the live link code.

Step 5: Add the Custom Link to the Page Layout

Navigate to Customize -> Opportunities -> Page Layouts, and Edit the layout where you want to add the link. Drag the new link to the Custom Links section and Save the changes.

Step 6: Test the Link

Open an Opportunity and verify the new link appears under the Custom Links section:

Click the link, and the webform is displayed in SFDC:

Complete the fields:

Click Send. The redirect is displayed:

Return to eProject and verify the record is created:

Step 7: Auto-populating the Form with SFDC Data

Return to SFDC and edit the S-Control. You can use the SFDC Merge Fields to insert data from the Opportunity into the DA form and save your users some data entry.

Note: This part can be a little tricky and it’s recommended that someone who is comfortable working with HTML forms make these modifications. The default webform code won't be the prettiest example of HTML code you've ever seen, but it's far from the worst. Before I get started with this portion of the process, I like to put line breaks between the table rows to make it a easier to locate the form field I want to work with.

Scroll down the web form code and locate the <table> tag, it will be near the bottom of the code:

To auto-populate the Account Executive field, position the edit cursor between the apostrophes for the value attribute:

Select Opportunity from the Select Field Type dropdown, and then select Owner Full Name from the Insert Field dropdown, which adds the Merge Field code into the input tag as default value:

Repeat to insert other Merge Fields as appropriate. For the Description field, which is a long text field, simply insert the Merge Field between the opening and closing <textarea> tags:

Save your edits and re-test the link:

Looks pretty good! All of the fields here have been automatically populated by either Opportunity or Account data, and the user has the opportunity to add comments or clarifications in the Description field before submitting it.

In this example, I modified the form formatting a bit by reducing the columns in the Description text area to prevent horizontal scrolling, and I got rid of the date format caption for the RFP Due Date field. You can also format the fonts, colors, and other aspects of the webform to match your standard stylesheet, branding, or even just make it look a little more like an SFDC page.

In Part 2, I’ll show you how to use a webform-driven S-Control bypass the eProject webform and validation altogether and automatically submit data from SFDC to eProject.

Closing the Gap: Creating Salesforce.com to eProject Integrations

emarone — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:49:00 GMT

Integrating enterprise applications is a crucial requirement for many organizations. Operational data cannot live in silos if your business hopes to be able to analyze trends and take action in a timely manner. One of the increasingly common eProject integration requirements we are seeing is Salesforce.com (SFDC).

We are developing bi-directional SFDC integration for eProject Project Request and Project data, however you can get a head start on passing CRM data from SFDC to eProject leveraging eProject Dynamic Application web forms and workflow notifications along with SFDC S-Controls and custom links. The best part is that you can get started today with zero programming or web service knowledge.

As an example, we recently created an integration between SFDC and eProject to record and communicate eProject implementation details upon completion of a services engagement:

Upon completion of a services engagement, the eProject Solutions Consultant creates an “Implementation Summary” record in SFDC, which includes data points like the primary implementation contact, number of users trained, processes supported, which departments or groups are using eProject, primary implementation goals, challenges, and next steps. This becomes a part of the Account history, and is available to our Services, Support, Sales and Marketing teams.

Once the record is created in SFDC, the Solutions Consultant “pushes” a copy of the Implementation Summary to eProject via a custom button and S-Control created from the DA webform. We only carry over a subset of the SFDC data, focusing on those data points that would of interest or use to the company at large, primarily the customer summary, implementation goals, and implementation challenges. The entire company is automatically notified about our newly deployed customers via eProject workflow configuration.

(Click thumbnail for full workflow detail)

This allows us to capture a very detailed summary of a customer implementation under the master customer record in SFDC while sharing pertinent customer information with the entire company, including those who do not have SFDC licenses, such as Engineering, Network Operations and Administrative staff. This helps us to improve our company-wide customer intelligence without creating an excessive amount of work for the services team as they wrap up customer engagements.

Other Dynamic Application integrations might include work orders, expense tracking, escalation requests, action items, or any other processes that might be initiated from SFDC and acted upon or managed in eProject.

In forthcoming articles, I’ll cover the steps required to set up a basic SFDC -> eProject integration, advanced capabilities, and the possibility of integrating Project Requests via the Project Request webform.

Your comments, questions and suggestions are welcome!