Earlier today in the EPMFAQ Forums, there was a discussion concerning an issue in Project 2007 whereby the Duration on a Fixed Duration task is set to 0d if the Work on that task either rolled up or was set to 0h.

This is divergent behavior from Project 2003, and one that appears to be causing issues for a rapidly increasing number of users. Many of us within the community have been aware of this issue for quite some time, but there appear to be many people that are unfamiliar with this little conundrum, be they users, administrators, or consultants.

Here’s my response to the question:

The issue you are referring to manifests when the Work for the task is set to 0h, whether by rollup or entry. This results in the task’s Duration being set to 0d. This is true for all Task Types, including Fixed Duration.

In Brian Smith’s recent post about the PWA Administrator that you select during provisioning, he points out that there is nothing special about this account — as you know, this account is the first admin in the system. According to Brian, it is also set as the administrator for the PWA site collection:

The first administrator is also set as the primary administrator of the site collection created for the PWA site. You can update the user in this case using stsadm -o siteowner. The parameters for this command are -url -ownerlogin -secondarylogin

My personal practice is to set the PS07 Service Account as this “primary admin” to ensure that it always has access. After provisioning, I log in as the service account and create the other administrators as needed. During post-deployment knowledge transfer, I strongly discourage clients from ever making any changes to the service accounts used during configuration (e.g. passwords, changing to another account entirely). While it’s possible to go through and change all the passwords, it’s labor intensive and error-prone, and any missteps during that process will cause issues in the environment.

Super-quick tip… When reviewing the traffic logs for the week, I noticed that someone had arrived here searching for the Administrator password for Microsoft’s EPM2007DEMO VPC.

So, if you happen to return:

Username: FarmAdmin
Password: pass@word1

All of the passwords you need are on Pg. 26 in 2007 Microsoft EPM Solution Demo Image Installation Instructions.doc, which is included in the package for the VPC.

HTH!

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A few of our clients have reported that after customizing a Project Workspace or deploying a customized Project Workspace, they begin to see Reporting (WSS Sync) errors in their queue:

When they view the details of this error, they see the following details (duplicate lines removed for your convenience):

Error summary/areas:
Reporting Wss list sync failed
ReportingWssSyncListFailed
Reporting message processor failed
ReportingWSSSyncMessageFailed
Queue
GeneralQueueJobFailed

Error details:

<errinfo>
<general>
<class name="Reporting Wss list sync failed">
<error id="24018" name="ReportingWssSyncListFailed" uid="7e7fa8da-24d4-4c4d-a9ab-c32ed46e205c" SPListType="1100" Error="Failed to prepare the transfer of SP list 1100 for project ‘89ec6841-1f56-46b1-b97b-d775f0ca7e06′. The field Category was missing from the SP list and was ignored." />
</class>
<class name="Reporting message processor failed">
<error id="24016" name="ReportingWSSSyncMessageFailed" uid="79d63cef-5a83-46b1-bc6c-c0124311b60f" QueueMessageBody="ProjectUID=’89ec6841-1f56-46b1-b97b-d775f0ca7e06′. ForceFullSync=’False’" Error="RDS failed while trying to sync one or more SP lists. The RDS queue message will be retried." />
</class>
<class name="Queue">
<error id="26000" name="GeneralQueueJobFailed" uid="b04b7077-731c-4149-87ac-89af07377229" JobUID="ba088e4e-781a-4bc4-b787-3e24ac2849ec" ComputerName="EPM2007DEMO" GroupType="ReportingWSSSync" MessageType="WSSSyncMessageEx" MessageId="1" Stage="" />
</class>
</general>
</errinfo>

As I’ve previously discussed, at my present client we recently were working very closely with Premier Support to resolve some issues with the cube build. Throughout the course of these discussions, I was told that I really should be running DB Maintenance Plans on the PS07 DBs because with the switch to GUIDs in Project Server 2007, the indices in the various databases can become stale very quickly.

My response to Premier was that since Microsoft has provided no guidance on doing this, and since Microsoft has made such a big deal about not touching any of the databases except Reporting (or Published in very limited circumstances) implementers (including myself) are concerned about doing ANYTHING with regards to Maintenance Plans without guidance from Microsoft.

Premier responded that Chris Fiessinger wrote a blog post about this recently. The agent I was working with gave me advice on how to set up the jobs in the maintenance plan, and promised to press the Product Group to put out some official guidance in the near future.