Project Hosts Blog

Want to join us at Project Conference? Want to join us for free?

Our friends at Innovative-e are featuring a contest to give away one free full-conference pass to the upcoming Microsoft Project Conference 2012 on March 19-22, 2012. The details of their contest can be found here:

Innovative-e Giving Away Free Full-Conference Pass for Microsoft Project Conference 2012

Attending Project Conference already?

Okay, so you’ve already gotten your ticket. Still want a shot to win free prizes at Project Conference? Don’t sweat it. Follow our Twitter: @Project_Hosts for live tweets from the event and special information on how to win our daily giveaways at the conference.

Winning is easy: simply follow us on Twitter, visit our booth #217, take your best shot at our golf simulator and tweet your score with the hashtags #MSPC12 and #ProjectHosts - That’s it. The best score at the end of each day (when exhibit hall closes) will receive a daily random prize from us! See? We told you that you’d get your shot at winning something. Want are the prizes you ask? Follow us and find out.

* For tweet to count, both hashtags must be included alongside drive score.

Questions? Comments? Contact us directly: info@projecthosts.com

Project Hosts is one of only 15 companies worldwide that has attained Microsoft’s Gold Competency in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM). This Competency requires passing of multiple technical exams along with a proven track record of successful Project Server and SharePoint solutions, verified by many positive customer references.

Project Hosts is the only hosting company that has achieved a Gold PPM Competency.

The advantage enjoyed by our 300+ customers is that when we deliver online, private cloud Project Server solutions to our customers, they can rest assured that their environment is being managed by engineers who have unmatched experience in supporting Microsoft Project Server, SharePoint Server, and the full Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution.

Many of our customers are interested in single sign-on, so their users can connect to our online services without having to enter a username and password each time.

There are a number of single sign-on solutions on the market that enable access to browser-based applications. These solutions use technologies like Microsoft Live ID, Active Directory Federation Services, SAML, or even Project Hosts’ own ARGON solution (look for an upcoming blog post). They are great as long as all you want to do is to access web applications via your browser. But they typically do not work for access using Excel (connecting to Excel Services), Project Professional (connecting to Project Server), or from other local applications running on your PC.

We have found that the best and most flexible single sign-on solution is to use the Windows Credential Manager. This feature is built into Windows and provides a mechanism to store user credentials in a encrypted vault associated with the user’s profile. More than 90% of our customers have chosen this solution. The solution requires us to issue a username and password for each user based on an Active Directory domain associated with the hosted application. The first time a user logs in, he or she can simply check the box “Remember my password” to store them in Credential manager. As long as users have permission on their system to use the Windows Credential Manager and have trusted our site in their browsers, they will automatically login to application without any additional logon prompts. Users can connect using a browser, they can view an Excel Services report online then open it in Excel on their PC, they can launch Project Professional on their PC and have it automatically connect in the background to Project Server – it is a completely seamless experience with no additional logins necessary. None of the other single sign-on solutions mentioned above work for all of these access methods.

Please email info@projecthosts.com if you would like more information about Windows Credential Manager or if you would like our white paper comparing various Single Sign-On options.

Document collaboration has become an integral part of good Customer Relationship Management. SharePoint is increasingly used to collaborate on, update, and manage versions of sales presentations, collateral, Statement of Work templates, agreements, and service contracts.

Previously, for these kinds of documents to be included in CRM-enabled communications with customers, they had to be stored inside CRM — in addition to SharePoint. Alternatively, it was possible to pull certain parts of SharePoint into an iframe inside a CRM entity. But now with Microsoft CRM 2011, there is a native integration with SharePoint 2010 that allows SharePoint-stored documents to be easliy accessed and referenced from within the CRM application.

On February 15 at noon Eastern (9am Pacific), I will be giving a webcast to demonstrate these new features and give out 2 free online trial environments of CRM 2011 + SharePoint 2010.

Please join us by Registering for the webcast.

Project Server 2010 has taken the integration with SharePoint to a new level. As a result, users of Project Server have four main choices of Business Intelligence (BI) tools to use for reporting: Project Server Views, Performance Point, SQL Reporting Services, and Excel Services. Excel Services has the advantage that Microsoft Office Excel can be used as the tool to develop or modify reports.

But there are some subtleties that must be addressed when accessing Excel Services reports over the Internet (or even within a corporate network). This is because by default, Excel will try to make a direct connection to the data source. If the data source is a database (like the Reporting Database for Project Server), then this direct connection may not be available over the Internet (or in a corporate network).

By changing configurations from their default values, the Project Hosts Operations team has developed methods to get around this problem, allowing users to open Excel Services reports from Excel on their PCs. If you are interested in learning more about these methods, please email info@projecthosts.com, and we will send you a document describing them.

This week at Microsoft’s Project Momentum Conference in Barcelona, Project Hosts announced the opening of its new London data center.

Project Hosts has been providing Online hosting services to customers in Europe for more than six years, but until now, they have all been hosted from one of our four data centers in the United States. As demand for Software as a Service has continued to grow in Europe, our partners that provide consulting, configuration, and training services have begun hearing more requests for European-hosted options from their customers and prospects. They are now actively promoting the new online services our new EU-based data center (or should I say data centre) has opened to them.

Pricing for hosted EPM or SharePoint or CRM from our London data center is quoted in either pounds sterling or Euros, removing the currency risk that dollar-priced hosting has carried in the past.

For more information, please email info@projecthosts.com.