When creating your custom, calculated field, think hard about which calendar you want to use to calculate the number of working days. It might be more useful to calculate using the task and resource calendars. Many calculations in MS Project use the project calendar. Be sure to review the custom field documentation closely to see which calendar your variance calculation is using.

–Al

What might be causing that?

Thanks

I do not mean to be difficult, but at this point my recommendation would be “stop using Microsoft Project and SharePoint.” I have struggled with similar integration issues on my own and have become a big advocate of web-based software like DotProject.

I am not a SharePoint specialist, but I believe you can create custom, structured data types in SharePoint. I would recommend modifying the third-party software to import/export a hierarchical list. I have found that trying to force users to match project and roll-up task names exactly is a difficult process. If they could pick the project names and parent task names from a drop-down list, I believe you would get much better data quality.

Let us know if you work out a solution. I wish I could help more directly, but SharePoint-to-MSP interfaces are not my specialty.

–Alex

If you do not need the other 15 lines, you could simply delete them. If you want to have only 10 milestones appear, I recommend creating a custom view and hiding the other 15 lines in the schedule using a filter of some kind. Read the help files under “New View” and “New Filter” for details.

–Alex

I’ve been working to integrate MS Project plans with a centralized SharePoint site using third party software that works very well to publish multiple plans into a single SharePoint task list.

The challenge is in how I get a flat list in SharePoint to roll up in a way that’s similar to how the project is rolled up, under a series of project plans, categories, and master tasks.

There are two components to this issue:

1. All tasks with the same info.
In order to differentiate one project plan from another, ALL tasks within that project must have the same identifier. All tasks for the project plan for the product release of “Widget Version 5″ must be labelled as “Widget Version 5″.

This is tough to control. All users must make sure that, every time they add a task, it has this information within it. It’d be much easier if you could set some sort of default that could change from project to project.

2. Sub-tasks under Master-tasks.
Similar to #1, there are many tasks that have the same information, but vary based on which task they are sub-grouped under.

Parallel efforts are organized into categories. The categories each have efforts that are broken down into the tasks that represent a single objective.

So, for example, under a project plan of “House Renovation” you might have one category devoted to “Interior Decoration”, and then a group of efforts under that. These objectives might include “Paint” or “Carpet”.

Each objective, in turn, has tasks associated to it. “Carpet”, for example, may have “Pick color” as the first task, and then “Order carpet” as the second. In this example, however, “Pick color” and “Order carpet” would be lines in the project plan that have custom fields saying (as in question #1) “House Renovation”, but also “Interior Decoration” as a category and “Carpet” as a master task.

I’m sure I’ve made this explanation far more complicated that it need be, but do you know of any way to automate this?