Thursday, April 02, 2009

100 characters for a project scope?

Apparently Microsoft Portfolio Server 2007 thinks you only need 100 characters to enter your Projects Objectives, business need, in scope, out of scope, etc...

I know we are living in a world of outrageous disk costs and even 100 characters of text should be a luxury. Err wait, that was 1980, when was this thing designed? Do I really want my project managers trying to plan in txt speak? "PJT gr8 OMG bnfts"

Given the small size of the portfolio server database, I am maxing these fields out. According to a post on the project server newsgroup (http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/list/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.project.server&tid=f1e4971d-7390-4aba-bf1e-701de1f87df1&cat=&lang=&cr=&sloc=&p=1), we max out at 3950. I see that the application objective field is set to 3900 by default so I am going with that.

To implement, navigate to - settings -> Attribute and Indicator Management -> Attributes Definition. Click the Show Default Attributes button. Now search for your fields. Check the attribute in question and click edit. Update Maximum Text Length from 100 to what ever you want it to be. I didn't test w/ values larger than 3900.

I had to change:
PORTFOLIO_OBJECTIVES
OBJECTIVE
PROGRAM_OBJECTIVES
PROGRAM_IN_SCOPE
INSCOPE
PROGRAM_OUT_OF_SCOPE
OUT_OF_SCOPE
PROGRAM_BUSINESS_NEED
BUSINESS_NEED
PORTFOLIO_ASSUMPTIONS
PROGRAM_ASSUMPTIONS
ASSUMPTIONS
DEPENDENCIES
PROGRAM_DEPENDENCIES

With, as far as I could see, absolutely no rhyme nor reason, these were already set to 3900.
APPLICATION_OBJECTIVE
PORTFOLIO_IN_SCOPE
PORTFOLIO_OUT_OF_SCOPE
PORTFOLIO_BUSINESS_NEED
PORTFOLIO_DEPENDENCIES


I would guess there will be more. I will update this post with further details if I find them.

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