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Microsoft Project Server Basics

So what exactly is Project Server?

Project Server is Microsoft’s Project Management

allows one to do project management, portfolio management, work management and related things for an Organization.

Can be used for project planning (deciding how much time, people, cost it will take to complete a project), create tasks, assign those tasks to resources (team members) and track those tasks

What are the Components of Project Server?

At a very high level, Project Server is made up of a server component (the ‘server’ software) that can be accessed and operated from clients

Client can be either Project Professional (which is a desktop product) or Project Web App (which is a browser based software) or a custom-made application

How do I use Project Server?

Project Server is typically used by different user roles such as Project Manager, Team Member, Portfolio Manager & Site Administrator.

These users use a client like Project Web App Project Web App sits on top of SharePoint & uses basic

SharePoint services such as administration, security and reporting

Thus, to use Project Server, you need to have SharePoint in place

Through Project Web App, the users use a SharePoint-like site to interact with projects, tasks, schedules and resources.

PWA uses Project Server Web Parts and other standard SharePoint web parts.

Architecture Layers of Project Server

Project Professional Desktop Client

Project Web AppBrowser-based Client

Project Server Interface Web Services

Business Object Layer

Data Access Layer

Archive Draft Published Reporting SharePointContent DB

Architecture Layers of Project Server

Front end: Project Professional or PWA (or a custom application)

Project Web App Server This is both, a physical and a logical entity Physically, it constitutes of one or more servers

hosting the web application Logically, it constitutes a set of ASP.Net pages, web

parts and a component called PSI Forwarder. This PSI Forwarder intercepts requests coming from

Clients like Project Professional and PWA and relays them to Project Server.

Architecture Layers of Project Server (continued)

Project Server: It is the main software that hosts and orchestrates many

different software components such as Project Server Interface (PSI), Business Objects, Data Access Layer, the Scheduling Engine, Project Server workflow system etc

Project Server Interface (PSI): This is the API of Project Server. It exposes core functionality of Project Server through

ASMX and WCF web servicesBusiness Objects:

The object model of Project Server that wraps various entities and behavior into objects.

Architecture Layers of Project Server (continued)

Data Access Layer: Architectural layer that does the job of saving and

fetching data from the business layer to actual Project Server databases.

It also helps encapsulate connection handling and transaction management.

The DAL is not exposed to any client applications. Its very much internal to the Project Server.

All that the clients have access to is the web service interface via PSI.

Architecture Layers of Project Server (continued)

The Databases: Project server 2010 stores data in below 5 databases:

Archive: Stores online backups from Project Server site. This is not visible to PWA.

Draft: Stores projects data of unpublished projects created either in Project Professional or PSI web services

Published: Data of all published projects. This is visible in Project Web App

Reporting: Same data as that of Published projects but optimized for reporting and OLAP cubes. This data is comprehensive and is updated in real time

SharePoint Config & Content DBs: Stores config & content data of project site content such as workflows, documents, lists, issues, risks etc

Can I directly access data of Project Server projects?

Yes. PSI is the interface through which Project Server data can be accessed. It’s a set of ASMX and WCF services.

Project Server data can also be handled to some extent through SharePoint workflows.

PSI is built using .Net (in case of Project Server 2010, its .Net 3.5) and allows client applications to access Project Server data. It exposes 3 types of APIs: General-purpose API exposing generic services such as Project,

Task, Timesheet etc Project Server specific API which can be used for purposes like

upgrading to newer version of Project Server or for integrating with MS Exchange

API meant to be used only with Project Professional

Can I directly access data of Project Server projects?

The web services are wrappers around the classes in PSI and expose web methods to operate on those classes.

The web methods return or consume information related to entities like Project, Task etc in the form of DataSet objects.

Example: Project.ReadProjectTeam returns ProjectTeamDataSet

that gives information about project’s resources whereas Project.ReadProjectEntities gives information about Tasks, Dependencies etc.

Thank You !