In case you haven’t heard, SharePoint Project Management Central™ (PM Central™) R2.0 was released last week. There are tons of great new features, but one of the most exciting ones is the ability for project managers to create a department site in addition to portfolio and project sites. This enables project managers to take advantage of PM Central’s multi-level tracking and reporting via a three-tiered architecture, providing maximum project management capability.

To Create and Track Data for a Department:

1) Create the portfolio site. (For steps 1-3, read KB.12434: Using PM Central in 10 Steps for more detailed instructions.)

2) Create resources in the Enterprise Resource Pool.

3) Create the project site. Make sure that you select a Project Department in the project’s Project Health List. To add a new department to the choices, read KB.12565: How to Change the Choices for the Project Department Column in the Project Health List.

4) Create the department site.

• Navigate to the portfolio site and select Central Actions > Add New Project. (If you created a new site collection using a PM Central top-level site template, you need a farm administrator account to create the department site. See the steps below.*)

  

• Enter a Title and an optional Description for the department site.
• Choose your permissions.
• Select the template for the department site:
  • Bamboo PM Central Department Level Site – Custom Template
  • Bamboo PM Central Department Level Site

  

  • Click Create and wait while the department site is created.

5) Configure the department site. You must configure the filter settings for the department site in order to view and track data and projects in the department site.

• Configure the filter settings selecting the filter settings link in the Welcome message.

  

• Under Column, choose the field that you want the filter to depend on, for example: Project Name, Project Manager, Project Department, etc.
• Under Operator, select the condition for the filter, such as Equal To, Begins With or Contains.
• Under Value, choose the value for the Column. For example, if you select Project Department for the Column, then the value could be Marketing, Sales or Support.
• Under And/Or, choose And or Or if you want to include another condition in the filter, for example: if you want to filter projects with a specific Project Department and Project Manager.

  

• Click OK. When the filter has been applied, the page will display the following message: The filtering setting process is running successfully.

  

6) Navigate back to the department site. It now displays the projects in the department site that meet your configured filter settings.

7) Return to the portfolio site’s Project Central tab. It now displays a link to the department site under the All Department Sites section.

*If you created a new site collection using a PM Central top-level site template, you need a farm administrator account to create the department site.

1. Create the department site navigating to the portfolio site and selecting Central Actions > Add New Project.
2. Enter in the farm administrator account to create the department site.
   • Select Site Actions > Edit Page.
   • Edit the Site Creation Plus Web Part.
   • Enter the farm administrator account information and choose a site collection administrator.

     

   • Set up the permissions to the site. You must select the Choose a new group option.

     

   • Click Apply and then OK to save your changes.
3. See the steps above to continue creating and configuring the department site.

As always, the PM Central team is committed to making PM Central the most useful and beneficial project management and collaboration tool for SharePoint available. We are open to your feedback, and we welcome your questions and comments in the PM Central forum.

Interested in PM Central R2.0? Get a free 30-day trial.

Keep checking the Bamboo Team Blog for more PM Central R2.0 use cases:

• How to Update Budget Cost and Budget Work