Okay, for once I'm going to talk shop.  For those of you who actually know who I am, I am a Microsoft Project Server 2003 SME.  Having been involved in the original beta of Project 2002 and on the Project Customer Advisory Council for Project 200x, I'm a bit familiar with the tool. 

TODAY'S SPECIAL

Today shoppers, we are going to discuss when and how to use non-enterprise custom fields in Project Server Project Web Access views to enable custom reporting views.

So, what's the problem and why do I care? (to quote Dr. Pinder) 

The problem is when implementing an enterprise solution, every department wants a slightly different reporting view to meet their particular needs.  The issue becomes larger as the breadth of the deployment grows.  You care because reporting issues tend to breed unhappy users.  If you've read Creating Customer Evangelists, you know the mathematics of unhappy customers can be deadly.  Unhappy users can kill a project.

An alternative is to add all of those fields to the Enterprise Global.  Doing so creates some issues.  First, it increases the Global's size and has an impact on performance.  Also, it creates a user interaction issue if most of the fields listed in the Project Information dialog don't apply to them.  Lastly, changes can only be made centrally and typically not quickly.

So, how do you make your customers happy while not breaking the tool?  Here's what I recommend.

First, keep only fields which are truly global to the entire organization in the Global.  This makes it easier to manage as you will find the number of truly global fields to be small.

Next, use the non-enterprise custom fields for departmental level custom information.  Non-enterprise custom fields?  The custom fields I'm referring to are the ones that are NOT in the Enterprise Global.  These are the custom task and resource fields you've had in previous versions.

Last, create custom PWA views to show the local custom data so that each organization can manage it's data in the tool.  After all, you want them to use the tool to manage this stuff.

Requirements

• A common project outline code defined and with value assigned for each project so that you can filter the PWA view.  You will want only those projects with similar custom field definitions to appear in the view.  We used department for the value.
• A project template used to create projects consistently for a given department.  Otherwise, it is likely that the custom field definitions will vary, which will lead to other issues.

Publishing Setup

• In Project Pro, change the following option.
  Go to Tools, Options, Collaborate tab.
• Under the Publish New and Changed Assignments section about two-thirds of the way down, change the check box to Any task information changes.

This way, if you change a custom field and nothing else for a given task, that task will now be republished and you will see the custom information in PWA.

Caveats

1. Only Task 0 Project Summary Task non-enterprise custom field values are visible in the Project Center views. 
2. The non-enterprise custom fields have to have the same name and defined values for all projects in the view or PWA will list each differently defined non-enterprise custom field as a separate column in the view.  This will occur for each non-enterprise custom field instance where the definitions differ between projects.  In one case, 10 custom fields resulted in 37 columns due to definition differences.
3. These fields aren't visible in the Portfolio Analyzer.

For example, if AAA project uses Text1 for Business Analyst and the other project BBB doesn't use Text1, then you will see the following in PWA.

Project Name   Text1    Business Analyst
AAA Project             Joe Smith
BBB Project    
CCC Project             Jane Doe

If you filter the view to see only projects where the non-enterprise custom field definitions are the same, the view will appear correctly.  So, you will see the following columns.

Project Name   Business Analyst
AAA Project    Joe Smith
CCC Project    Jane Doe

Once you do this, you can create custom views based on the filter you've defined and then assign the views to the correct category so that only those folks see the info.

I'll post another entry on what you can do to make the entry of this information easier in Project Pro, if manual entry is required.

 Enjoy!