Deploying Project Guides

There are two primary challenges to implementing a customized Project Guide. The first challenge is deploying the custom Project Guide content to make it accessible to users. The second challenge is getting all the users pointing to the new custom Project Guide.

One option for content deployment is to put the custom content on a central Web server and have everyone’s machine point to the Web server. The second alternative is to put the custom Project Guide files on each workstation. If you have many users, it may be difficult to administer content changes on each machine. If you go the route of a Web server, you need to make sure the Web server is a member of Internet Explorer’s Trusted Sites on each user’s machine.

Once you have the content available to each user, you have to set Microsoft Project to use the custom Project Guide content. You have a few choices in how you tackle this task. The easiest method for most people using Microsoft Project Server enterprise features is to put a macro in the enterprise global template that sets the ProjectGuide parameters (see ActiveProject.ProjectGuide* in the Microsoft Project VBA environment) automatically upon login. Another choice is to set up system policies for Microsoft Project, a topic addressed in the Microsoft Project 2002 Resource Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/project/project2002/reskit/default.asp). A third option is to manually set the registry settings on each Microsoft Project installation.