Unable to open a project schedule from MS Project 2010 in Project Server environment – Schedule opening issue!

Environment: Project Professional 2010 SP1/ Project Server 2010
Issue:

One of my lead scheduler brought up an issue in accessing her schedule using MS Project Professional in Project server environment. When she tries to open a specific schedule on server, she gets the following error

She confirmed me that all other schedules have no issue at all but this one. She was not able to close this window as it freezes the MS Project Pro application. She first tried to kill MS Project application in Windows Task Manager but could not do that and eventually she killed Project (Winproj.exe) from process tab.

When I tried to see the exact error, it showed me the following error that does not help much.

Solution:
The first thing I checked if I am able to see project schedule in PWA (web client). I had no issue in opening that schedule in PWA. 

Initially I tried to restore the last saved specific project schedule from server. I was able to restore with 100% without any issue. I tried again to open the schedule from MS Project client; I got the same error mentioned above so this trick did not help much. Scheduler confirmed that she had no issue when she opened this schedule 2 days ago.

After doing a few tricks, I found the following steps worked for me and my scheduler was able to open the schedule this time without any issue.

Steps:

1-      Login to PWA

2-      Go to Project Center and click the affected schedule link

3-      Click ‘Project Details” PDP link and click ‘Edit’ button from Ribbon to edit project level custom fields.

4-      Click ‘Save’ button to save the project’s custom project fields.

5-      Close and check in the project schedule.

And bingo, scheduler was able to open her schedule without any issue. It looks like something happened during the last saving or publishing process that blocked communication between client and server and caused that issue. After saving the schedule from PWA, it removed all the blocks in the communication with server.

Unable to connect to Project Server from client (MS Project Professional 2007) - Accounts corruption issue!

Environment: Project Professional 2007 SP2/ Project Server 2007
Issue:

Last week one of PM brought up an issue in accessing his schedule using MS Project Professional 2007 in Project server 2007 environment. When he tries to login to connect with Project Server, he gets the following error

PM was not able to close this window as it freeze the MS Project Pro 2007 application. He first tried to kill MS Project application in Windows Task Manager but could not do that. Eventually, he was able to kill Project 2007 application from “Processes” tab by selecting WinProj.exe (as shown screenshot below)

When I tried to see the exact error, it showed me the following

Note: PM had no issue in opening any schedule as a standalone basis i.e. without connecting to Project server. This was happening only when he picks an account created to cnnect with Project server

Solution:

 After an investigation, we figured out that the account created to connecting to Project Server got corrupted for some reason. Deleting the old account and recreating a new account solved this issue like Bingo…

Not anymore User Name and Password fields available in Login profile to connect to Project Server in MS Project Professional 2010

Environment: Project Professional 2010
Issue:

In the new version of MS Project Professional 2010, the User Name and Password fields have been removed what we had in MS Project Professional 2007 version in the login screen to connect to Project Server (see Fig –A).

                                                              (Fig –A)  - MS Project Professional 2007

                                                           (Fig –A)  - MS Project Professional 2010

If a user needs to connect to server on different user id, he will have to log off first from the windows and re- login with the other user id. Sometimes this feature is very useful if a user is working in two different departments with two different roles and had two different accounts setup. In other scenario, if we need to test security on different roles, we login on different workflow ids to test specific MS Project professional functionalities right away by using those fields.

Solution:

There is no out of the box settings in MS Project Professional 2010 to get it back but no worries -  we can create a batch file (.bat file) with few commands to open MS Project Pro 2010 without windows login off. Please follow the below steps to create a batch file and open MS Project Professional 2010.

Steps:

1- Open a note pad and enter the following commands

@echo off

set /p UN="Username?   "

set /p DM="Domain?   "

RUNAS /USER:%DM%\%UN% "W:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\WINPROJ.exe"

2-   Save this file as “OpenProjectPro-2010.bat” on your desktop. A new batch is now being created as below

3-   Click the batch file to run from the desktop. Enter the asked information i.e. User name, Domain  and Password and in result, it will open MS Project Professional 2010  based on the provided credentials as shown in the following screen shot.