Project Server: Creating a customized website with resource monitoring

Hello,

 

the Project Server (PS) comes with neat dashboards, but it does not yet provide "business intelligence" in the sense that you can see at a glance how much work is assigned to a user e.g.

Given that a lot more information is stored in the database than we actually see in the PS dashboards, do you think it is possible to develop a customized website which will query the PS database and show things like:

- number of words currently assigned to a specific user in a given phase? (translation)

- number of words currently assigned per user and filtered by the current status of the project?

- if you introduce further metadata for each project, like "project urgency" with values that are filled during project creation, would it be possible programmatically to fetch and display all projects that have the same urgency? User story would be: I need to filter my projects list for all Urgent projects currently in Translation phase.

- these new reporting options, if displayed on a web page similar to the current dashboards, would have to be subject to a permission as well, so that they could be enabled per user or permission role

 

Thanks for your input on the API possibilities in this regard.

  • Besides the default website, Groupshare 2017, comes with REST APIs that gives you the ability to extend what you get out of the box. We've recently published our latest version for the REST API client library, called GroupShareKit, which simplifies the consumption of the REST APIs (at least of .NET applicaitons). To answer your specific questions

    1. For your first 2 points the next CU update for Groupshare 2017 will offer the ability to retrieve the analysis report information. This report is generated for each project and contains a per file information with the word count. Starting from this you can use the REST APIs to find the projects on which a certain user is involved and an which files are assigned to him. This can then be correlated with the analysis report information to obtain the results you're looking for.

    2. At the moment there is no option to store additional metadata within Groupshare. However, this doesn't stop you from creating an additional repository (can be a database, file or whatever make sense for you) where you store the GS project id and the additional metadata you're looking after. From your web application you would then search on your additional repository and display the information from Groupshare using the REST APIs

    3. This will have to be a separate web application because for the time being you can't extend the out of the Groupshare web application. This application can rely on the users and permissions already defined in Groupshare to enable user access. In fact we've done something like this in our sample web application for GroupShareKit.

     

    Hope this helps.

    Romulus Crisan | Translation Productivity Development Manager | SDL | (twitter) @cromica_82 | (blog) http://www.romuluscrisan.com/