gogogadgetearl

2006.11.21

• as you guys probably noticed, i was gone all last week.  i was in tampa, florida for microsoft project server 2003 training.  tampa was fun, but boy is project web access a terrible tool.  check out these screwy permissions.  you'll notice that you can choose to neither allow nor deny them [go offline from project web access], or you can both allow and deny them [user defined 3] -- and you can save the permissions like that, no questions asked.  it's terrible.  the user defined permissions are out of order [3, xxxx, xxxx, 1, 2?], and to add to that, they are completely undocumented: we have no idea what the user defined permissions do...even microsoft's official project partners [our trianers last week] don't know what they do.  ::sigh::  even funnier is the way they shortcut-key some of their options.  you know how some controls/menus have an underlined letter that you can press alt+[letter] to access, right?  like how you can press alt+f to access the file menu [because 'f' is easy to remember for 'file']?  check these letters out.  the 'y' in 'they'?  the 'b' in 'by' [what about the 'b' in 'below' at the top of the form]?  the 't' in 'to'?  wow, those are easy to remember.  the 'b' in 'by' really reminds me of giving view permissions for managed resources.  sheesh.  to give you an idea of how inconsistent project web access is, sometimes the save/cancel buttons are on the top of the page, sometimes they are on the bottom, sometimes 'save' is labeled 'update', and sometimes there is an 'update' button in the middle of a page that doesn't really update until you click 'save' at the top/bottom of the page.  wtf??
  
  thank-you microsoft for giving us a tool that is more confusing than it is useful.  :-)