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Troubleshooting Project Professional 2007 in a Terminal Services environment

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This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

When you are using Project Professional 2007 in a Terminal Services environment, you may encounter some problems that occur due to the method in which account profiles are stored and with the introduction of the local project cache feature. This article describes these potential problems and possible solutions that you can use. For more information about the local project cache feature, see Understanding the Local Project Cache feature.

Note

Verify that you have installed the most recent updates to Project Professional 2007 prior to troubleshooting. The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 includes enhancements to local project cache performance. For more details, see Project Server 2007 Infrastructure Update Release (white paper) (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=121912). To install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007, see the associated download page (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=121884&clcid=0x409) on the Microsoft Download Center.

Project Professional in a Terminal Services environment

To avoid delays in opening project files in previous versions of Project, customers would install the Project Professional client in a Terminal Services (and sometimes Citrix) environment. In a Terminal Services environment, remote users can log on to a server that has Terminal Server enabled and on which Project Professional is installed. Because the terminal servers are on the same local WAN as Project Server, bandwidth would typically be much better than what the remote users would experience if they ran the Project Professional client on their own computers.

A typical Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server deployment may involve either of the following schemes:

  • Load-balanced terminal server farm   Users connect to the terminal server farm, and depending on the load, they are redirected to different terminal server computers. For more information, see the Windows Server 2003 article Load Balancing Terminal Servers (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=105918\&clcid=0x409) on Microsoft TechNet.

  • Pool of terminal server computers (which are interchangeable)   Users go to an internal Web site, see the available list of terminal servers, pick one, and log on.

Although the local project cache helps to minimize this problem when using Office Project Professional 2007 with Office Project Server 2007, some customers may still prefer to install the Project Professional client to a Terminal Services/Citrix environment for other reasons, such as minimized rollout and management costs.

Common problems with using Project Professional 2007 in a Terminal Services environment

In both of the Terminal Services deployment schemes described above, users are not guaranteed to logon to the same computer every time. This causes the following issues when Office Project Professional 2007 users are connecting to Office Project Server 2007.

  1. A Office Project Professional 2007 user logs on to TerminalServer1 and creates a Project Server account. The next time she attempts to connect to Project Server, she logs on to TerminalServer2. The account she had created last time is not available on TerminalServer2.

    This issue is caused because the Project Server Account details are stored in the "Current User" section of the local computer registry. That data is not available when the user logs on to another computer.

  2. A Office Project Professional 2007 user logs on to TerminalServer1, creates a Project Server account, and opens a few projects. Next time she logs on to TerminalServer2. The projects she had opened last time are not available.

    This issue is caused because the local project cache location by default points to the Application Data folder on the local computer. This is not available when a user logs on to a different computer.

Both issues can be solved by either of the following solutions:

  • Implement roaming user profiles for the user accounts

  • Create user logon scripts

Roaming user profiles

Roaming user profiles enable users to log on to a computer in a domain while preserving their user profile settings. User profiles are stored on a shared location on the network. When a user logs on to the terminal server computer, the user profile information (desktop configuration, My Documents directory, registry, and application data) is copied to the local computer. Any changes that occur on the local computer are captured, saved to the user profile, and then applied the next time the user logs on.

When Office Project Professional 2007 users log on by using a terminal server, their user profile information is available to them, irrespective of the terminal server through which they log on. All Project Server accounts or information in the local project cache are available to the logged-on users.

For more information about roaming user profiles, see the following Microsoft TechNet articles:

Logon scripts

User logon scripts are an alternative to roaming user profiles that achieve similar results. Through user logon scripts, you may create all the Project Server Accounts automatically. In this case, the local project cache location should be configured to point to a common network share — instead of the default Application Data folder. This can be achieved by using Group Policy Objects (GPO) for Office Project Professional 2007. Group policy is a feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that provides centralized management and configuration of computers and remote users in an Active Directory environment.

When creating the logon script, you may need to reference the registry key locations for the local project cache path and the user profiles. These registry keys are located in the registry as follows:

Cache path (per user):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\MS Project\Settings

User profiles (per user):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\MS Project\Profiles

For more information about using group policy settings, see the following articles:

See Also

Concepts

Understanding the Local Project Cache feature
Configure the Local Project Cache settings