I installed Project Server ( PS ) a couple months ago and have had one heck of a time getting to work.  Actually, I was just about to drive myself insane getting Office Project Professional to connect to the damn thing to connect without getting all fussy and throwing up incomprehensible error messages and stuff.

Anyway, bought a book on PS on Friday and set down to do a top to bottom review of the installation to see where I had gone wrong.  After a couple of hours, I finally figured out that my PS installation was fine, and Project Pro worked ok in stand alone mode, so there had to be an issue with connectivity between the client and the server.

BTW, Project Web Access (PWA) worked just fine, but Project Pro didn't.  Which was even more confusing.

After a bit of Googling, I found two articles that helped me resolve the connectivity issue:

How to let Project Professional 2003 connect to your Project Server that is located in the intranet zone without being prompted to add the Project Server as a trusted site

This one solved the error message where Project Pro was complaining that the PS was not "Trusted Sites Zone." Um, dude, it's in INTERNAL server so it needs to go into the Intranet Zone so until we can find a programmer at MS that understands the difference between these two zones and their uses, you'll need to add that registry key.

 

You receive a "Microsoft Project cannot access the Microsoft Project Server" error message when you log on to Microsoft Project Professional or Microsoft Project Web Access

Now this error was much more subtle and what I wasted most of my time on.  My customer has some type of proxy server ( we don't do the IT on this site, so I don't actually know what it is. ) that uses a script to control settings access to the Internet - and much to my surprise, the Intranet as well.

It also turns out that this was causing us a problem and a variation of that article fixed the issue:

  1. Start Internet Explorer, and then click Internet Options on the Tools menu.
  2. Click the Connections tab, and then click LAN Settings. 
  3. Click to clear the Automatically detect settings check box. 

I truely don't understand why, but I have seen that little checkbox cause more issues regarding Internet/Intranet connections when a Proxy Server is involved, than I can shake a stick at.

Anyway, clearing that box, shutting all IE windows and retrying the Project Pro connection to PS worked just fine.

 

If anyone has any other Project Server tips, please email me or leave a comment and I'll assemble and post them.