Cloud-based offerings in the small-medium business space are finally changing from concepts to real product you can use today. Microsoft launched their Office 365 online suite a few weeks ago to much fanfare, and early indications are a solid competitor in the SMB and even consumer spaces. Even for a first gen product, Office 365 components have surprising compatibility with extending Microsoft desktop applications seamlessly, just like before with more costly in-house hosted solutions.

Sure enough, Project 2010 is in the club, easily integrating with SharePoint Online from the Office 365 suite. One key feature of Project 2010 is the ability to manage tasks on SharePoint team sites, bypassing simple functions done with Project Server in the past, and more importantly showing side-by-side with existing team sites using cleaver templates. If your company is trying to implement team sites and collaboration using Office 365's lower barrier-to-entry hosted model, and you also want to include a project management layer, Project 2010 working seamlessly is helpful for a team with only limited bandwidth and training resources. Also, if you have a team in the field, this makes project plans accessible and interactive from anywhere.

Basecamp has long been an online project and task management offering, but I think this combination of desktop clients, team sites, and task and project management is unique in the computing space, and worth a look alongside Microsoft's Office 365 offering, which requires little to no IT help.

When developing against SharePoint, sometimes you will encounter issues at deployment. Here is some info and tips that I found quite helpful.

1. Always try to reset your IIS first. A lot of times, simply resetting IIS would resolve a lot of issues at deployment.
2. If you are encountering error while doing a wsp deployment. Make sure that the SharePoint Administration service is running. You should probably set it as auto start.
3. If you are getting the error stating that a deployment or retraction is already under way and it is not allowing you to redeploy. Most likely your previous deployment is hung, and you can cancel the job and re-deploy your solution by getting to the stsadm in your command line and then run the following two commands. Stsadm is located in The GUID JobID is provided by the first step.
   1. stsadm -o enumdeployments
   2. stsadm -o canceldeployment –id “GUID jobid”
4. If you are seeing the general SharePoint error and not giving you any specifics on what the issue that you are having, and you do have access to the SharePoint site as admin. You can turn it off by going to web.config. Of course if you are in a production environment. Make sure to change it back after debugging.
   1. Debug=”true” instead of the default of Debug=”false”
   2. CallStack=”true” instead of the default of CallStack=”false”
   3. CustomErrors=”Off” instead of the default of CustomErrors=”On”
5. At deployment, your usercontrols are deployed to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES, so you can always double check to ensure that the deployment of your usercontrols are done correct. However, they are all read only, and cannot be updated unless by a new deployment.