Brian smith has written a great blog post on roadmaps here. I would recommend you to read his blog post before continuing.
Project Online comes in three flavors.
They are not chocolate, vanilla and strawberry :). They are Project Online Essentials, Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium.
I have extracted this table from Project Online Service Description page to give you an idea of what each one has and who will get benefited.
| Plan | Description | Target |
| Project Online Essentials1 | Web-based interface for team members Update tasks, issues, and risks Submit timesheets Share documents and collaborate with Skype for Business presence | Team members |
| Project Online Professional1 | All of the Project Online Essentials functionality, plus: Rich user interface through desktop client Anytime/anywhere access through Web interface Project scheduling and costing Resource management Publishing projects to the cloud Includes the most current version of the Project desktop application, instantly streamed to your Windows PC. Each subscription license allows for up to five concurrent installations of the Project desktop application. | Project managers |
| Project Online Premium1 | All of the Project Online Professional functionality, plus: Portfolio selection and optimization Demand management Enterprise resource management Out-of-box portfolio reports | Portfolio and resource managers |
Roadmap is new feature to visualize the status of projects across the organization in a single screen. As on Feb 2019, Roadmap can pull status from projects managed in Project Online and Azure Boards (aka VSTS).
Is Roadmap available for all Project plans? Let’s decode it.
The following checks should be done in a sequence. If one of the checks fail, all the checks following that will also fail.
- Office 365 tenant should have at least 1 Project Online Premium or Project Online Professional plan. This means it is not available to tenants only with the following plans
- Project Online Essentials
- Project Online with Project for Office 365 (retired)
- Project for Office 365 (retired)
- Project Online Premium without Project Client (retired)
- Project Online through Dynamics
- Roadmap should be activated by administrator (check this link to know how to activate Roadmap). This step will add three new service plans to Project Online Premium and Professional like see here. They may not able to turn on Roadmap due to the following reasons
- Roadmap is not yet available to your organization. So, you don’t need to take any action it will be made available shortly. You can raise a support ticket to expedite the process.
- Roadmap is not yet available to your region. This means Roadmap requires Business Applications Platform support in your region. For the current list of countries and regions supported by the Business Application Platform, please go to here.
- Roadmap requires Common Data Service for Apps on your default CDS instance. Why? Roadmaps checks for changes to the connected Projects in Azure Boards and PWA every 15 minutes and updates CDS. Watch Howard Crow video to upgrade CDS.
Though things looks smooth, you need to be aware of tenants that have both Project Online Professional/Premium and a retired plan say Project Online Premium without Project Client.
Let’s say the user has Project Online Premium without Project Client plan only, and roadmap is activated at the O365 tenant because the tenant has 1 Project Online Professional/Premium plan. The user will be able to create roadmaps but will not be able to connect to a Project in PWA.
This is because the license assigned to the user does not have “Flow for Project” that can read details from Project plans and write to CDS.
Project 365 