Every team member can now update task completion in Project for the web for free!

In Project for the Web, you would have noticed users assigned with certain E3/E5 licenses have view access to the Project and Roadmaps. This means they don’t need to have a Project Plan license to just view the Roadmaps and Project for the web that are shared with them.

Now this has changed! This change is better than the previous.

Users with E3/E5 license can now update “% Complete” of their assigned tasks in any project they are part of. They don’t need to have Project Plan license to update the task progress.

This change is significant as it increases the adoption of using Project for the web across enterprise and makes it more affordable.

1. Benefit to cost ratio is higher: The project manager should have Project Plan license and their team members can just have E3/E5 license.
2. Collaboration: This improvement will change team communication: team members take ownership of updating the task on a frequent basis and help everyone to know the progress of project till this moment.

Project managers will not notice any change in the way they assign tasks to team members. Team members must be part of Office 365 group of the current project to see and update their assigned tasks.

Remember to choose “Assign and add”

Team members, with E3/E5 license, will now notice a label “Limited access” against their project. They will now be able to mark their tasks as complete or update its “% Complete”

Import your .mpp files to Project for the web through Project home

One of the features released in May 2021 is “Import your .mpp files to Project for the web through Project Home”.

To give you a reason why this is a big announcement. Project desktop client is a great product for project planning and tracking by single user.

Now, project management is decentralized and almost every stakeholders wants to be involved in project planning and execution for which Project desktop is not the solution. Project desktop doesn’t have collaboration features to support editing as well as viewing the plan simultaneously or even give real time feedback.

Project for the web is a cloud-based project management solution with capabilities to customize its experience to meet your organization needs and also it can be used by managers and team members at the same time. What’s even more is now you can import the .mpp file to Project for the web to start this journey.

I spent a few hours on this new feature – Import your .mpp files to Project for the web through Project Home. This post is my experience and what you should be aware of about this feature.

Make Project For The Web “Data” Friendly: Centralize Project data with Power BI Dataflows

Project for the web data is stored as entities within Common Data Service. Besides Project entities, CDS stores standard and custom entities of other apps. Storing in CDS platform gives opportunity to customize, extend using Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agent, Power BI)

Let say we, the project managers, want to turn this information into actionable insights. How do we do it?

Power BI Common Data Service connector allows us to connect directly to CDS entities, and build reports and dashboards on Power BI desktop and Power BI service. Yet, this work requires we need go beyond the data stored in Project entities. The good news is this information is available either on cloud (in CDS, other data sources) or on premise (SQL Server, Files, Folders, etc) and we have connectors for those too.

Are we correct in bringing all information directly to Power BI?

Will this approach offer a standard, easy and fast insights?

Let’s start with Common Data Service. CDS is a transactional database and not a data warehouse. It has plenty of “deliberate” constraints. These constraints are imposed to prevent any one action having too detrimental an impact on the rest of the system and, therefore, on users. Along with these constraints, increase in data volume will impact the performance of CDS, its apps and reports.

No Common Data Service data operations, either internal or part of code customizations, work completely in isolation.

All Common Data Service data operations interact with the same database resources, either at a data level or an infrastructure level such as processor, memory, or I/O usage.

To protect against conflicting changes, each request takes locks on resources to be viewed or changed.

Those locks are taken within a transaction and not released until the transaction is committed or aborted.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/common-data-service/scalable-customization-design/database-transactions

The second challenge is Project data is stored in many entities with relationships. Citizen developers, like project managers, will need support and time to understand these relationships. If not, we may apply a wrong filter and miss creating relationships resulting in incorrect data in visuals.

The third challenge is data from other data sources could be fragmented, incomplete and complex making data preparation difficult.

Final challenge is project managers should provide the environment URL for the CDS for Apps environment and have permission to access that environment.

In this post, I offer a solution these challenges. Read on and let me know your thoughts.

Make Project For The Web Human: Build your Project bot with Power Virtual Agents (Detailed!)

If you are new to Power Virtual Agents (PVA), I recommend do a quick read at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/fundamentals-get-started#create-your-first-bot to know the terms to be used in this post.

In my previous post, I gave a feel of how PVA simplified the way of managing projects!

Today, I spent 6 hours writing this post to give a complete step-by-step process of building this Project bot. So, don’t miss to read this till the end.

Bot: I am waiting!

When the user sends a message, bot matches the message with the right topic based on trigger phrases. In this case, the below topic is matched and the user is greeted with the message “Sure. I can help you. Please login to identify your projects.” . What happens next is important?

This post goes deeper into the authentication process combined with Microsoft Graph and new Project to personalize conversations.

How is this done? Read on.

Make Project For The Web Human: Allow managers to get self-help with power virtual agents bots

I spent the last two days learning and building bots with power virtual agent (in preview), and how it can talk to the new Project.

What started a simple exploration ended up as a big experience – bots, topics, entities, authentication, openid, tokens, emojis :), app registrations, graph API, channels, team integration wow!

I am very happy to share my first version of new Project PVA bot. This bot first authenticates the user, lists their projects and the user can ask the status of their projects! Great news with few clicks, you can embed these bots in websites, teams, and other channels.

I have a blog coming up to build PVA bot + authentication + integrated with new project. Meanwhile, take a look at this image and get a feel of how PVA simplified the way of managing projects

Make Project For The Web Smarter: Auto delete zero duration projects

Project for the web is simple, and this simplicity also creates problems 🙂

In my earlier blog, I discussed about notifying team members of their late tasks. As I started working on the new Project, I observed it is very easy to create a project. If I grant Project Plan 1 / 3 / 5 subscription to users, they may end up creating projects without tasks.

It is important to periodically review all projects and delete zero duration projects. Otherwise, the reports generated either through Power BI or other tools will present wrong information. (Do you know about Project for the web Power BI Template)

Advantage of the new Project is all project data is stored in CDS. I can automate this cleanup process through Power Automate. Yet, I don’t want to risk deleting zero duration projects that might created for future need. So, how about flow asking the project manager for approval through Teams and on approval delete the project.

Make Project For The Web Bigger: Automate and integrate with Flow and Teams

Project for the web data is stored in entities within Dynamics 365 Common Data Services (CDS).

With data in CDS, you can customize these entities, build new entities, create relationships as per your business needs. Also, you can extend its benefits by building apps in Power Apps, automate tasks in Power Automate (earlier called as Microsoft Flow).

In this blog, I will use CDS, Power Automate and Teams to notify team members when their tasks is late at regular intervals like the one below