New Article: Three Things That Took the Longest in Real Project Online Migrations
Resource: What Microsoft's Export Tool Actually Does
New on MPUG: The PDU Tracker
Live Event (10/7): Life After Project Online - A Community Roundtable
PM Best Practice: Find the Dependency You Don't Control
Tuesday Brief: Project Online retires on September 30, which puts a hard edge on this month for anyone still working through a move. Ira Brown spent the past year completing migrations for enterprise clients, and this week we're publishing what he told us about where the time actually went. We've also taken a close look at Microsoft's own export process, which turns out to answer a different question than most people assume. Plus the PDU tracker that recently went live on the site.
New Article: Three Things That Took the Longest in Real Project Online Migrations
Ira Brown, president of Project Widgets, has moved organizations off Project Online all year, and by late August most of that work was finished. He came back to MPUG to debrief on what slowed things down.
The short version is that thinking of this as "move the projects somewhere else" is what gets teams into trouble. Brown walks through the reporting layer that has to be rebuilt from scratch, the single sign-on setup that governed everyone's timeline in the background, and the enterprise configuration that has to be recreated piece by piece in the destination system.
One detail is worth knowing even if your migration is already done: the OData service that Power BI reports run on has been removed from Project Server Subscription Edition. Every report and integration built on it needs rewriting.
Resource: What Microsoft's Export Tool Actually Does
If someone has pointed you toward Microsoft's documented export process for Project Online, it's worth knowing what it was built for before you plan around it. That process exports a single named user's content, covering the projects that person owned or was assigned to, and produces MPP, XML, and JSON files for review. It runs on PowerShell and needs a SharePoint administrator.
It is not a migration path. Microsoft states that the exported MPP files cannot be saved back into Project Online or Project Server. The script package it ships in also contains the tools for deleting user data, which tells you what it was designed for: answering individual privacy requests, not moving a PMO.
If you hold Portfolio Viewer, Portfolio Manager, or Administrator access, there's a more practical route for the reporting data. The OData endpoint at /_api/ProjectData connects directly to Excel or Power BI and returns projects, tasks, assignments, resources, timesheets, and enterprise custom field values across the instance. Microsoft notes this access is granted at the service level rather than per project, so it's all or nothing. If your team already runs Power BI reports against Project Online, that connection is pointing at this endpoint right now, and it stops answering on September 30.
Newly launched on the site, and useful in a month when a lot of people are heads-down on other things. The tracker lets you plan your PDU requirements against your MPUG transcript and shows your progress broken out by Talent Triangle category, so you can see where you stand and what's still outstanding. You'll still submit to PMI yourself, but the record-keeping is handled.
Live Event (10/7): Life After Project Online - A Community Roundtable
One week after the retirement date, we're getting a group of MVPs and practitioners together to talk about what actually happened. Erik van Hurck, Ira Brown, Nenad Trajkovski, Eric and Jeff Christoph, and Tim Runcie are all confirmed, with more MVP guests possible.
This is a discussion rather than a lesson. Come with the problem you're still stuck on, or listen to how other people solved theirs.
What You'll Learn:
What life after Project Online looks like from people who have already lived it
Common migration pitfalls and how others worked through them
Answers to the problems you're still facing, from MVPs who know the tool ecosystem
Where other PMs in the same transition actually landed
🗓️ Wednesday, October 7 🕛 12:00pm - 1:00pm ET 📍 Live on Zoom 🏅 1 PMI PDU: Business Acumen
PM Best Practice: Find the Dependency You Don't Control
When you're working to a fixed external date, go through your plan and mark every task whose start depends on somebody outside your team taking action. A security group provisioning an account. A vendor building an environment. A partner approving access. Those are the durations you cannot compress by working harder, and they are usually the ones nobody put on the schedule in the first place. Identify them first and start them first, because everything else has slack and they do not.
