If you work with Microsoft Project Online you know how great this product is at streamlining project, resource and portfolio management activities. All this is for a single purpose, to allow you to deliver better projects, on time, on budget.
And now a few changes were released this month. Let have a look at 2 very special ones that I would like you to know:
Create and Manage Up to 30,000 Projects
Traditionally, Project Online allowed for up 5,000 projects. Starting April/2017 this limit will have a significant jump. 6x to be more precise. Now project managers will be able to create and manage up to 30,000 projects in the cloud using Project Online. What was already a fantastic number, now has just increased to great lengths.
Why This is Good?
It offers a better scale, 30,000 projects allows for a much bigger room to move and improve and at the same time offer more flexibility to get more things done.
Pick and Choose the Site URL for your Project Site Configuration
Another great improvement on the way things are done in Project Online is on how information is organized in SharePoint sites. Now project managers can create more project sites and every project now can have a 1-1 relationship with their project site.
Why This is Good?
Again, traditionally this number was limited to 2,000. Often times more sites were needed but this limit was reached, then what people used to do was to split your landscape into several PWA sites, which then extended to another batch of 2,000 sites but the trade-off was that it impacted in the team productivity with a fragmented environment.
…One More Great News Before You Go…
In addition to these great improvements, there is one more fantastic improvement done in Project Online this month: Now users can set the destination URL of the project sites in the Enterprise Project Type template. This not only helps with the meta-hierarchical structure of the organization but also streamlines the process of project creation allocating sites based on similarities and functional equivalences.
How It Works?
For example, if you company has a site collection dedicated to a specific department and all sites are located on it (Sales, Marketing, IT etc), let’s call it https://superedge.sharepoint.com/sites/demo for demonstration purposes, now you can configure your all your departmental projects EPT to provision sites directly into this site collection
You do this by going into each EPT, then in the Project Site section, select Allow users to choose:
What if You Can’t See these Things in Your Environment…
This is a Question that many times people ask me when they see these cool announcements and all the new features and yet they don’t seem to get them. Don’t worry, that’s the nature of Office 365 Releases. Releases are done by zones and via multiple channels. Very often these changes are done slowly and according to geographic zones, so if you don’t see them yet, don’t worry. They are coming!
