Microsoft Project for the Web:

bridging the gap between Project management Solutions.

Microsoft’s Project and portfolio management solutions have spanned the basic beginnings of project management and the large enterprise solutions well. The advent of Project for the Web (PFTW) bridges the gap between the massive enterprise solution (Project Online) and the small-scale Microsoft Planner. It is the perfect mid-maturity Project Management tool.

PFTW uses the Power platform to build processes. This means that it has Active directory sync and data warehousing as well as integrating directly into Power BI and Teams. These aspects of the program make fluid Project management possible. There is no desktop version of PFTW, as it is fully web based. The lightweight management toolset in PFTW is highly intuitive, visual, and non-traditional, making for a modern dynamic Project management experience. It is the example of collaborative, agile, and modern work management.

PFTW is not training intensive, has enhanced Microsoft365 connectivity and is a Core Scheduling tool from the lowest level Licence. All licences allow for building custom tables using the application. These tables and project plans integrate with Power BI for reporting and dashboards.

This being said, the limitations of PFTW are that it does not support projects larger than 500 tasks, Resource management or Portfolio and Strategic management. This is a mid-level tool. PFTW has future focuses on collaboration and customisation of your project plans, Project management, Team member experience, deployment and administration, extensibility, resource management, and people management.

 Recent updates to improve these functions include:

• A Project Roadmap and MS Teams App 
• Task level custom fields
• Group sharing of projects
• Document attachments and links (linked to SharePoint online and Teams)
• Email notifications
• Guest users and @mentions
• Export function for timelines to PDF
• Power BI reports including roadmap data
• Imports from MS Project .mpp file
• Enhanced filtering (for people and stages of work.)
• Checklists and labels (like MS Planner)
• Colour task fields.
• Team members can now update tasks in a project
• Running Multiple environments (non-default)
• Data entities and push and pull from them into Power Apps
• API support for Projects
• Bookings- high level calendaring across projects
• Availability in GCC

Future planned functionality includes:

• Project tasks in MS Planner/ tasks for Teams
• People View
  • Orphan tasks viewable
• Calendar improvements
• Time Phasing of Data
• Agile Support
• Increased task limit per project (>500)
• Goals
• Baselines
• Create Projects from a Planner plan
• Task constraints
• Enterprise Custom Columns
• Admin centre for PFTW
• Due/Late task notifications via email
• Integration with Viva Goals
• Cross project resource views
• Role based security and access

Project for the Web is the Project management tool for those outgrowing smart sheet or Asana with the added benefit of the licensing for it extending the usability of the Project Planner E3 or E5 usability on Microsoft. Team members not licensed as Project managers can use office 365 E3 or E5 to view PFTW information and it has platform support from Power and the Dataverse.

Essentially Project for the Web bridges the gap between small and large enterprise scale project management in a agile cloud based modern way.

For a more in depth discussion of these features and information on PFTW look here