Performance and Scale Improvements to Project Online

Thank you Chris and Krishna

Performance and scale improvements to Project Online

by Project Team, on October 21, 2014October 17, 2014

Chris Boyd is a senior program manager lead on the Project Engineering team and Krishna Mamidipaka is a senior product marketing manager on the Project Product Marketing team.

To provide a delightful user experience and better support the scale at which some of our largest customers operate, we have started to roll out performance enhancements to Project Online tenants worldwide. While some of these changes will be visually evident to the user, others could be more latent.

Here are a few common things that will feel much snappier as a result of these investments:

Project Center—In particular, navigating to a specific project from Project Center. We invested in optimization that eliminates certain intermediate steps.

Interacting with projects on the web—Performance optimizations, all the way from SQL tier to the web UI will speed up user experience.

Creating and publishing a project—We have improved queue jobs required to create and publish projects. This enables users to seamlessly transition out and start working on the next stage of the project much faster.

Submitting timesheets—Improvements to page performance will allow users to quickly submit their timesheets.

We are also providing new levers to Project Online administrators to further enhance the value for their organizations. These are designed to improve performance when creating projects, working with Project Detail Pages and publishing projects. They are:

Option to turn off the creation of Enterprise Project sites—A Project Web App (PWA) admin can now configure if and when a Project site gets created for Enterprise Projects. If the organization does not plan to use the Project sites, turning off the creation of the sites can greatly improve the time it takes to create and publish a project. This allows users to move from one Project Detail Page to the other faster. This option can be accessed from the Connected SharePoint sites page.

Settings to enable or disable the Enterprise Project site creation.

Option to turn off the Task List Sync—By turning off the Task List Sync for enterprise projects, users will find that publishing a project is much faster. It also helps users navigate to the next Project Detail Page faster and generate their latest project status report quicker. This option can be accessed from the Connected SharePoint sites page as well.

In addition, we also successfully addressed a few key customer requirements around improved scale, including:

Projects limit per PWA instance increased to 5,000—With the option to turn off Enterprise Project site creation for any enterprise project, customers can now manage up to 5,000 projects per any site collection with PWA within Project Online. Today, customers are limited to 2,000 projects per PWA instance which is a direct function of the number of project team sites that can be supported within any SharePoint Online site collection.

PWA instances per tenant increased to seven—Customers can now benefit from up to seven site collections with PWA within any Project Online tenant. The current limit is three. When combined with 5,000 projects per PWA instance as mentioned above, organizations can theoretically manage up to 35,000 projects in their Project Online tenant. This should give organizations plenty of flexibility to roll out enterprise wide Project and Portfolio management.

PWA instances per Project Online tenant is increased to seven.