Project Online: Notifications With or Without Exchange Online

Thank you Brian Smith for this great Fall 2016 post.

This is a repost from Brian Smith’s blog as we have had some questions around Notifications and Exchange on premise.  Let us know if you have any questions.

We are just rolling out some changes – and they should be hitting all Project Online tenant sites by now – which allow for Project notifications and reminders to be sent to accounts outside of Exchange Online.  So as long as you have a ‘Work email’ configured with the desired address for the user they can get alerts for new task assignments and various levels of reminders.  There is a setting that governs notifications working even if you do have Exchange Online – and this would need turning on too – so I’ll start with there.  Go to PWA Settings, Additional Server Settings and scroll right down to the bottom – and the Turn on notifications option will be found.  Check the box if it isn’t already checked.

turn off notifications

In my tenant I have some users in Exchange Online, and others who are not.  If I want the ones who are not in Exchange Online to also get notifications then I can add their e-mail addresses into their SharePoint User Profiles (if they are not already there) by navigating to the Admin portals, then selecting SharePoint under Admin Centers, user profiles once I get to the SharePoint Admin Center – and finally Manage User Profiles.

admin centers sharepoint menu, sharepoint admin center user profilesmanage user profiles

There should be a user profile for each user – if you don’t find one then maybe that user has not logged in yet.  I am going to add a Work email to my BrianMSN2 account.  This user has a Project Online license, but does not have an Exchange Online license.  I use the find option – then I can right click to edit the profile.

find profiles search

The Work email field is quite a way down the long list of properties – and here I have set my Microsoft account..

edit profile

So you can see, three of the ‘Brian’ accounts are using the Exchange Online accounts for the tenant – and BrianMSN2 should get their notifications through BriSmith@Microsoft.com.

default user profile subtype

Important to note that the e-mail address is not displayed under Manage User within PWA.

manage users

If I now assign a new task to BrianMSN2 – an e-mail should go out.

work hours

And here it is!

email alert for schedule changes to your project

Thanks for all the hard work in the Project product group for making this happen.  Of course if you already had the Work email configured (as SharePoint notifications already used this field) and PWA notifications turned on then your users may already have started seeing these hit their inboxes.  Let us know if you have any questions.