A Unified Scheduling Engine and API in Project Online and Project Server 2016

Project Online, Project Server 2016, Project Server 2013
This is a repost from the Project Team, on July 14, 2015 – Thanks for the post folks.

With Project Server 2013 and Project Online, we replaced our server-side scheduling engine with the Project Calculation Service (PCS), bringing the power of the Project Professional scheduling engine to the browser. This new service also powered our new cloud-ready Project API, also known as the Client Side Object Model (CSOM). However, the transition to PCS and CSOM wasn’t quite exhaustive. There are still elements of Project Web App (PWA) and our legacy API, the Project Server Interface (PSI), which rely on the old server-side scheduling engine. Discrepancies between the two engines are a problem for our customers. To resolve these issues, the legacy server-side scheduling engine will be fully removed from Project Server 2016 and Project Online, along with the Project class methods of the PSI. CSOM is the future of PWA extensibility, and we will continue to make improvements to CSOM based on your feedback to ensure parity with legacy PSI scenarios.

What’s changing?
There will be changes in the following three areas:

  • Project Detail Pages (PDPs) that today rely on the legacy server-side scheduling engine to process and save data will now use PCS exclusively.
  • The Project class of the PSI is being removed. Customizations leveraging methods in this class will need to be updated to instead use Project CSOM methods.
  • As we identify gaps between scheduling PSI and CSOM coverage, we will invest in new CSOM methods to unblock these scenarios. These improvements will roll out online when ready and ship to Project Server 2016 customers through Public Updates.

What’s the timing?
For on-premises customers, Project Server 2016 will ship with all of these changes implemented. As previously mentioned, CSOM improvements will ship with Project Server Public Updates.  Online customers will see some of these changes rolling out within the next month. We will roll these changes out in phases and continue to work on CSOM improvements for the foreseeable future.  In Project Server 2013, we will continue to support the current PSIs and will continue fixing any issues related to the legacy server-side scheduling engine that customers encounter.

What do I do?
If you’ve built customizations leveraging the Project class of the PSI, you’ll need to do some work to replace those methods with their equivalent CSOM methods.  If you’re a developer with custom Project solutions, you’ll need to make the necessary changes in the near future to ensure your solutions continue functioning properly. If you find scenarios that are not covered with our current CSOM implementation, please let us know and we can connect with the Project Team. We are committed to building a rich, fully-featured API that supports our partner ecosystem and our end users.