3 New Enhancements to Project Online

Microsoft recently released 3 new enhancements to Project Online. Thank you Chris and the Microsoft Team.

Keeping with the theme of continuous innovations, we are excited to roll out three new improvements to Project Online as a direct result of requests from our users.

Email notifications

Team members, project managers and resource managers need to stay informed on the tasks that have been assigned to them and pending items others are waiting on to complete. To help, we are bringing improved email notifications functionality to Project Online. Email notifications in Project Online keep you on top of what’s coming, let you know when things are due and what’s currently on your plate.

For more details on taking advantage of email notifications see:

• Turn on notifications in Project Online
• Get email reminders about your work in Project Online

This feature is available today across all Project Web App (PWA) sites.

Project IDs

One consistent request we have received is a need for organizations to generate a unique project ID for each new project. This allows users to refer to a project independent of the project name, which may change. Organizations accomplished this through a number of ways: manually entering the next number when a project is created, building it into their workflow or using the custom event handler. Instead of having users build custom solutions or introduce a manual process, we thought it would be better to have it baked into the service. We are pleased to introduce a new feature that generates a unique project ID on project creation!

To enable this functionality, you need to define your project ID as part of the Enterprise Project Type (EPT):

Each EPT has its own project ID definition. You can specify a fixed Pre- and Postfix, Starting Number and Minimum Digit Padding. The project ID can be added to a number of views throughout PWA and in custom reports. It can also be programmatically updated using CSOM.

We are just putting the final touches on this feature, and it will start reaching PWA sites over the next couple of months. Watch the Office Roadmap regarding the latest information on its release at: success.office.com/en-us/roadmap.

Increasing custom field limits for reporting

Another overwhelming piece of feedback we received from users was the ability to include more project text custom fields in their reports. We have increased the limits on ALL custom field types that can be reported on.

Here are the new limits:

This change is effective today across all PWA sites!

We are excited to be rolling out these new features. We hope that these new improvements to Project Online will improve your productivity. For more information about upcoming improvements to Project Online, please visit success.office.com/en-us/roadmap.