MicrosoftTransition to another product that is feature compatible will take more than 12 months for most corporate clients, and this announcement simply shows how unrealistic and out of touch Microsoft is with their customers. Two things are certain - when Microsoft said that Project Online wasn’t going anywhere back in February and that they were committed to supporting their customers, they lied. The previously promised date of June 2030 seems to have evaporated. With this timescale corporates won’t even have a full financial year to transition data and that will be a massive headache. The sheer volume of customers requiring help is ire to be overwhelming. Either Planner needs to reach parity in terms of features in the next two months (not going to happen) or Project Server SE needs to have a smooth way of supporting all the Power BI reporting. Then there’s the issue of corporates with high end integrations that would normally take well over 12 months to plan, develop and execute. Microsft is incredibly naive if it thinks this is all possible within 12 months for all of their Project Online customers. A lot of customers are going to be very angry at this announcement and I don’t blame them. I’d like to understand what additional resources Microsoft is putting in place to support customers, including manpower (essential). Funding alone won’t cut it. Hugely disappointing and poorly thought out announcement from Microsoft. After 40 years in IT this is the single worst move I ever saw from Microsoft.
You can patch together a decent Microsoft PPM solution with Planner Premium in combination with various other MS Tools (i.e. Power platform), but definitely not as robust as what Project Online offers. If your considering alternative PPM platforms, feel free to check out our free PPM Tool Finder - https://panoramic-solutions.com/ppm-tool (I apologize if you come across any bugs, as we are still iterating).
I think the key phrase here is "patch together"... Why would you go through that pain to end up with a Heath Robinson solution that is unlikely to scale. Most serious PPM customers need something that can scale whist meeting all the functionality that Project Online currenlty offers. Out if 120 customers that have tried to make Project Planner work, every single one of them abandoned it as not fit for purpose. This is due to the deep limitations imposed by the platform. The interface is modern but still clunky, and the speed of updates is visibly slow, especially with large amounts of data. In a collaborative environment this makes the tool ineffective. No proper resource management, cost management, enterprise custom fields, deep task level dependencies and three tiered calendering are just some of the things that are not present and require significan time to develop. Lets face it, if it was that straightforward Microsoft would have done it already. Much better to go for a 3rd party full fledged replacement to Project Online than to try and cobble together something that will never reach the same level of parity. Most of our customers agree. The retirement of Project Online withour any direct compatible replacemen means Microsoft is sure to be exiting the PPM sector.
Well said Kelvin. Even with some excellent partner options, and some with ways to keep the desktop client for scheduling, getting budget approval and planning and executing a migration to be complete by the end of September 2026 will be a huge challenge for some customers. And Project Server SE needs a solid future - still contractually it could be given the same 12 months notice. I've heard 2031 mentioned but not backed up in the wording of the legal 'modern lifecycle'. I know large customers for SharePoint Server SE and Exhange have the same concerns. I'm sure they are always told, 'but we'd give more than 12 months notice', but as we've seen, when push comes to shove - the rug gets pulled. (To totally mix my metaphors.). As a subscriber to Planner and Project Plan 3 I have still not been alerted to the demise via e-mail - the message center suggests this is 'medium' impact, and the 'status for your org' column is blank - suggesting that this message isn't important to me. How many customers are still in the dark that the thing they are paying for is going away? Even my PWA sites aren't showing a banner warning me. I hope there is more of a plan to help customers than there appears to be so far...
