MicrosoftAnother issue I have with this shutdown with no viable replacement for people that need to do real construction planning is that we are being forced to move from something that has been adopted as a global standard for decades to having to take a punt on one of the myriad organisations trying to build an alternative.
In the construction industry, we need to be able to submit and share schedules etc. and having a global standard is very valuable. It's great to see people innovating, but if you make the wrong bet now, you may find yourself having to move again in the short term once the market has a chance to choose which solution will be the next "global standard".
As an aside, it has been very disappointing to see the number of obviously very experienced and knowledgeable partners / MVP's etc. that have been pushing the MS line for many years to migrate across to planner / P4W when it is plainly not up to the job. This decision, while brutal now, has been a long time coming. It has astounded me that MS didn't get much more pushback than they did over the last 5 years.
If you want a solution specifically tailored for construction take a look at https://www.procore.com/ or https://www.4ps.co.uk/solutions/construction-project-management-software/. Project Online/Server can be configures for construction (and we have done so a number of times) but its a generic platfomr that requires configuration - that was the beauty of it - configuration was easy and flexible. The fact remains Microsoft is forcing customers to look elsewhere and like or not (and most don't of course) its a enforced move. An opportunity some might say to move to a more suitable product. It's clear that Microsoft has no interest in supporting a hugely successful product anymore which is both sad and very frustrating. If they had put their efforts into migrating Project Online to Dataverse seven years ago we wouldn't be in this situation today.
Kelvin_Kirby, I think that we have lost an awful lot more than we realise at the moment. MS Project had one job - to determine WHEN something was going to happen in some sort of logical order, generally following a set of agreed scheduling engine rules. It did it reasonably well - and where it didn't do it well, at least it was predictable. Where it went wrong was trying to do too much other stuff. I see very little opportunity in this. Somehow we are losing a very good and dependable tool that almost anyone could use. It is being replaced with some shiny new bling that once you get past the thin veneer, you realise that it really doesn't solve the same problem as the thing it is apparently meant to replace.
gwruck Agreed. And I can't tell you the number of customers we have had that have tried Planner/Premium and very quickly lost faith in it because of the lack of features. With Microsoft announcing the retirement of POL with no viable alternative (Project Server SE excepted, even if hosted in Azure, although still a backward and very costly step) it heralds the exit of Microsoft as a serious player in the PPM space, which is a huge shame, because they have a massive customer base with POL that they are now going to lose. The problem is the product strategy (originally to create a competitor to Wrike, Trello, etc) with P4TW got hijacked and then there was an attempt to add features to it (renamed to Planner) to reach parity with POL. But because the original strategy was flawed it will never get there. Clearly Microsoft have decided that it never will and POL is on old infrastructure (even though it still works) but that's nottry in the future direction. Now the dilemma is do they continue to invest in Planner over the next 4 years to try and retrofit Planner to a full featured PPM solution (very unlikely, since most customers will have moved to alternatives (Altus, PPM Express, Projectum xpm to name a few) which already have POL like capabilities (and more) so what's the point. Better to exit and focus budget elsewhere. It's such a shame because Microsoft have dominated this space and could have continued to do so if they had recognised early enough the need to re-engineer POL for the Dataverse platform. But we are where we are, sad thought that is. I just hope Microsoft will honour the legacy of supporting those customers and the loyal partners by providing the necessary IUR licences and CDX environments so that we can get the job done in time - given the timescales that's no mean feat, esp for some of our Enterprise customers!
Maybe if it hadn't been decided that concurrent editing was a requirement for what became Project for the web, then maybe Dataverse could have made a good Project Online back-end. Who knows.
