I had a nice surprise when visiting my Project Online support tenant today – I can see that the new Resource Management and Capacity Planning features have been rolled out to my tenant. The roll out started today (9/23/2015) and could take a little while before every tenant has the opportunity to activate the tenant – so just be patient if you have not seen it yet. The first indicator is in the Message Center, and this should be there for all Project Online tenants in the Admin Center – so hopefully your tenant admin let you know what’s coming:
The “Complete action by” isn’t really relevant here – there isn’t anything urgent you need to do – quite the opposite in fact – I’d certainly suggest playing around with the new feature in a test PWA site before activating in your production systems.
*** Update 9/25 - the message has been changed to "Awareness" with no "Complete action by" date - so it will look a little different from the above screen shot. ***
Once it has been rolled out to your tenant then you will see a yellow banner in the home page, the Resource Center and the PWA Server Settings page:
When you visit Additional Server Settings on the PWA Server Settings page you will see a new option to Activate these features – and when you check it you will get an informative pop-up:
As the pop-up says this will set your PWA instance to start the migration process – and published resource plans with time phased resource data will get turned into resource engagements (see the FAQ document in the list of documents below for more information). You can cancel out at this point – and even if you click OK you still have one more chance as you need to SAVE the page before the action will really be set in stone. Once you do activate and SAVE It is NOT reversible – so as I mentioned – familiarize yourself with the feature before taking this step.
The link to ‘this guide’ – will take you here - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-Resource-engagements-73eefb5a-81fe-42bf-980e-9532b1bdc870?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
A very useful read on the new features. Worth stressing the note there - IMPORTANT Resource engagements are only available if you're using Project Professional 2016 or Project Pro for Office 365, connected to Project Online or Project Server 2016 Preview. Project Standard 2016 does not include resource engagements.
Thanks Sonia for the great supporting documentation:
· Overview: Resource engagements
· Accept or reject an engagement request
· Add a resource to Project Web App
· Activate resource engagements in Project Online
· FAQ: Resource engagements are replacing the old resource plans
I hope you like the new feature – and keep an eye on the Office365 Roadmap for more project goodness.
