Forum Discussion
Data access after Project Online (PWA) retirement
This thread is a little old, but I have a question related to this part:
2/ What about linked SharePoint sites?
SharePoint sites linked to Project Online (such as project workspaces) will also become unavailable after retirement.
You will not be able to access or modify these sites once Project Online is retired.
All the resources I have seen here and elsewhere seem pretty clear about "project sites will not persist" or "you will not be able to access your project data, including SharePoint data." I still have one small faint hope.
We are planning a migration from PWA to another platform, but to minimize that migration I was planning to archive hundreds of old, closed, or completed projects first, in this fashion:
- export the Project Schedule as an MPP file
- upload it to the project Shared Documents library
- delete the project from the Project Center, while not deleting the SharePoint subsite
- set all user permissions for the SharePoint subsite to Read-Only
Important note: We not use the “PWA permissions mode”; we are only using the “SharePoint permissions mode”.
All the resources either don't mention the permissions mode or specifically say "your sites won't work because "the PWA permissions" won't be present". But we don't use PWA permissions mode -- we use SharePoint permissions mode. I simply cannot see what connection to PWA is remaining in those subsites once we archive the data and delete the project from the Project Center. That's my small hope.
Perhaps the answer will be "We (Microsoft) don't know what permissions mode you use, so we're going to delete everything anyway." That would be draconian, but at least it will be clear. But it dramatically increases the migration effort -- we have to migrate the active projects to a new platform AND migrate the "archived" SharePoint sites to a new SharePoint site.
Your thoughts, anyone?
Hi humphriesk,
I completely understand your reasoning, and honestly, your approach is technically sound from a SharePoint perspective. Under normal circumstances, if you detach a subsite from its business logic and rely only on SharePoint permissions, it should continue to exist independently.
However, based on everything I have confirmed directly with Microsoft (including multiple support cases, partner discussions, and official responses), the behavior here is not driven by permissions mode or logical dependencies. It is driven by the decommissioning of the PWA site collection itself.
This is the key point: once Project Online is retired, the entire PWA-backed site collection becomes inaccessible, not just the Project data layer.
Because of that:
- It does not matter if you use PWA permissions mode or SharePoint permissions mode
- It does not matter if the project is deleted from Project Center
- It does not matter if the subsite is read-only or “archived”
If the site (or subsite) is hosted under a PWA site collection, it is expected to become unavailable after retirement.
Most guidance, including official responses, consistently points to a hard cutoff where both Project data and associated SharePoint content become inaccessible after September 30, 2026.
So unfortunately, the “small faint hope” scenario, where detached SharePoint subsites continue to exist independently, does not align with what Microsoft has been communicating so far.
Practical recommendation:
If those archived sites are important, the safest path is:
- Migrate those SharePoint subsites to a separate, standard SharePoint site collection (outside PWA)
- Treat them as independent content repositories going forward
- Do not rely on permission mode or project deletion as a preservation strategy
I agree this significantly increases the migration effort, especially for archived content, but at this point it’s the only approach that aligns with the current Microsoft guidance.
Hope this helps clarify the situation.
