Data access after Project Online (PWA) retirement

The safe planning assumption is that access ends on the date, because Microsoft

hasn't committed to a grace period — and an archive you build in October is worth

nothing if the service is already gone.

Two things worth separating, because they get conflated and it matters:

**A reporting export is not a schedule.** The OData reporting feed

(`https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa/_api/ProjectData/`) will give you

tasks, assignments and timephased rows, and it's the fastest way to bulk-extract

everything. But it's the reporting schema, not the scheduling model. It does not

preserve the network logic, constraints, calendars or baselines in any form a

scheduler can re-open. It's an excellent audit record and a useless archive if

you ever need to *reschedule* one of these plans.

**So export twice, in different formats, for different purposes:**

1. **Native .mpp per project**, from the Project desktop client. Highest fidelity

— this is the only artefact that preserves the actual schedule model.

2. **MSPDI XML per project** (Save As → XML). More portable and readable in ten

years than a binary format, and not tied to any one vendor. Be aware it does

not capture timephased Work and Cost values, so it isn't a complete

substitute for #1.

3. **OData pull** for the portfolio-level reporting record.

4. A PDF of each Gantt, if anyone will ever need to read these without software.

**Then verify before the date, not after.** Take three or four representative

plans — ideally ones with deleted rows, custom fields and real predecessor

networks — re-open the exports cold, and check that predecessors, constraints and

baselines actually survived. Finding out an archive is lossy while the source

system is still running is a recoverable problem. Finding out on 1 October is not.

Worth noting for anyone planning to land in Planner: Planner Premium has no MPP

export, so whatever you take out now is what you'll have. Plan the exit format

before the migration, not after it.

Disclosure: I'm an ex-Microsoft VP and I run projectkiller.app - a Mac based version of Project.