I posted last week about the client update requirements - Project Online- Two weeks to go–upgrade your Project client! and today there is another announcement that is important for Project Online (more further down this posting) but it got me thinking about how you can keep informed of these changes if you are not an Office 365 administrator. In the Message center there is an link to preferences:
Clicking takes you to this page where you can choose to get weekly e-mail digests of the messages (SharePoint – which includes the Project messages – is listed when you click MORE).
Knowing that these options are available you can go to your Office 365 administrator and ask if your e-mail address could be added. If they say no, then I’d suggest you ask that they create an Outlook rule so that whenever they receive the weekly digest and it contains the word ‘Project’ that it gets forwarded to you. Hopefully one or other of those options will be acceptable to them and will keep you and your PMO team up to date with changes coming down the pipeline.
From the top screenshot you can probably see MC106623 which is our early notice of an API change in oData due to a new feature – and this should be going live by September 18th. I’ll be doing a longer blog post giving more details later – but here is the Message Center posting and the Additional Information link will take you to the support article on this change. To be clear you get to choose just one rollup timescale – or none. You don’t get to keep the daily if you choose to switch to weekly for example.
Updated feature: Project Online Rollup of Task and Assignment Timephased Data
MC106623
Published On : June 19, 2017
Expires On : October 31, 2017
Action required by September 18, 2017
We have added the ability for a PWA admin to set how to rollup task and assignment timephased data. We now support weekly, monthly, by fiscal period timephased units, as well as the previously supported by day grouping.
How does this affect me?
If you choose to use this new option, you may benefit from simplified report building, reduced storage requirements, and improved report generation performance. However, existing reports that make use of the following entities could be impacted by this change: - AssignmentBaselineTimephasedDataSet - AssignmentTimephasedDataSet - TaskBaselineTimephasedDataSet - TaskTimephasedDataSet You can also choose not to generate the rollup task and assignment timephased data by selecting the "Never" option. We'll be gradually rolling this out in September, and the rollout will be completed by the end of October.
What do I need to do to prepare for this change?
Please review any reports that make use of the task and assignment by day information from the Project Online OData service once this feature is available to your organization. If your reports are rolling up timephased task and assignment data by one of the following new units: weekly, monthly, or by fiscal period, we recommend updating your reports to take advantage of the rollups for better performance. If you have an app that queries all the properties without specifying the property names, it may be impacted by this change. We recommend you set the apps query for specific properties. Please click Additional Information to learn more.