Migration to a hosted environment

MVP

Hello,

I'd like to get some feedback regarding migrating Project Web Apps (PWA) from your local environments to a hosted solution and therefore a content database migration is no longer an option. In addition some departments will be migrating from Project Server 2010 while the hosted environment is Project Server 2016. A PWA will already be created for each department and users will no longer have access to Central Administration. The end users from the department will migrate their own projects to this new PWA using Project Professional. It is also important to point out that departments do not use custom solutions such as workflows. The only customizations includes out-of-box solutions such as enterprise custom fields and lookup tables.

 

Here are some of the Microsoft TechNet articles I have already reviewed

 

So here are the questions-

  1. What's the best or recommended path for the Project Server 2010 users to migrate? Should they 1st have a local copy of their projects on their desktop/laptops, upgrade their Project Professional to 2016 and then publish it to the new Project Server 2016?
  2. Same question as above but for Project Server 2013 users.
  3. Anything that affects reporting when migrating from 2010 or 2013 to 2016?
1 Reply

@Daniel Christian wrote:

 

So here are the questions-

  1. What's the best or recommended path for the Project Server 2010 users to migrate? Should they 1st have a local copy of their projects on their desktop/laptops, upgrade their Project Professional to 2016 and then publish it to the new Project Server 2016?
  2. Same question as above but for Project Server 2013 users.
  3. Anything that affects reporting when migrating from 2010 or 2013 to 2016?

Hey there Chistian,

   If you are going from On-Premises to On-Premises (hosted) content database migration via 2013 is still the best option for full fidelity migration.  Any other approach will involve varying degrees of data loss.  You might want to check out Fluent Pro's community edition toolset for migrating some configuraiton elements if you are intent on migrating using the Save As function of Project Pro.

 

  1. Assuming you don't migrate the projects via content DB method - AFAIK Project Pro 2010 won't connect to 2016, and soon neither will Project Pro 2013.  So I think the best option will be to open extracted projects with Project Pro 2016 and save into Project Server.  Expect data loss in areas like versions, resource assignments, resource plans etc.
  2. Same answer as 1.
  3. From a reporting point of view very little has changed.  The Project Server reporting database is now in the same DB as the SharePoint content DB and just as Project Server 2016 is now 'in-the-box' as a SharePoint 2016 feature (although still licensed separately) Excel Services is not - so plan your infrastructure carefully. 

 

Good luck.

 

J.