June Project Update Blog

[Microsoft Project Team]

Your feedback informs us on what you want added, improved, and enhanced in Project for the web.  As you may be aware, UserVoice will be retired at the end of June 2021. We value your input and want to keep the momentum of our conversations going. Please continue to provide us your suggestions either within the app or in the comment section below.  

The updates for June are as follows:  

New Features 

• Choice Custom Fields: Create custom fields that allow you to quickly choose from several pre-set options. To learn more about these new fields, check out our blog post here.  

• Filter by Progress States: Filter your projects so you only can see your Not started, In progress or Completed tasks. Hide tasks that aren’t applicable to your work right now!  

• Filter on the Board & Timeline: Quickly find your tasks by filtering your tasks on Board & Timeline by keyword or assignee. 
• Import from Project desktop: Users can import .mpp files from Project desktop to Project for the web. This functionality is available to all users, and you can learn more about how to use this feature by reading our blog post here. 

• Project Power BI Template App: The Project Power BI Template is now available as an app accessible from Power BI or on App Source (Microsoft Project for the Web) 

• Copy link to task improvements: When you copy a link to your task, the link will be shown with the task name as the URL.  

Upcoming Features 

• Assign tasks to non-group members:  Assign tasks to add anyone in your organization to your project automatically.  

• Rollup Custom Fields: Add summary, average, max, or minimum calculations to your numeric custom fields. See the rollup value of all your subtasks in your summary task field. 

Microsoft Project Trivia! 

Last Month: 

• Question: In project management, milestones often represent significant events that happen during the project process. How can you create milestones in Project for the web? 
• Answer: You can create a milestone by setting your task’s duration to 0 days. 

This Month: 

• Question: Users of Project for the web can use the Board view as a Kanban Board for work management. What language does the word Kanban originate from, and what does it mean in that language? 

[MattRumph]

A custom text field for multi-line comments would be a great addition.

The use case is this would allow us to take notes directly on each task while having a status call. Versus taking notes in OneNote, then adding the notes to the tasks outside of the status calls.

[Brett O'Hanlon]

Who cares

Still nothing on the what's been voted for the most and at close to double the next feature.

https://microsoftproject.uservoice.com/forums/914203-project-for-the-web/suggestions/38922199-two-wa... 

[jsmith-icodevelopment]

I concur with the above statement. Planner integration is hands-down the best feature that would jumpstart Project for the Web. Otherwise, it is severely limiting its use. Hopefully the development team reads these comments and is working on implementation. Otherwise, band-aids will never make this product what we are looking for. 

[sally08]

I agree with the comment on full integration / feature parity with planner.  or at least an actual update - What is the vision/plan from Microsoft on these two products?  What to use when?  I get conflicting information and really need to know in order to make decisions at an organizational direction level.

[sbots1980]

Import from Project desktop

This will create a new Project for the web project separate from your Project desktop project. Note that some Project desktop features can't be imported into Project for the web. Learn more

That's a long list of unsupported features, but who is in the end using deadlines?

[Jo_Egerland]

Two way integration with microsoft planner and Microsoft projects

So this is quite an old comment, and I would like to know if there is any progress on the intetgration between Planner and Project?

A full two way integration with MS PLANNER and MS PROJECTS (P4TW especially) would be REALLY useful to enable full task management capabilities in the MS environnement.
Project managers need to ensure tasks are disptached to their owner. And the best place to deliver them and enable people to have a complete view ot their tasks is Planner.
For the moment, people have to juggle between TO DO, PLANNER and PROJECT. TO DO and PLANNER TASKS are now integrated in TEAMS.
TASKS from PROJECTS should follow.

[OliverLennartz]

the integration of tasks into planner is the most needed feature, as voted in the uservoice's.

[LuciferSam]

Two-way integration. Or it's just a useless tool.

[Allan With Sørensen]

I'm going to repeat what others have said, just because I hope it helps convince management at Microsoft to prioritize it:
Two-way integration with Planner, please!

I will at lease elaborate on what I mean, a bit.

I'd like to see the ability for an individual task in Project to be two-way linked to an individual task in Planner:

- Notes, due date, assignment, labels, importance, status: all carry over and are two-way synced

- File attachments, subtasks (from Planner): viewable on the task in Project OR let me at least click a link to get to the Planner task

- Buckets are mirrored between Project and Planner: Any bucket assignment in either is synced between the two

- If a task, that is linked to a Planner task, is gets assigned subtasks, and thus becomes a "super-task", write protected fields, such as due date, are no more editable in Planner either

- Tasks can be linked from any planner plan, which is part of the same Microsoft 365 group as the project OR that the project manager can access

- When I mark a task as "Done" it is moved to a bucket that I determine in Planner and Project (this isn't possible in Planner today, just thought I'd mention it here, because we need it!)

- You can obviously add Planner tasks to Roadmap as well

- Tasks that are milestones can still be Planner tasks, even if their duration is zero (milestones in Project can still be assigned to buckets, given notes, aso.

How to link a task from Planner to Project:

- In Project, where you click "Add a new task", there's a dropdown that'll let you select to "Add a task from Planner" - then you find the task you want to add, from the Planner plan you want to add it from.

- In Project, for an existing Task, you can choose to "Add as a task in Planner" - then you select a Planner plan to add the task to.

- To make the above easier, one could link Planner plans to the project under settings for the Project, but this should preclude tasks from being added from other projects, just help make it easier to find tasks that you want to sync with from Planner.

Other important additions:

- Project managers in Project, can see all tasks across both Project and Planner in any Office 365 group that they can access, in one big list, which can be sorted, filtered, searched, grouped, aso.

- Add same functionality as mentioned above for DevOps. Two-way sync, ability to add DevOps tasks to plans in Project, ability to see ALL tasks in Planner, DevOps AND DevOps in one view.

- I haven't even mentioned Lists yet... the old Project was able to use SharePoint lists as task lists, so there is already precedence for it. This one IS more tricky though, as the new Project is based on CDS, so I don't know, but two-way sync here would be great, too.

Opportunities:

- Opportunity to upsell from Planner to a Project Plan E3 for project managers - we'd probably jump at this!

- Finally Project becomes the glue that ties all tasks together for a project manager, which is sorely needed! Conversely To Do becomes the place for the individual to see all their own tasks, even from Project. Although To Do needs some work too, in that department, but that's a different story.

This took me about 40 minutes to think out, so I apologize that it is thoroughly incomplete, but I hope it will help inspire some ideas that I hope to see soon in Project (like really soon!). Thanks for listening.

[darrenstephens]

"My Tasks" in Planner to include Project For Web tasks and/or Teams, Tasks by Planner and To Do > Assigned to me to include Project for Web tasks. Realise that I'm just another request in the many of the same but with uservoice being closed want to ensure there is awareness of capability interest.