How to automatically sync availability with Project Professional?

[AleXSR700]

Hello everyone,

I am quite new to MS Project Professional and I have assigned resources to different tasks. Now, instead of entering vacation times etc. manually per resource, I would like to sync the availability of the user from the resources calendar. The data should be available in our company network.

Could someone point me in the right direction to link the resource's calendar availability to the Project?

Especially since the MS Projects plans users to the hour, it would make sense to know when the user is even available for working on that project.

Thank you all for your help

Alex

[#2]

AleXSR00,
Where exactly is your "resources calendar"? And what do you mean by "available in our company network"?

John

[#3]

@John-project 

Well, I can share my calendar and see all calendars of my colleagues. So e.g. my calendar would be my Outlook 365 calendar. I have all my out of office and busy appointments in there.

If I am planning myself for e.g. 20 tasks, then Project will essentially plan my tasks for my earliest availability and plan 8 fulll hours per day. In reality I might have 2-3 hours per day of meetings.

As those appointments are in my calendar and they are listed as "busy" or "out of office", Project could simply exclude those times from the scheduling.

Project has this feature to add manual vacation times etc. but I would have thought that within the Office 365 package, the calendar could simply be synced so I do not have to check my and everybody else's calendar all the time.

[#4]

AleXSR700,
I do not believe Project has any feature that would sync Outlook calendar for resources but I don't use Outlook so I will defer to one of my colleagues.

John

[#5]

Do you then always manually enter every availability? Or are you using a different external calendar (instead of Outlook)?

[#6]

AleXSR700

The feature you are seeking, which is to synchronize your resources' schedules in Microsoft Project with their Outlook calendars, does not exist. This means your only option is to manually update their calendars in the Microsoft Project file, which I know is a LOT of manual labor. Sorry, but hope this helps.

[#7]

@Dale_HowardMVP 

Thank you for the clarification.

Do you know if Project has some kind of API that would maybe allow for PowerAutomate to enter the data into the Project file for me?

I admit that I am not a fan of PowerAutomate as it seems to be quite rudimentary in what it can do (especially compared to other flow based automations like Node-RED) but I might be willing to spend an hour or two on it if it saves me the manual labor 😉

[#8]

AleXSR700 --

No, I do not believe that Power Automate would work in this case. You would need to create a macro in Microsoft VBA, but I doubt you would have access to the Outlook calendars of the people on your team. But if you did have access to their Outlook calendars, you could write a macro that combines Project VBA with Outlook VBA to extract the data desired from their calendars. Just a thought. Hope this helps.