Project for the Web - how to prevent Assign Project Task to Contact or Account from Power App?

[JanVanek]

Hi, our customer has noticed that if he wants to assign a task to a colleague and he starts typing e.g. the first 3 letters of the name, the whisperer offers not only user names from Entra ID but also Contacts and Account names from the connected Power Application Project. How to prevent this? It is not desirable, project tasks are only assigned within the organization.

Thank you for help, Jan

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@JanVanek I'm not aware of a way to accomplish, but it would be nice.  Typically, in a PMO you want to control the resources in your environment/projects, but this is not how they designed Planner Premium.

[#3]

If you are in a non-default environment then you can limit access to the application on the powerapps admin side. You can limit access to a specific group of users, those users would be the only users who would show up, except any manually created contacts.

[#4]

@psawyer Can you elaborate on how to do this?  We have done extensive testing and could not limit who showed up in the Assigned To list and consulted with Microsoft who confirmed this is by design.

[#5]

Sure. Microsoft support for Project is an embarrassment.

You need to be running in a non-default environment. Then you need a group for all the employees you want to assign tasks to. So if you have a group to separate out internal vs external users use that. Then from this page https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ you add in the security group for who can access the environment.

I had the opposite problem. When I created the environment I put a security group in, and I couldn't assign tasks t anyone outside that group. So I removed the security group, and when that happened I could assign tasks to all users in my org. There is a microsoft article on it.

You have to use a non-default environment which has a couple limitations, but the reporting and ability to customize the environment is worth it IMHO. If you need more info let me know.

[#6]

@psawyer We are using named instances, aka non-default env, and created multiple groups in https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ but this did not limit who was available in the Assigned To field.  Can you share any of the settings used for the group you used?

[#7]

@RodFromm 

This is the setting I used.  Do you have a security group set?

[#8]

@psawyer At the Environment level we do not have a group assigned, but we do have lower-level groups within the environment.  Sounds like it is as simple as assigning a group at the Environment level to and only users in the group will show up in the Assigned To field?  Is this correct?

[#9]

Yes, that is what I believe you need to do here. I don't know if you will need to remove the users or not. But all users will show up in the admin center who have access.

[#10]

@psawyer - Thanks, that worked!  I wonder why Microsoft said this wasn't possible.  Did you have any success limiting what a resource can do within a project, regardless of license type?

[#11]

@RodFromm Microsoft support for Project is pathetic.  I have been working on stuff with them for months.  Seriously their support is so bad I don't have words for how bad but I will try.  Microsoft outsourced their support to a team who doesn't understand the product, then they pass the ticket around to avoid having to work on it.

As far as your access question.  Yes.  You can restrict or add access for parts on the entire project environment, or individual projects.  The security works identically to how Dynamics works so that documentation is valid.  The only thing you cannot do is get the "Limited" access function which was introduced last month.  But you can get everything else.