On September 30, 2026, Microsoft retired Project Online. If your organization ran its project portfolio there, you may have already completed a Project Online migration. You may have arranged extra time with Microsoft. Or you may be holding a backup of your projects and wondering what to do with it.
I recently finished moving a client off Project Online, and I want to share how we approached it. The most important question in a Project Online migration isn’t which product should we buy. It’s what does our organization actually need to keep working. Get that right, and the product choice gets a lot easier.
Project Online was Microsoft’s cloud-hosted project portfolio management (PPM) service, built on Project Web App (PWA) and SharePoint. With the retirement, organizations lose access to Project Online itself. That includes the schedules, resource pool, timesheets, and OData reporting feeds that many Power BI dashboards depend on.
A few things are not part of the retirement:
That leaves organizations with real choices, and each one has trade-offs.
In my experience, most organizations end up weighing four paths:
Planner and Microsoft’s newer cloud planning experiences are a natural fit if your teams want something lighter and more collaborative. These tools work well for task-based work. Organizations that rely heavily on enterprise resource pools, cost rate tables, timesheets, or deep custom fields should check carefully that what they depend on today is still available.
There are good third-party project portfolio management platforms out there. Some, like OnePlan, are built to work alongside the Microsoft Project files and Microsoft 365 tools your teams already use, which can soften the transition. This can be the right move if Project Online never quite fit how you work. It’s also the biggest change for your people. New tool, new terminology, and new reporting, usually all at once.
Project Server Subscription Edition is Microsoft’s current on-premises project server. It keeps the familiar Project Web App and Project desktop experience, and it isn’t affected by the Project Online retirement. The trade-off is that you run it yourself: servers, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition underneath, patching, and backups.
If scheduling is the heart of your work and you don’t need the strategic portfolio side of a PPM tool, an enterprise scheduling platform like Deltek Open Plan or Oracle Primavera P6 is worth a look. These tools are built for large, complex integrated master schedules. Everything lives in a single database with a shared resource pool and enterprise custom fields. Linking dependencies across projects is easy and reliable. Complying with scheduling best-practices, tracing complex logic, and analyzing delay claims becomes much easier with these scheduling systems. They’re the tools of choice for mega-projects in energy, construction, and aerospace and defense.
The trade-off is the move itself. These tools calculate schedules differently than Microsoft Project does, so an accurate migration takes real care. The learning curve for project managers coming from Microsoft Project can also be steep.
The client is an engineering and testing organization with around 150 active projects and roughly 250 people in their resource pool. They’d been on Project Online for years, and a lot had been built on top of it:
With the retirement date approaching, they needed a path that wouldn’t disrupt their project managers or their reporting in the middle of active work.
They chose Project Server Subscription Edition on their own servers, and kept Power BI reporting in the cloud. That might look like a step backwards. For them, it was the right call:
A different organization, with different people and a different appetite for change, could reasonably land somewhere else. That’s the point. The right answer depends on the business, not on the newest product.
The part of a Project Online migration that worries people most is losing something along the way. Our approach was built around proving that nothing was lost:
For this client, all of their live projects were moved and verified a week before the Project Online shutdown. There were a couple of hiccups along the way, but nothing that wasn’t solvable within the budget.
We realize not everyone finished their migration before September 30. Some of you may have arranged an extension with Microsoft. At the very least, many of you took a backup of your projects as MPP files and exported your data through Project Online’s OData feed before access ended.
If that’s where you are, you’re in better shape than you might think. That’s exactly where we can help.
The migration above actually ran on the same two ingredients:
Getting from a folder of files to a working project server takes some care. When an MPP file comes from Project Online, enterprise custom fields and the links to the enterprise resource pool don’t always come through intact. We’ve built the process to carry those values across and reconnect resources properly, then use the OData export as the reference to prove every project matches what you had.
Your OData export is also the foundation for rebuilding your Power BI reporting history. So even if Project Online is gone, the work you put into it doesn’t have to be.
If you have backups and aren’t sure what to do with them, let’s talk. A quick review of what you saved usually tells us what can be restored and what can’t.
If you’re still deciding, these are the questions I’d start with:
At Pinnacle Management Systems, we handle Project Online migrations end to end:
Is Project Server Subscription Edition affected by the Project Online retirement?
No. Project Server Subscription Edition is Microsoft’s on-premises project server and is not part of the Project Online retirement.
We missed the Project Online retirement deadline. Is our data gone?
Not necessarily. If you saved your projects as MPP files or exported your data through OData before access ended, those backups can be used to rebuild your projects in Project Server Subscription Edition and to restore your reporting. What can be recovered depends on what was saved, so start by reviewing your backup.
What’s the difference between an MPP backup and an OData export?
An MPP file holds an individual project schedule. An OData export holds the data across all your projects as it was published, including custom fields and the figures your Power BI reports used. A complete Project Online data recovery works best with both.
Can I keep my Power BI reports after migrating from Project Online?
Usually, yes. Reports built on Project Online’s OData feeds have to be pointed at the new data source. In this case that was the Project Server reporting database, through an on-premises data gateway. With care, the reports can look the same to the people using them.
What happens to Power Automate flows that used Project Online?
Flows that called Project Online’s REST API won’t work against Project Server unchanged. They need to be rebuilt. For this client, about 20 flows became 8 scheduled jobs that are simpler to support.
How long does a Project Online migration take?
It depends on how much is connected and how much history comes with it. For this client, it took about three months from assessment to go-live, with most of the effort in discovery and verification rather than the move itself.
Will we lose our project history?
Not if the migration is planned for it. Every project in this migration was compared back to the original Project Online data before go-live.
If you’re still working out what comes next after Project Online, I’m happy to talk it through. Even a short conversation usually turns up a few things worth knowing before you commit.