Introduction and setup of the new Project Service

Project Service Automation is an addon for the Customer Engagement business application suite which was formerly MS CRM Online. However the name Customer Engagement does not stand soley for CRM Online anymore and is now divided into respective product brands Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Marketing which come bundled with additional features. The addons Project Service Automation and Field Service were rebranded as respective products as well into Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation and Dynamics 365 Field Service. For all these services the Common Data Service - or short CDS - is the baseline database service and provides integration capabilities across other business applications via Power Automate and Power Apps.

Project Service Automation - or short PSA - provides interesting functionalities for Project Quotation, Project Contract Management, Project Management, Ressource Management with scheduling capabilities, time as well as expense tracking and also at some level Project Invoicing.

As a footnote: I won't go into detail now to describe what exactly is behind these mentioned functionalities. There are other good blogs which provide very deep content. I can recommend articles from f. e. Antti Pajunen, Kuldeep Gupta or Matthew Lazowski.

As PSA is a CDS based application, collaboration tools like MS Teams and MS SharePoint can be integrated as well as with MS Outlook by setting up synchronization with MS Exchange server to allow tracking of unified messaging activities like E-Mails, Appointments and Tasks. But that's just a little bit background about the capabilities. And now comes the new part.

A few months ago Microsoft released the new Project application which might be in a future release targeted as the successor of PSA. I will describe in this article what I have experienced in the setup of the current release of the new application. To avoid misconfusion I will call it - in context of this blog-article - Project Service or Project where the later is in my understanding the current official name.

To get access to the Project application either a Plan 3 or Plan 5 license is required. See this page for a comparison of Microsoft's project management solutions. After assigning the license to the user the Project tile will be accessible from the Office 365 Portal.

Opening the Project service will forward you to a page like this. Now here you can either create a new project or - when clicking on the arrow down - a new roadmap. If this is your first time when using this application the system will most likely do some background settings after choosing one of these options.

Just as a footnote: There is also the possibility where you can switch to Project to the SharePoint repository of Project Online which allows the same functions as with Project Server but I will not describe it at this point as this will go very deeply about MS Project and Project Server.

Now if you are coming from the PSA world you might ask, what has this to do with CDS and how can I access the data from there? Your Office 365 organization needs at least a Dynamics 365 plan with Sales or Customer Service installed. I had in my test organization the Customer Engagement Plan trial installed and assigned a license. This will enable in your Default CDS instance of your organization the new Project solution.

Note: Deployment was successful in Sandbox and Production instances as well. However the created project created in the Project application did not appear there.

If you have other CDS instances you will also see the new Project solution in the instance picker with the availability to install it. However as far as I have experienced these installations might fail if you have Project Service Automation already installed.

When creating a new project, veterans of PSA and of course of MS Project might experience many similarities about how it is created and how the tasks are all lined up. Besides the Grid and Timeline view - where you can assign dependencies between tasks - there is also a Board tab where buckets can be created and arranged; i. e. assign tasks like in MS Planner. These functionalities allow not only waterfall but also agile project scenarios to cover. There is an interesting how-to from Microsoft which describes the later a little bit deeper from an applicational point of view.

The process for creating a project is pretty straightforward as you can directly enter the tasks in the grid view - where you can arrange them by drag and drop, add additional Buckets if needed and make final adjustments in the Timeline.

Note: The resource assignment for Tasks is not mentioned her and will be covered in a later blog.

But what about the Common Data Service? Well, if the Project Solution is installed in your instance, you will notice two new Model Driven Apps - Project and Resource Scheduling - which will bring up very familiar screens if you open them.

So far enjoy testing and playing around. I will cover in a later blog-article what you can actually do within these.