Capabilities of the new Project application

In my last blog I gave a short introduction about the new Project application and described also the setup. Now let's dive a little bit deeper and see what is currently possible.

If you assigned the Project and Customer Engagement licenses you will have access to two model-driven Apps in your environment.

When opening Resource Scheduling model-driven App we can create in the Resource Scheduling section new Bookable Resources and Requirement Groups or manage the Resource Requirements as well as their bookings with the Schedule Board too. Further background settings can be done in the appropriate section.

Keep in mind that you should create Bookable Resources first to use them later for task assignments in the Project.

Now some basic settings can be done there which enables to create a project. To achieve this we either use the Project model-driven App or go back the Office 365 Portal and open the new Project application.

Let's look what we have here. There is the Roadmap functionality which is the main dashboard for our programs. And We can also see a list of your Projects sorted by Recent, Shared with me and Created by me. From here we can create a new Project.

Note: You can also go to Project Online from this screen which will open the SharePoint-Repository of the Project Web App which covers a different type of projects (PWA Type).

The process for doing this is very simple. Just add tasks in the grid view, define start and end dates as well as predecessor(s). You can also assign those tasks to Resources if you configured them in the model-driven app. This will be visualized as Gantt-Chart in the Timeline view.

If the project was created from the Project application in the Office 365 Portal  we will immediately see it in the Project model-driven App. But you can also create it in the model-driven App which is then synchronized to the Project application.

Now let's take a look about the Roadmap feature. There you can have a overlook about the current Projects in the pipeline. We can select the projects which are needed in this view as well as their respective tasks. For this you need to create a row, give a name and select the tasks which you want to visualize.

This can be connected to two different type of projects:

• to a project which is either created in Project Online (type: PWA) or the new Project web application (type: Project)
• to an Azure Board from DevOps which needs to have at least User Stories

Note: In the following sample screenshots I connected to a Project from the application and to a DevOps project.

We can also add key dates which we can visually track. Now we have in our Roadmap an overview about our selected programs as well as some internal key dates.

My personal conclusion:

This may seem at first a very small set of functionalities as some key capabilities are currently missing. But if we look closer at the details we see that this service is accessed by CDS (start searching in the model-driven App with Advanced Find and you will see that there are project related records). This allows enhancements with own business logic by Power Automate and Power Apps (Check for Antti Pajunen's recently released Blogs which gave a good overview). You can also check the flows out which can be deployed to the environment when connecting to a roadmap.

If we look closer we will see new interesting preview steps for the new Project service.

Note: At the current time I was unable to add these steps manually into a flow.

Proven that this is a first basic version of the new Project application, this will be extended in the upcoming months by bug fixes and updates with more capabilities (f. e. Time / Expense entry creation, Project Sales, Revenue Recognition, etc.).