What do you like and what would you change about Project for Web?

[The MPUG Community]

MPUG Community:

We are soliciting your input and are planning to hold focus groups around the topic of Project 4 Web.

If you could change anything about Project 4 Web, what would it be? And why?

If you can tell us anything you specifically love about Project 4 Web – and why – we would love that too!

If you would like to be part of a focus group or to provide 1:1 feedback, email us at info@mpug.com and we will get back to you.

MPUG cares about this community and wants to hear your voices!

[alisin1]

I like the simplicity of Project 4 Web (P4W). MS Project has a lot of great features, but when trying to introduce a new user to MS Project, those features and settings can be very overwhelming. P4W is also great for collaboration; if another PM is on vacation I can step in, and my portfolio manager can review timelines without asking me.

The three areas of improvement for me are:
1. The limited dependency types – I believe P4W only has “FS” right now, but I’d love to see that expanded, and if possible, include the ability to do dependency +/- days (ex., FS-5).
2. Line limits – I tried creating a program plan using P4W and found out that the project plans cap out at 500 rows.
3. Reporting capabilities – as a solution to #2, I ended up creating eight separate plans (“subprojects” with no master), and now I have to export them all to Excel to do any reporting on them.

Unfortunately my team chose to revert back to an Excel spreadsheet due to the issues/areas of improvement I listed. I would love to give P4W another shot. Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback!

[The MPUG Community]

Hi Alision – thank you so much for the feedback.

Great work around as well.

We’ve heard of many teams that revert back to Excel due to issues/areas of improvement — which is why we are looking to understand the pain points and see if there is anything MPUG can do to fix them. If you think of anything else — or hear from any of your colleagues, be sure to let us know!

Thanks again!
Lexie @ mpug

[cbass1224]

Like:
– simplicity
– power bi reporting capability

Don’t like
– time scale options way too limited
– no ability to customize the view
– no ability to use subprojects (road map does not work for this)
– lack of dependency types
– need a view that shows “my tasks” or something similar to Planner

[The MPUG Community]

Hi cbass1224 – Thank you so much for the reply, extremely helpful!

[James Welsh]

Make it easy to create a calendar. Currently it is almost impossible to do because it is necessary to ask someone that normally administers Dynamics to set it up. Noone knows how to do it. Without being able to add non-working days, M4W is unusable.

[Dale Howard]

Nearly 4 years after Microsoft released Project for the Web, it still is not anywhere near being “enterprise ready.” If it is the tool that is going to replace Project Online, then Microsoft needs to dramatically speed up development on this tool. For example, to be enterprise ready, we need to be able to create enterprise custom fields and enterprise custom calendars, both of which would be available for use by every PM user. Those are only a few of the elements that are needed to make this tool enterprise ready.

[James Welsh]

MS has focused on making it look good and so some degree the program is ok. But in order to be able to make a calendar appears to be impossible at least in an enterprise setting because the permissions required and the changes necessary need to be done by people who have no idea how to do it. Not every enterprise has a dedicated dynamics SME that knows how to set up a role to allow calendars (and probably a lot of other functionality) Without documentation, and procedures to follow from MS, no admin is going to go anywhere near handing out permissions.

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