Webinar Recap: They Finally Did It! Microsoft Releases a Brand-New Version of Microsoft Project

Please find below a transcription of the audio portion of Tim Runcie’s They Finally Did It! Microsoft Releases a Brand-New Version of Microsoft Project webinar being provided by MPUG for the convenience of our members. You may wish to use this transcript for the purposes of self-paced learning, searching for specific information, and/or performing a quick review of webinar content. There may be exclusions, such as those steps included in product demonstrations. You may watch the live recording of this webinar at your convenience.

Kyle: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s MPOG webinar, They Finally Did It! Microsoft Releases a Brand New Version of Microsoft Project. My name is Kyle, and I’ll be the moderator today. And today’s session is eligible for one, PMI, PDU in the technical PMI category. The MPUG, the activity code for claiming the session is on the screen now.

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We’re very happy to welcome back Tim Runcie, today. Tim is one in six Microsoft Project MVPs in North America, and has held that title for 16 years in a row. Tim works with companies like Microsoft, and next generations of project, program and portfolio of technologies. Tim is an accomplished speaker, consultant and educator, supporting the project management community for over 25 years. As the president and founder of Advisicon, Tim has written over 38 books on project management methodologies and technologies. With that said, I’d like to welcome you back, Tim. And I’ll hand it your way to get it started with today’s session.

Tim Runcie: Fantastic. Thanks, Kyle. Welcome, everyone. Excited to be back here, especially to be showcasing the entirely new release of Microsoft Project. This is going to be a future version of what you will be finding in terms of everyday use of projects. So this is kind of the, I feel like we’re at the nursery here, just watching the birth of a brand new baby.

As Kyle has mentioned, I’ve been doing this for a long time; working in both the technology sector and like all sectors, but really working with organizations. We’re building project management technology, so I love doing PMOs like finding ways to blend this. And we’re going to find with this Project for the web, the modern project, is it’s actually going to fill an important gap in the project program and portfolio stack. So, I think these are helpful for us to go through.

If you have any questions, anytime you’ve been watching the recording, I encourage people to reach out to me directly. If you’re [inaudible 00:02:49] find without that licenses or need any pointers’ direction, I’ve been doing this in terms of supporting our community practice for the last 25, 27 years actually. So, I’m looking forward to continue another 27. In terms of today’s agenda, here’s what we’re going to cover.

First of all, why another version of Project? We talked about all the tools that are out there. It’s important understand why is this tool here? What is it for? And how can you take advantage of it? Or perhaps, maybe it’s not the right fit for what you’re looking at? We’re going to talk about that, because we have this grow up story that takes people from no maturity to high levels maturity. And Microsoft is engineering a series of tools they’ve designed to work together.

We’ll get into what we talk about this, how does Modern Project work with Legacy Project? Maybe you’re using Project Online or using the project desktop tool, how do these fit together? And that’s important to understand, that ecosystem of how they play in the sandbox and play well together in the sandbox. And then let’s talk, and more kiss and jump right in here. We’re going to do some demonstration. I want you to see how it works. I’m going to walk you through there. I want to encourage you to be putting questions in the chat window. I’m going to make sure I carve out enough time at the end to take as many questions as possible. So, I know this may trigger some things for people as they’re thinking through this.

Again, as you begin doing that, we’ll do some interactive Q&A. And of course, we’ll make sure you understand, what are the reporting capabilities? And how do you get this? With that in mind, let’s just get started in understanding a little bit of, why is there a new version of Project? From an understanding of, we’ve gone from these micro tools to these macro tools over the years, what is the direction? Where’s Microsoft going? Let me take us back a little bit. Maybe you’ve seen this before. Where we talk about the three tiers of project program and portfolio management. But then again, how do people actually live at work?

If we look at the modern generation of workers or the information workers that are out there, we have a lot of these baby boomers who are retiring, we have this millennial, Gen X, Y&Zers, and people who’ve grown up with technology, especially in a mobile situation. So the idea is that most of time, teams come together to work and get things done. And that may not necessarily need to be in a full blown version of a deep, dark, heavy engineering project, or perhaps you’re not trying to do earn value. And so how do we let people get in, get out and get back to work, yet provide the metrics and analytics to fit there?

And so those three tiers really in the stair steps are task management, you have kind of these punch list of things that you work with. You have a Notepad, you’ve Excel, you have your Outlook. A lot of people will use just kind of an area where they’ll track this information, or even a mobile device where they can keep track of a checklist of things to do. Microsoft uses tools in that space with Microsoft to do [inaudible 00:05:33]. Of course, the Microsoft Project team owns planner and so they said, you know what? Let’s see about giving people their agile tool where they can have kind of a SharePoint under the hood, but have this, con bond, this card view, where I can actually move things in a planning board and communicate. But yet at the same time, there are gaps.

And so where we look at Project Program and Portfolio Management where we leverage the Microsoft Project, we leverage the enterprise environment. Maybe that organization is not ready to join up there, and that’s actually kind of important. So we move kind of, basically through the process of looking at one of the tools that are available. And intently, is that we want to make sure that we’re migrating… Oops, let me back up a second… That says, hey, if you’re using Excel or Task Lists, how do we help you basically blend these together to fit the work and the work activity that goes along?

So modern project or project for the web, it’s its actual name, is a brand new experience. It’s designed to be collaborative. It has AI inside of it. And of course, it’s on the brand new platform we talk about called, basically CDS 2.0, where it’s on this platform that you can do Power Apps, power automate, which used to be flow. And the idea is that you have this functionality that behaves very similar to teams, Microsoft Teams. So, the security mechanisms there don’t require the things that you’ve had in the past. So if we have all these versions of project, it’s great. Some of us really like project management technologies for the fact that we can actually show predictive analytics. So, we can actually look at demand and capacity planning. How does this work in terms of introducing a tool, while still leaving all the other tools around?

Well, if you think about the Microsoft power platform, and this is kind of important. As the architecture here is really designed to allow us to use a reporting tool that doesn’t care necessarily where your data comes from, is that it’s the Power BI, it can do reporting. I can automate things, or I can create applications or embed elements in teams. Of course, with project scheduling, we now have a new tool in dynamics. And as we think about what’s called the Common Data Service, or CDS 2.0 version is that, now dynamics project everybody is sitting on the same platform, you can use that very commonly to connect information, use the AI Builder. But the idea is that the experience is the same.

And so when you think about this if you’re in Product Service Automation, or you’re in Field Service, or you’re in Dynamics, these type of modules, guess what you use when you build schedules? You’re going to use Project for the web, and that’s what we’re going to look at today in terms of how to play around and leverage these.

So, all of these are a connected system. It’s a platform of tools, including office. We get into an element that says projects there, Dynamics, but they’re all sitting on Azure. And the intent is to make sure that as you bring in the tools together, that if you want to build reports, or workflow, or you want to create process that allows you to kind of interact with other technologies, you could do so very easily.

Now, with that in mind, in terms of using Project, what we want to be able to do is say, listen, if I want to communicate, or connect or share data, I’m not restricted. And I kind of call that working in a house without walls. So the idea is you can wander from the kitchen, to the dining room, to the living room. And I’ve talked about this before, where hopefully, you do have some security on your bathroom, at least a door. But then in many cases, your end users don’t know or don’t have to feel like they’re hopping from one environment to another. So the desktop version of Project is kind of where we started, where we think about it, hey, good old Project Pro. It’s been around since 1986, I believe.

I know, I started working with it, I think in ’86, ’87. That was the old DOS versions of the product, and then it began moving forward. Well, now Microsoft has taken all these local desktops, and they put it into a Project Online, central repository. So, we’re able to share that information. And then of course, Microsoft releases Power BI and says, you know what? We can let you create really cool, sexy dashboards on reports, to actually help you see that without having to over engineer a tool. In fact, the reporting tool works across everywhere.

And now we have a tool called Roadmap and Project Home, which you’re going to see here in just a moment in terms of working with Project Online. But what about this new little upstart that just kind of entered into the fold called Project for the web? Well, it doesn’t sit in the same database as your Project Online information, meaning that it doesn’t use the same resource pool. It really is an entirely new application, and it sits in something called Project for the web. However, the cool thing about that is that Project Home, Project Roadmap, which is the ability to bridge and bring information from different systems into a kind of a view is available.

And of course, Power BI can be both. And so the idea is that the limitation that says, you know what? Maybe you don’t need the heavy architecture of an enterprise ERP project management system. You need a lightweight scheduling system that lets you get in, get out and get back to work. And so, that’s the premise. And what we’re finding is that a lot of organizations who are growing up their accidental project managers or their unofficial project managers, really suddenly recognize, hey, listen, I can actually begin to move forward, where I’m not working in simple lists. So let’s take a look at this, and let’s have some fun with this.

Let me bring up projects, so here we go. Project for the web starts in the same platform. So first of all, if you’re using Office 365, you’ll come in here, you’ll pick your project landing page. This is your Project Home. Notice, I’ve got a roadmap saved up here, I’ve got the modern project. I think we’ve got Legacy Project or Project Online sitting here and available. You’re going to see that we can actually have more or less, and I can quickly jump into my Project Online environment, which right here for some of us recognize, hey, look at all my Microsoft Project files, sort of having them loosely scattered. I’ll actually centralize them here.

However, we talk about working with modern project, what we may want to do is say, listen, I might be doing some sort of strategic planning, and I want a roadmap of both my existing Project Online, maybe even my Azure DevOps portfolio. And of course, I may want to merge in information coming from my modern project. And so we think about Project for the web, here’s an example of one that’s built. In fact, I’m going to build one for scratch for you today. But take a look. Here’s the grid view, you actually have three different views. And if I want to Build a view, and expand and collapse this, so I’m not worried about looking at a Gantt chart.

Well, yes in roadmap, I can also bring this information in here. In fact, you’re going to find that I’ve got these little emojis that actually help me understand what my milestone is and what I’m tracking. So it looks out there and says, hey, pilot phase, what is that? Well, it’s coming right from the schedule that I built. So literally, I can bridge with roadmap project for the Web, Project Online, Azure DevOps, and you’ll see other new and other third party elements in the future being able to be folded in there. So, Project for the web still gives us an ability to be connected in an overall ecosystem.

Now continuing with that, let’s just look at this. First off, we’ve got a great grid. And basically, you don’t have infinite columns. So, let me just show you the number of columns that you have here. I’ve added a few, but they’ve added some new pieces in terms of how they’ve named the initial fields that we work with in the past. So the word predecessor successor, notice that doesn’t exist here. It says depends on, or depends… Dependents are after. Or instead of having work, it’s work, not effort. Actually effort, not work completed, effort remaining. And the reason for this is that most organizations who are beginning to dabble in project management don’t have their project management professional certification. They aren’t prince to experts, they don’t have a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. And so some of the phraseology is intimidating.

So if we think about the modern project as we look at this Project for the web, it’s like, hey, listen, it’s easier. There’s not that many columns. I still have buckets, and I actually have the ability to assign people to a project. I can also switch over to a board view, which now I’m looking at having a web-based planning board, task board, sprint board. You can name anything you want in terms of your buckets here, and you can drag and move these correctly, and move them around in terms of a planning phase. So the idea is that if I’m moving it from what’s next up, or I’ve got things on my backlog, or I want to prioritize between my sprints, I still have the information in the database available to work with. But I’m doing this from the web, or I’m doing this from a mobile device. Where before a project desktop, you can go in here. But you got to have the desktop only. It wasn’t for the web.

Now, where people get very excited is that some organizations really like the idea of having relationships. Remember, when we talk about planner, in Microsoft Project, yes, you can connect the task to a planner board. And if you want to do some customization, you can have flow, or basically power automate move or update information between the environments. But here is, I’m starting to collect and assign information. I just want to quickly get in and manage this. Well, planner does not have the ability to have time-phased task or work activities.

That means if something slips or changes by a week or two, we don’t have any predecessor successful relationships that were showing a downstream impact. So literally, I can come up here, I make adjustments. I can increase the duration. If I want to create a link, I literally can grab these, drag and drop, or I can clone and copy my environment. And so the idea is that I’ve got this visualization capability that just gives me the option to work in a very streamlined and easy to view environment. Again, you can kind of play around with these. And I’ll slow down because you can kind of zoom in and you can zoom out. But I also don’t have a big grid here, I’m actually looking at high level information.

Again, with your modern project is that you’re always going to have access to your details. So I had an organization ask me, they said, “Hey, Tim, we’re working in JIRA. And we really like the idea of Project. We like the whole time phased element here, but I want to just put exit criteria, entrance criteria. What is some information that I can have?” I said, “Well, if you’re not putting those as activities in your schedule, you can actually come up here, and you could add comments.” You have kind of a rich text environment here where you can put some of the conversational pieces. You’re going to see that there it is, I’ve got the buckets or categories, I can move things around with. And the idea is that very simply, I don’t have to worry about creating a large schedule, or having to learn about Effort Driven Scheduling, or fixed work, fixed units, fixed duration.

Everything in Project for the web is actually fixed units, and it is Effort Driven Scheduling. So, it’s using the most common settings and project as we have today. You’ll have little flags and alerts. And of course, you can actually check these off, which is kind of fun. If you actually click on these, it makes a little sound. And I don’t know if you can hear that. But you can see the graphic there, where it actually comes in, and it lets you know and it gets done. At this time of the year, I usually say it’s like an angel getting its wings when you get all your cast on it. You just click on those, and it flags it.

So with us looking here, let me take us back to building a product from scratch. I think this is going to be helpful for you to understand kind of how we would set that up. So let me… Let’s hop past roadmap, and let’s jump right into building a new project. Normally, I click here to get a new roadmap. But right now, I’m just going to create a blank new project. So when I click on this, notice, it’s not asking me to set up securities or permissions. It’s not going to require us to go and build a global resource pool. What it’s doing right now is very similar to what you find in Microsoft Teams. Is that literally, it’s setting up a security group behind the scenes, just like Microsoft Team has. In fact, you have the same capabilities in teams of how you work with this. So let me just click here, and I’ll give it a name here. I’m going to go ahead and call this Modern Project Demo.

And right now, when I name this, it’s actually going to get an email address. It’s going to have a security, a group name called _Modern Project Demo. And right now, I’m the manager. And so there’s nobody invited to this, but I can actually take advantage and leverage these pieces. Now just like in Teams, you can invite people that are internal to your organization, or external to your organization if you’ve turned on those features where you’re using the enterprise edition of Office 365. There’s a couple of layers of what you have, and you can turn that on.

But right now when I come in, I can just say, well, listen, I can add it, I can delete it. Or if I’m working in here, I just want to create a series of tasks. So let’s just do a little high level planning, and just show you how easy this is. I’m going to call this planning phase, and then I’m going to go ahead and call this design phase. And then, I’m going to say build a phase. And then I’ll say testing, and then I’ll say, close out. Here we go. Then honestly, I could just sit here and press the insert key on my keyboard, I can keep typing. But if I want to put a little bit of details in our planning phase, we probably should say field project plan. Remember, a project plan has a lot of information in here. And I want to end in that.

So you notice that you get this little ellipses here, which I can actually indent that. I can cut it, I can copy, which is kind of fun. Because sometimes I’ll go out and steal a lot of things, and just paste them directly in here. And the idea is I’m pasting the text in the values in this particular column. I can also copy the link to a task, I can complete it here, I can insert sub tasks. So we’ve got this whole menu driven option, but let me just indent that real quickly.

Now, for those of you that are hardcore Microsoft Project users, you know that the Alt, Shift, left arrow will promote or demote activities. And so as you’re working here, you’re going to find that some of your keyboard shortcuts actually let you do some of that. So I’ll shift right arrow, I’ll shift left arrow, I can just use my keyboard to continue working. And so that’s been kind of fun. Let me throw a few more things in here. So, let’s insert another task. So we’re going to build a project plan, build a risk plan. We’re going to validate… Oops… So we go validate plan with the team, and I’ll put a milestone in here and we’ll just call this planning phase complete.

Notice I didn’t put anything in here in terms of work effort, duration. I didn’t do any of that. So I literally could come in here and just say, hey, that’s two days. This will be three days, that’ll be four days. This, of course is a milestone, we’ll make it zero. By the way, I just would like to make these to have dependencies, so I’ll highlight them together. Instead of doing one at a time or jumping over to the information, is I can just add or remove the dependencies directly.

Now notice, I’m just kind of working in the grid. So who’s it assigned to if I want to add work, or effort or columns like that here? They’re available. To remember now we talk about effort completed, or I’m looking at predecessor successors hence the word dependence, or depends on but I’ve got some great information here. So, at least I’m looking at my information. And if I do want to see the start, let me just add the finish real quickly. They got it.

Now I didn’t get prompted for a security permission. I’m just building this. And this is the idea that if you’re in dynamics and you’re doing a CRM kind of a proposal or an estimator, you’ve got work coming in. You’re going, you know what? Let’s just kind of build a high level schedule. Let’s figure out who’s going to need this. You should be able to build these together, as well as going into a timeline view with the same thing. So [inaudible 00:21:01] well, listen, let’s just continue to work here. So in our design phase, let’s just insert a row here. And we’ll just say design stuff. Now let’s design cool stuff that’s better, that’s better. And we’ll just say validate, design. And then I’ll pay and say, design phase complete. And I promise, I won’t make this a typing exercise.

But here we go, same thing, highlight, let’s go ahead and make these sub tasks. Let’s invent them Arthur, hey, listen, I want to continue and make these actually have dependencies. Now, as I’m looking up above here thinking, hey, you know what? I can kind of link these together. Why don’t we just grab the end of my milestone or my activity here, and let’s just link those together? And so literally, it’s about [inaudible 00:21:49]. Even progressing or moving these around, which is kind of fun, is sometimes as I come in here, I’ll actually change the overall duration of a task. You can see it kind of ebbs and flows. But sometimes when you start figuring out, who’s going to do that work.

So I usually encourage people if you know what the effort is, you have a high level, level of effort. Type that in, and then begin assigning people. Because remember, fixed basically, fixed units effort driven just says the first time you add people to a task, project’s going to set the hours for you. And as you tweak or to an app, it certainly will go up and down. But let’s build a team here.

So as I’m looking at this, I might want to pop over to my board view and go, oh, that looks great. Let’s add a couple of buckets here. So my first bucket I’m going to say is, we’ll just say first up. Then I’ll add another bucket here and I’ll call this, for review. And I’m going to say hey, listen, let’s just validate our design. I definitely need to do all my validates, and they’re going to go to my review section here. If I’m doing a building, I’ll just make sure that these get done first. And let’s assign some people.

Now first off, I can actually go over to where it says group members. And you click on this, it’s just going to say, hey, look, there’s your security group and you can begin adding resources. I typically will come in, and just start adding a right at the past level. So if I say, hey, listen, let’s add Carla. And Carla’s name will come through my organization, here she is. It says, hey, would you like to add Carla? Create and assign this activity. Basically, we’re going to add her to our security group, you bet.

Then maybe while I’m also building the plan, Carla’s smart, but I think I need to add a couple other people here. So let’s add Ken, and Ken Law. And yep, there he is. We’ll drop him in as well, and sign an add. And I’m literally starting to build this on the flyer. Or I can pop up to my group members and just start typing in here and saying, hey, let’s add Ted Leslie. She’s always good in terms of validating that, and then let’s go ahead and add Rich because I want somebody to teach me how to actually use this. And so I can build these together. And basically, it’s a private group, I can come in and change these or modify them. But I’ve got that ability to actually come in here and start moving, renaming, dragging, dropping. So let’s put our design stuff here and then work from there.

So from a grid perspective, we’ve got a nice option. And of course, as you’re working in this if you think about having an email domain or an email group, I certainly can click here. And what this is going to do is run into my Office 365 environment and say, well, listen with this security group, with this project schedule that we’ve just built that we are putting together, I can actually come in here and begin to look at, how do I set up views, directories, information? You’ll find the same thing with Microsoft Teams, is our abilities to come in and actually go and say, hey, show us some of the groups that we’re working with. Or perhaps, I’d like to drill right into activities, or assignments, or anything that we actually have in that environment.

Again, from the ability to manage that or look at the opportunity of a SharePoint site under the hood, all of that exists just like you do in teams. In fact, let’s talk about teams for a moment. While I’m working with project, this is kind of a great way to manage this. But what you’re going to find is that while you’re working in teams… Let me just bring my tight teams window up here… Notice what you can do. Teams is an amazing tool. The idea is that instead of your end users having to go to this URL, or that URL and [inaudible 00:25:08] maybe you’re using Project Online and modern Project for the web. Part of the organization is just the accounting department, and they are going to struggle with project. But they can actually do this pretty easily. They work in a spreadsheet list all the time, they’ll do a little bit of time-phased updates. We’ll talk about percent completes in a moment.

But I want them to come into a team, or perhaps a channel. And when I go in here, I can certainly upload my files, and I can open this in SharePoint. If I want to synchronize these, I can. Hey, some of the organizations are using the planner board. So look at that, I can actually in Teams, actually have an associated planner board, where I can put a schedule, charts, I can see what’s ahead or behind. Perhaps I have a full blown SharePoint site, where maybe I published a project schedule and I want to have that directly.

So notice while I’m in here, I’m just able to pull up document libraries, issues and risks. I’ve got the full week of Project Online. Or perhaps, maybe I want to jump right to the detailed project schedule. And then this is a side project to help keep track of, maybe other elements that work inside of there. So instead of people buying a full license and project, they can actually use this in conjunction.

What I love about it is we can also add our Power BI reports, which I’m going to show you here in a moment is that, listen, it’s not just about having data or report jammed into a tool. It’s that we have this super powerful reporting engine, I can point it at Project Online, I can point it for modern product or product for the web. I can bring them both together if I really want to, but I’ve got that visibility. Again, let’s show you, I can simply add modern project here. And if people have the right license, they can come in, and see and edit this. So, I literally can work directly in this view.

In fact, what’s kind of fun here is as I work in these environments, this is co-author. This is a true co-authorship in modern Project for web, which means that technically there’s no limit to the number of people that could be in your project schedule making changes simultaneously. Now, just saying those words makes the hair on my arm stand up. Because as a Project Programmer Portfolio Manager, I usually don’t want anybody in my project schedule, making changes simultaneously. But if you think about Office 365, and the ability for all of office to allow people to come in, make comments, to do multiple levels of undo. To actually roll in and say, hey, if I’m changing or modifying this, I can actually see it in real time.

As you’re going to find that in the lightweight versions of doing project management, this is very collaborative. We want people to come in, and be modifying, and changing and making discussion. Or element changes directly in that particular environment. So having  this visibility is extremely helpful, and allowing that co-authorship says, look, I can have a group in teams using it, I can be over in a separate web browser, I can be on my mobile device here. As long as you have the right licensing, you can just pop in and begin to view, edit or see this. So I think this is going to take some getting used to. I know for me, I’m kind of like, whoo, people in my schedule, I don’t know if I want to have that happen.

But again, the idea is that if I have a high level project schedule, and I need to, I’m doing demand management and resource capacity planning. I don’t have to put all the details here if I need people to progress or update this. So as Microsoft looks at the licensing component, I think you’re going to see some exciting things happen next year, and what Microsoft will do with licensing around what happens with Project Online or Project for the web? But the idea is that they want to get people quickly understanding what it is to mean about projects, past effort and assignments, and have that accountability and visibility for the nonprofit organizations out there? Or the NGOs worldwide, or faith-based organizations who really don’t understand the deep arts of having project management yet, everybody does projects, and everyone try, and use this tool? This is designed to help bridge that gap for you.

Let’s take a look at a couple other things here. I mentioned that the ability that we have reporting, so let’s talk about reports for a moment. What I’m opening up right now is an out of the box dashboard, made available by Microsoft against this Project for the web environment. Again, I can actually bridge both if I really want to. If I want to look at deliverables, or milestones for Project Online or for Modern Project, I basically can bridge the gap here. But you have the ability to, again, have that same capability of, what are your projects? What am I viewing?

I can do this from my phone, I can click and see the work activities that are available. But inherently, the overall idea is that this is it, I’ve got Power BI data, looking at my projects. And again, I can see the information. There are links that allow you to jump directly to these, and I’ve got this nice little sandbox I’m beating up and playing with right now. If you want to jump to a high level portfolio, again, depending on who needs to see the information, they can actually come out there and say, listen, let’s give you kind of an idea of what your projects are. We can look at a week at a glance, I can jump this out to a month at a glance, I can change kind of the overall visualizations of what I want display. Again, the ideas I’ve got some of the same tools that you use for Project Online with your Modern Project.

Very importantly, a lot of times, we’re always looking at milestones. Especially where the schedules are easy to update and manage, I may want to have, hey, what got completed? What are upcoming? Again, as you start putting and building more and more tasks here, you’ll see these jumping out. You can also read what we call roadmap. So there’s things that I can pull it to my roadmap, and actually say, hey, what’s coming out? What are the things that are key dates I need to pay attention to? What’s the date range? Is there a risk associated to some of these? Again, when we talk about roadmap, we get out into that world where we say, hey, we’re actually creating these dates. I can actually pull information and say, look here, and actually have an overall report from Power BI. Or pull it directly from project.

I can pop into resourcing. And so again, I may want to look at what tasks are started, what’s completed and what’s not done. Remember in modern product, it isn’t about necessarily assigning hours and tracking that. Even though we track the effort here, you can actually see what’s open, what’s closed, what’s remaining. And people could change that. So when I go back to modern project, you go, Tim, where’s those details where the hours are?

Well, remember, we can either add our columns, or we can always open the details directly like while I’m in that environment. I might want to say, hey, listen, as I’m putting it in here, I got 16 hours. If I’ve got just some complete, I just say, eight hours complete. At the enter key, I should be able to say whatever task I click on, I can actually look at what’s completed and what’s remaining. Notice, it just updates automatically.

I can also go in, and I could grab these and start dragging and moving them around. Notice, it’s not going to prompt me with a constraint message. It just says, hey, listen, when you want to start manually moving things around, no problem, we’ll let you do that. We’re not going to force feed you to say, hey, listen, this has a constraint, are you sure you want to do that? Inherently, the idea is that you’ve got some great information you can work with, and you can just touch it, drag it, move it from a mobile device, et cetera.

If I go back to our reporting and go, hey, listen, I’ve got resource assignments, I’ve got a task overview. I’ve got this whole rich Power BI [inaudible 00:32:09] that if you are going to use modern project, definitely leverage the out of the box reports. It’s got some great stuff that’s already there, I don’t have to reinvent that. I know at my company, Advisocon, we build, kind of tailor some of these. We have a lot of different report packs that we use. I think there are a lot of partners out there that do that, and that’s great. But inherently if you’re in that crawl, walk, run stage, may want to just take a look at what’s out of the box. This is really an uplift that’s very minor for you to be able to come in, and actually visualize information.

Now you notice, I’ve got these little emojis. People keep asking me, Tim, how do you get emojis? I can’t seem to get mine in there. So if you come out here, let’s just show you how to do that. So if I’m in planning… Let me just pull up the details. Whether I’m typing this in directly, one of the things that happens is if you’re on a Windows 10 environment, remember this is browser based. So you can be really on Mac or somewhere. But if you do the windows semi colon, it actually will open up this little emoji window. And if I’m thinking about planning, going, yep, this is a good environment to work with. I have a lot of different things to choose from.

So as I look at kind of organizing, or planning or maybe perhaps I want to go, and I want to look at some alternative food choices, or I want to get into, hey, listen, I’m going to do some high level planning. I’ll just go ahead and start with my satellite here, and you can hit the space bar. Again, it’s visual now right there. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s in your text, it’s in your name, your title. It’s just a something that you can begin leveraging. So pretty powerful, just being able to surface that.

And the reason I like doing it is I like visual cues. So typically, when you send a note, you say, hey, great job. You put a smiley face there, or you put something in teams, where we talk about using stickers or a GIF. Basically, the whole idea is if I’m kind of putting this together, I want to draw people’s attention to things that are important that they need to see. And so this is kind of a little technique that you can put in there. Just again, use your windows’ semi colon. I think there’s a couple backslash keys you can play around with. There’s different versions of those. But, again, that’s a Windows’ 10 feature, I’ll able to allow you to extend beyond even what you have directly.

Now again, from a building, planning, working perspective, let’s talk a little bit more about our ability, whether I’m in a board view, where I could create buckets. Whether I’m in a grid view, three different views here. And then the idea is I can come in and just say, hey, listen, so let’s continue to assign people. So as I work or manage these directly, inherently, you still want to follow best practices. So, while putting Leslie on a milestone isn’t probably the best idea. The idea if I want to look at, what about effort? They put my effort column on here. We really want to try and avoid, but not necessarily putting you know people on summary tasks or milestones.

You can also look at your same linking techniques, things that you’ve learned in Microsoft Project. But here, as long as we’re not typing in effort or changing this as a duration, it’s going to be fine because its duration is zero. But again, the ideas that try to adhere to some of those. I think it will help you as your schedules get bigger, and bigger and bigger. I have not found a limit yet. But I’m sure as I get down, though, I’ll probably try, and push this out to about 40,000 rows and see what I could do to break the system. But the Microsoft engineering team has assured me that this thing is fairly robust. And when we’re beating it up over last year, and we had a lot of fun trying to make that work.

Again, light, simple, easy. The idea is that I’ve got a timeline, I’ve got a con bond or sprint planning board, or a task board, if you will. And then I can certainly move into a relationship dependency where, sure, I can come in and change the durations. They can move these around. It’s just going to allow the end user to quickly get in, get out and get back to work. And of course, having some of that reporting on there.

Let me bring up a couple things here. First off, we talked about how do you get this? This question is coming up quite frequently since it’s so brand new, so let me give you a couple of caveats before we get in there. First off, pricing will vary. I am not Microsoft, MPUG is not Microsoft. Yes, you can call Kyle at home at 3:00 A.M, and ask him what the price is. The answer will still be, I have no idea. You may need a check. But based upon who you are, whether you actually have a VAR licensing, or you’ve got discounts, or you’re a nonprofit, or you’re a state or local government, the idea is that the pricing will be different. But in general, the retail pricing will be posted. I’ll show you that in just a moment.

One thing that I do want to say about nonprofit is that, that nonprofits Microsoft has come out with their tech for social impact. And they’re giving 10 free Office 365 licenses to all nonprofits. If you’ve registered as a nonprofit, you can actually get 10 licenses, which is great for small nonprofits that are out there. However, it doesn’t include this new modern project. So people were asking about, hey, I want to do that. That’s different. So, you’ll have to check in terms of the on that.

Now, the pricing from the website, if you just go out and do a search, looking at the skew, they call it Project Plan One. And people go, well, what about Project Desktop, or Project Pro for Office 365, or Project Premium? You’ll notice there it says Project Plan One is, this is now modern project. By the way, you already have it if you’re using Project Online. So, this is actually available in that environment. So if you’re having Project Pro for Office 365, or a year in Project Premium, you’ve got and this is available. The same thing is applied to add by dynamics.

However, if you’re brand new and you’re going to jump out there and get this and turn on this, you’re not going to get that free license. So the idea is that if you’re working in project and you want to go out and start something brand new, it’s about $10 a month in terms of the pricing. Project Plan One, Project Plan Three, Project Plan Three is actually the Project Pro for Office 365 version, and project plan five is your premium edition. Basically, it allows you to be patient folio management. You notice it does talk about key member or the essentials license. And essentially, there is no impact change, that’s still the same thing. So that’s really there for team members, or if you’re using Project Online. That ranges anywhere from, I think, when I’ve seen prices from three to three dollars a month, depending on what it is.

But remember, licensing is subject to change, so you may want to check each and every time. Or if you can’t find it, let me know. Just reach out to me or anyone on my team, and we can happily equate you what’s changed or been modified since there.

With that in mind is that, again, much more cost effective, easier to use. The intent is to grow. So one of the very common questions that comes up is, well, what about Project Desktop today, is that going away? There’s a lot of fear that’s out there that says, Project Online and Project Pro for Office 365, is that going away? The short answer is not anytime soon. I’m not allowed to speak timelines. But I can guarantee you years and years are going to go by before this version of project, this basically Project for the web is has achieved the level of what we find with Project Pro or Project Desktop. But the intent is to begin moving this direction, to provide easy to use interface web-based driven the same thing that we’re finding where we have, maybe 33 million users a project who suddenly find that there’s 159 million users.

A planner out there is that people get it, they want to do work management, task management, but we want to be able to have that connected system. And so in that grow up story, this is certainly not Microsoft to do. We have little task lists. It’s not planner, but you do get the same con bond board, or the task planning board. You can move it around. But wherever, planner doesn’t give you much details. It just says, is it started? Is it in progress? It doesn’t ask about hours, it doesn’t necessarily even look at, if something slips, what’s the impact? Then as you move up to Project for the web or basically Modern Project, sometimes what we’re calling is P for W, Project for the web, you might grow into Project Online, which still has that deep, dark, heavy lifting, super powerful. But yet a very cost effective to use where you build your schedules and publish these.

So I like to find that if you want to start working in both environments where you have all three of them going, use your Power BI reports, find your dashboards, bring the data into one view. And the idea is that bridging your JIRA data, bridging your other external third party tools, your ERP accounting system are pulling it in here, still exists. And because we’re on that CDS 2.0 platform, this is super helpful.

Okay, Kyle, I think we’re ready to basically open up the phone lines, if you will, the chat window for questions. So, let me just pause here. I want to make sure I can really give people a chance to sink your teeth into this and ask any questions. So any questions, Kyle?

Kyle: Great. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, we do have some questions coming in. And just a reminder, if anyone has questions, you can chat those over in the chat box there, and we’ll answer those for you.

Some of these, we touched… You touched on Tim during the presentation, but I’m going to ask anyway, just for clarification. But a first one here came from Dave, and I think you covered the pricing and Project Desktop. He was also curious if you’re aware of any new certifications that Microsoft may be coming up with to replace the old, the 74-343 exam?

Tim Runcie: Yes, great question. So this is always one of those pain points, which is how, if you’re going and launching all these new technologies, and then the certifications are really tied to old things. Project Online, not necessarily Modern Project is going to have a new certification. I don’t have a lot of details around that. But I think I probably will be making an announcement because as we work as part of the Partner Advisory Council, these kind of things happen. They come up, which is people want to get certified. I know as a gold partner, we actually have all of our staff go through. We actually help them get certified, and we make sure that they’re working through there. So when these new exams are coming out, we definitely want to be key on top of it.

What you are going to find, though is that some of the old, you have to learn how to install and deploy SharePoint, and configure the on premise stuff is evaporating. And Power BI is being added to the picture. So I encourage people to get some training or begin to look at Power BI and how that works, and how to leverage it certainly with Project Online data. But yes, there will be a new exam for project. I’m not aware of the objective domain. If it’s going to uncover the modern project, which honestly, this is really simple. But we do know there is going to be a new version put available. That should be coming out sometime in 2020. But don’t quote me on that, I know that’s just kind of the conversations that we’ve been having since last summer. A great, great question.

Kyle: Great. Thanks, Tim. Let’s see here. We have one from David asking [inaudible 00:42:48] the new version of project available in the government G4 Cloud.

Tim Runcie: That’s another good question. In fact, I’m going to be on a call here with another state agency. The answer is yes, it is available. There’s things… What’s interesting, there’s things like we’re normally in groups, we actually have one note. For some of those things, some of the elements, as silly as one note is not in teams, there’s just some things that are not necessarily turned on. But when I say that is the only thing that I’m aware of that’s not available. So if you start wanting to spit up your basically a one note view, when you go into the group details, that’s the only thing that’s not available. But yes, this is fully available for government cloud.

Kyle: Excellent. All right. The next question here. Barry is curious about how licensing works for non-project managers, or team members who are external to the organization. Do they need their own license?

Tim Runcie: They would. Anybody coming in, and here’s a good example. A lot of times, we’ll pop out into teams. So what I’ll do is, I’ll form a team, I’ll invite people. There’s really no cost if you’re already in, basically Office 365 for Teams. But then somebody says, well, listen, we’re going to do… We’re not going to do Project Online, we’re not going to do SharePoint. We’re just going to use the team environment. I’ll use my planner board. Or now they’re thinking about using modern project, here I am embedded in teams. So even if you invite somebody externally, you would need to grant them that “the $10 license for that”. So they will need a license to access this.

But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t come in here, and click on the modern project tab. But if they don’t have a license, they just won’t be able to see it. So inherently, the idea is that, yep, they can come in, they can post, they can put comments, they can work on videos, they can do all the things that you have within your files. But if you don’t have a license for them, they won’t be able to do or see this [inaudible 00:44:35]. So, they’ll need the Project for the web license.

Kyle: Okay. Good to know. Eric was asking, oh, he mentioned that his organization has been using project for years. But the Dev team also uses JIRA for managing their support work. And he was curious, is there any opportunity to integrate JIRA and projects, so that they can pull that information into their plans?

Tim Runcie: Oh, this is a fun conversation. All right, let me see. Let me unpack this a little at a time. Good Lord, this is back in 2009 to 2014. So I remember the old product conference, we actually built a connector between TFS, Team Foundation Server and Project. And then that became a, what about JIRA? Can we bring in these Azure environments and other elements that we’re working on? So, let me kind of fast track the conversation.

First off, the intent is to be starting here. Let me pop over to roadmap. So when you actually want to build adding a row, let me just kind of show you what will happen here. Is that when you go to connect to a project, this is this project, this is Azure boards. That again, this is Azure DevOps, you could do that today. You’re going to see other elements, including JIRA appear here directly. In terms of roadmap today, that doesn’t exist. but that is something that’s been spoken about for a long time.

Now, let me talk about bringing in data externally again. So that whole Team Foundation Server is now kind of deprecated. It doesn’t connect necessarily to the project anymore, and now Azure DevOps does. But Power BI is wonderful. I bring task information, JIRA data SharePoint list. I’ll pull all that stuff in directly, and I use it as kind of a consolidated report. But Eric’s question, I think it was… Was it Eric, Kyle?

Kyle: Yes. Yeah.

Tim Runcie: Yes. So what Eric said, hey, listen, we’re actually looking at bringing data into Microsoft Project. So whether I’m talking about a project here, you’re going to have to automate that, or have to build a basic authentication. And so remember, JIRA typically is not tracking things time phase. They might have a start date, they might have a due date, they might have velocity in terms of things of [inaudible 00:46:39] could burn down, reports or velocity, but they’re looking at sprints. And if you want to, you can actually put effort, and you can peanut butter that across. But it’s not something that you necessarily have a native connection for.

Now you can copy and paste, literally list into project. You can copy and paste a list into modern project, so there’s some easy flexibility. The other part is that, as we start looking at using power automator flow, we can grab information, and we can move these things in here. However, we are restricted today. And this is a little bit of a restriction, at least from the infancy of project is that, like over to my grid view here. I can create custom views, I can build custom forms. In fact, I’ve got a custom view that I built in teams that actually allows me to surface, and put other related information in there.

However, right now the problem is, I can’t add those columns in here. I could build them, I could store them, I can track it with the task. But the engine right now doesn’t let us drop those columns in, because Microsoft is still waiting for this to settle down. But where Power BI comes in is that, as long as people are filling out the information externally, internally, we can kind of bridge that gap. So this is a little bit of, I would say it’s in its infancy in terms of project. If you’re looking at Project Online, yep, there’s things you can quickly do to move to Jura. There’s even third party connectors out there that will bridge between these. You can go buy them. I try and do things where I’m not buying a third party connector. Let’s just say, look, if you’re going to build a little automation, standardize what data needs to move in and where it goes. And then almost in terms of like copy and paste or add sub tasks to an activity, you can do that.

So there are some flexibilities, not out of the box today. But trust me, it is hotly discussed about external Microsoft products that, potentially compete in the edge Azure DevOps or the DevOps space. So being that agile environment, that’s a big conversation. So Eric, great question. I look very much forward to being able to share more. There’s things I can talk about, there’s things I can’t talk about. But that’s about as close as I can get to it.

Kyle: Great. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Runcie: You’re good.

Kyle: Terry sent two questions over here. First one, can you export your project schedule from Microsoft Project Desktop to publish it in Project for web?

Tim Runcie: No, those are two different animals. Remember, Project Desktop and Project for the web are in completely different systems. It doesn’t mean I can’t behind the scenes, because I’m on the CDS 2.0 move or share information. But I’m not able to go, hey, let me just take my Microsoft Project Schedule and just connected here. The other is, and this by the way, this is one of those things that we had a conversation with Heather at the Microsoft engineering team. We’re like, oh, come on, just let us open up project in desktop. We’ll kind of open up modern product in desktop.

Nope, they’re apples and oranges. And so what Microsoft did, literally is they started from the ground floor up. They didn’t bring any legacy code, nothing. They just sort of imagine we’re going to start with a new tool, and everything is on the table. There’s nothing that we can’t decide that we want to do, but we aren’t going to have to start with the same architecture over there. So the way to move things back and forth, yeah, there’s some things I’d say you could do in terms of automating that. But I also would just say, hey, look, if you want and you want to copy and paste data, yeah, you can actually come in here and say, let’s copy the task. And that’s really the physical way to do it.

But nope, we can’t fire this thing up in the desktop because, boy, that’s where I spend a lot of my times. I tap into the desktop, make the spin on a dime and then push it back over. So, not directly. But indirectly the answer is yes, you can copy but it’s again, it’s a manual process. It’s not automatically synced, unless you build some refresh or automation. Sorry. I know. I know. I’m there with you. I’m there with you, Tom. Terry, I’m sorry.

Kyle: Thanks, Tim. It looks like we have a couple of questions coming in about where you can see what, with which tools here. This one was, can resources assigned in Project for the web be accessed within Teams?

Tim Runcie: Can resources assigned through Project for the web access Teams? Yes, that’s the main thing.

Kyle: [crosstalk 00:50:48].

Tim Runcie: Yes, the same engine behind the scenes. So literally, a lot of times what I do is, actually would have a team spun up for this. You can even have, it has the same security group. So it literally is like think about Microsoft on the underside, that is the security model that they use but using the same platform.

Kyle: Okay. Dylan came from Patrick asking, while using PWA or Project Online, can you see assignments on a resource on a Project for the web project?

Tim Runcie: So if I… Let’s just go to product online real quickly here. So here’s good old Project Online where we can open Project Desktop, we can build a team from the enterprise resource pool and sign them. The assignments here, these are basically, yes, you can send alerts or notifications, and people can actually come in and time sheet against these activities. So if I assign the same person, so let’s say that I use [inaudible 00:51:42] Ken. So if I put Ken here on a task, and then I come over in product for the web, and I put Ken on an assignment here. They’re not coming from the same resource pool. However, what I can do is I can use Microsoft to do… Let me actually fire up to do here, which actually has a direct feed from planner and say, look, if you want to know what all your stuff is, we can rain this down right into your Microsoft To Do.

Remember, if you’re using Outlook, this task list is the same engine that’s in Outlook. So if I want to use my running the store list and here it is, which if I bring up… Let’s just bring up outlook here. I try not to have my email open while I’m working. So, let me let me bring this over here and make sure it’s good. What are we talking about? Oh, Christmas cookies, that’s what people are talking about today. When I come over here, you can see that if I add a task, I go to my task view, I can see the same list, what are my assignments? Here’s my running to the store list, here’s my to do list. So Microsoft To Do, really has the ability for us to grab and pull that information in. And so if you want to, instead of necessarily saying, hey, I want to rain that down from one tool to the other, what I would do is rain it down into to do.

Or again, hint hint, wink wink, and I’m going to say this hint hint wink wink very strongly. Is when you want to look at resource assignments, use Power BI. You say it can read your assignments from modern project, and from legacy projects. I’m talking about modern and legacy or classic, basically a Project Online and Modern Project. Now you may want to look at, in terms of the resource name is using just basically the email address. It’s a very simple primary key that you can, say, uh, that same email address over there, same email address here. But the idea is you’ve got two different environments. But Power BI is a great bridging tool. And we do that quite frequently as like, hey, look, I need to look over here and see what’s coming in from the different sources. I hope that makes sense.

Kyle: Yeah. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Runcie: Great question, Patrick.

Kyle: Great. We have a few questions coming in about, I guess what you can see. For example, a resource over allocations, is there support for earned value, scheduling items like fixed duration, things like that? And would you use those other tools, or is that going to be in Project for the web?

Tim Runcie: Yeah, that’s a great questions. So me I’m a, I kind of start out typically with… I actually depends on depending on what type of work I’m doing. I might be doing fixed duration, effort or non-effort driven, and then I convert to fixed work. Or sometimes I’ll go and start with fixed work, play around with it, and then lock the duration down. But the overall idea is no. No, this is… Whoops, wrong one here. This is fixed units, effort driven. Period, end of story. There is no way to modify that today.

So remember, though, in the future, Microsoft’s intending to continue to move and grow the functionality here. So in terms of what the way that we work in our classic environment with Project Desktop and Product Online is, we can set fixed work, fixed duration, fixed units. We have the determining the driving resource. None of that works necessarily the same way here. This is really designed to be quick and efficient. And that people begin to grow from, hey, I got the simple list. Or I got these cards and planner to something that actually does have a little bit of a timeline, but still gives them grit in the board you’re to work with.

So they’re clearly today are limitations, and that is intentional. As they begin to connect engineer this from the ground floor, and they’ll decide what comes over. So like, hey, I want more columns. Well, guess what I was asking for three days ago? I want more columns. Sorry, you get 11, well, 14 columns, I believe the total count. But that’s all you get today. And what they’re doing is evaluating each piece, which is, what is the most important thing that we want to add next? So to talk about this real quickly, is if you have not gone out to user voice, I usually tell people that if you want to… I could just bring up a browser real quickly here. I think I haven’t bookmarked, but project user voice.

Absolutely, get out there, and go to the web, go here, use your user voice. This is really helpful for planner, Power BI, et cetera. So what’s kind of fun is, I get to go and poke the engineering teams and the marketing teams directly. But you actually have a voice, so that you can come out and say, you know what? I want this feature in this environment. And what they’re doing is literally, they’re looking at the total count of votes, what are the things that you want? And that is one of the ways that they’re prioritizing the workload.

So I really strongly encourage you to come out to use your user voice through the Microsoft portal, and allows you to have that collective collaboration. Every comment, every post that’s made is read. It’s read by the engineering team, and sometimes they’ll even reach out to you with a question. Microsoft never will reach out to you if you’re asking for credit card, or personal information, never. And so if that’s happening, that’s not right. That’s not them.

But they will and maybe ask, or say, hey, listen, you may not know this, but click this view, or click this tab, will actually give you some of the answers. So, I encourage you to use your user voice. I know Kyle, a little bit of a longer answer there. But intentionally, this is just going to continue to crawl, walk and then run. And they’re starting with just the base, the most optimized and the most used features, as well as some of the hotly requested items that maybe don’t exist in the legacy tool.

Kyle: Awesome. Thanks, Tim. I know we’re getting close to the end here. Maybe one more quick one before we wrap things up. David had a question. He said he’s using Project for Office 365. And when he clicks on the projects in the Office 365 waffle menu, he sees you don’t have access error message. And he was curious if his tenant admin meet… Does this tenet admin need to check a box to make modern product available to hi, or?

Tim Runcie: Yeah, I think what needs to happen is they need…. If he’s using currently using Legacy Projects or Projects. So here he is, here’s the waffle, and he’s coming clicking on project. If it doesn’t… Let me just do it here. I’ll do it right now. So if you click here, it’s going to… Let’s… It’s telling me I’m leaving my site, which is helpful for me because I work across Dev, and test and production environments. If it doesn’t take you here, even for your existing projects, this is where you should land.

Now, you can go right to Project Online, but right here is where you should land. You get this out of the box with project. And the idea is that sitting right here is new blank project, you should be able to click this. If not, it is not, there may be some of this not turn on an Office 365 correctly. You need to take a look at that with your admin. What I would suggest is, guys, if you run into some of this weird stuff, let me know, reach out. I’ll put my contact information, even my tech team will help kind of walk you through that if you’re missing it.

Remember, the crazy thing about Office 365, is they move stuff around all the time. So if something’s broken, definitely we want to hear about it. And we might even put a quick blog post out there, so people will have some things move. So, check that. So that’s a quick answer for not finding it. You should land on your homepage, you should be able to click this. And if you have Project Pro for Office 365 versus say a team member license, which isn’t the same. We have premium, you should be able to use this today.

Kyle: Great. Thanks, Tim. Thanks very well everyone that sent questions. We really appreciate that. And Tim, thanks for taking on all those questions and giving us answers. I’ll hand it back to you to close out, if there’s anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up today.

Tim Runcie: Oh, you bet. Let me summarize a couple of things, and just wrap it up today. But again, awesome. This is exciting to see kind of the in its infancy, this modern project, but it’s designed to fill a gap. And so again, whether I’m driving that from the Report View, from a Summary, from a Roadmap, or Power BI, you’ve got some great options. Again, this is just the beginning, be kind, be gentle. It is literally three and a half weeks old, so just be and just be aware of that. Use your user voice to tell Microsoft things that you want. We also love to hear them in general. But again, it’s designed for low impact and ease of use.

So intentionally, from the ground up brand new product eventually, someday will surpass what Microsoft Project Client and Desktop have. But that’s not for years, and years down the road. So, don’t sweat anything anytime soon. Again, it works in conjunction with Legacy Project and Project Online, and that’s where you kind of look at doing direct reports. Or using Roadmap to bridge the two. Again, you can integrate your systems tools from reporting. Again, it’s done embedded in Dynamics. Or and if you’re using CRM, or using Field Service Automation, or a Field Service, or Planning Service Automation, Microsoft Project is the scheduling engine for that. And that’s exactly what you’re going to see as your Modern Project or Project for the web.

Still, again, we’re going to find out things. So if you do have other questions about this, let me put my contact information up here. I’ve got some YouTube videos on our Advisicon channel that I actually spent a little bit more time going to a couple of different nuances about customization and coding, things like that. But I recommend you check those. And then Kyle and I were chatting today, maybe we’ll do one in a couple of months. We’ll actually come back, and show you some more advanced capabilities around modern project. But certainly, reach out anytime on Facebook, LinkedIn. I’m hardly ever on Facebook. But if you want to send a note, that’s fine. Or email me at Tim.Runcie@Advisicon.com. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to see if we can keep you guys moving. And if you want to try out the new version of project, I’m very happy to make sure you can take advantage of that. All right, Kyle, back to you.

Kyle: Thanks, Tim. I really appreciate your time today, and sharing your knowledge with the MPUG community. Let me pull the PDU code back up for those of you claiming today’s session. It’s eligible for one technical PDU in MPUG. If you missed any in today’s session and would like to go back and review anything that Tim shared with us, a recording will be posted on mpug.com shortly after we wrap up today. And you’ll receive an email in just a couple of hours with the link to that.

Now, MPUG members have access to our full PDU eligible library of on-demand webinar recordings on mpug.com. And Tim is quite active on the MPUG website as well. So once we do post the recording, if you have any more questions or think of something between now and then, feel free to comment on that and we’ll be able to answer that question for you.

I just chatted over a link to our next upcoming session on January 23rd, Winning Presentation Skills with Carl Pritchard. So that’ll be a great session on how to develop an excellent presentation and deliver that. That’s January 23rd, from 12:00 to 1:00 Eastern time. And that’s open now for registration, so we’ll see you there. And that does it for today’s session. So I’d like to thank everyone that joined us live, or was watching this session on demand. Thank you, Tim, for presenting today, and we hope to see you back for our next live session. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Runcie: All right. Thanks, everyone.

 

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Tim Runcie, PMP, MCP, MCTS, P-TSP, MVP is one of 6 Microsoft Project MVP’s in North America and has held that title for 17 years in a row.  A seasoned veteran of complex programs, and portfolio management systems, Tim works with companies like Microsoft on next generations of Project, Program, and portfolio technologies.  Tim is an accomplished speaker, consultant, and educator, supporting the project management community for over 25 years. As the President and founder of Advisicon, Tim has written over 38 books on PM methodologies and technologies. Advisicon has recently added a non-profit division focused on helping faith-based and 501-C3 organizations with implementing and training on available business solutions and providing business coaching or process automation with the mission of “Serving those who Serve.”

Free resources are available at www.YouTube.com/Advisicon or on Tim’s LMS, www.Advisicon.thinkific.com

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