The power and versatility of the new Project for the web includes the ease of integrating it with the other tools and systems your organization uses. All your project and portfolio data is now stored alongside your other critical enterprise data in the Common Data Service for Apps (CDS). By leveraging the Power Platform, you can create rich user experiences for the business processes that depend upon Project.
Easy to develop and deploy
The Power Platform consists of four major pieces that make it easy to work with your data. Power Apps enable you to create user experiences for the business logic about your Projects. Flow helps with automating actions across apps and services. With Power BI, you can visualize your Project data and share insights across your organization. Our most recent addition, AI Builder, can enhance your apps and business processes with AI. Packaging and deploying is simple using the Solution tools available with the platform. Once your app is deployed, a shared security model helps keep the data in your organization safe.
Security and compliance
Security and compliance for your apps and data comes via the Office 365 Groups security service. Groups security also is what enables Project to integrate natively with other Microsoft offerings such as SharePoint for document storage and Teams for collaboration.
Project alongside other business data
If your organization uses Dynamics or Power BI, your enterprise data can already easily be connected to Project. The Common Data Model that CDS unlocks provides a shared language for connecting data and applications across your organization. One of the first things you’ll notice when developing apps to connect Project to your other business data in CDS is that building relationships between sources is as simple as drag-and-drop.
Where we are today
For this first release, we’ve prioritized delivering a great experience for the project manager who wants to create a schedule of work and manage it in the same place. We think the first-party project app is a great place for this person to work. For the portfolio manager, custom applications can help them with their responsibilities. Scenarios such organizing a project pipeline are easy for you to build experiences around. You can also build applications to monitor the progress of a project.
Where we’ll be tomorrow
Over time, we’ll complete the work needed for you to integrate Project into the way your organization manages projects and tasks. Your feedback about the current extensibility surface is critical for us to prioritize unlocking the scenarios most valuable to you. If there’s something you need that is missing, head to the Project User Voice forum and let us know what kinds of changes would help you and your team.
Getting help
In addition to the other links throughout this post, there are other places where you can get help. The Project @ Office 365 documentation hub will continue to be the best place to get the latest about building applications that use Project. You can also visit the Project on Dynamics GitHub site where you can find sample apps. You can also learn from other developers by visiting the Power Apps Community. If you’re building applications that have deep integration with the entities in the Project Solution, sign in to PowerApps and navigate to Solutions. In there you’ll see the Project Core solution. Exploring that solution will help you understand the entity model and details about the schema.