Timeline in Project Web Access 2013 : new nice feature!!

The timeline in MS Project Pro 2010 has been a really great new feature which was strongly appreciated by project managers when they need to quickly extract a graphical overview of their project plans for executive committees presentations.

But what about a portfolio timeline view including multiple projects? That was not possible with Project Server 2010. Hopefully Project Server 2013 brought a bunch of nice new features such as the timeline in PWA, meaning in the proejct center and in the project schedule page.

So in this post, not much writing but just a quick description of this new feature quite easy to use and with a extremely nice render!

Below is the project center (still in french, I promise I'll get an english PWA as soon as possible...), where you can select a project in the grid and click on "add a project" in the "project" tab on the ribbon, under the "timeline" section. Be aware that if you click on the project name hyperlink, you'll go directly to the project details, so just click on another cell next to the project name.

Figure 1 : Project center timeline with the "add to timeline" button

When you click on the timeline itself, a new contextual "timeline" tab appears in the ribbon. It allows you formatting the bars with custom fonts or colors. You can also choose to hide or display some items like dates or lock the timeline width. Finally selecting a specific bar in the timeline, you can remove it or display it as a legend.

Figure 2 : "Timeline" tab with formatting options in the project center ribbon

Going to the project detail in the schedule page, you'll be able (assuming you're in edit mode) to select a task and add it from the "add to timeline" button.

Figure 3 : Project detail timeline with the "add to timeline" button

Note that selecting high level phases of your project will give you a really nice result. Similarly to the project center, you can click on the timeline to display the "timeline" tab of the ribbon in order to do some "sexy" formatting.

Figure 4 : Timeline" tab with formatting options in the project detail ribbon

Note : (read carefully the edit at the end of the post, the first part of the sentence below is erroneous but I keep it as is to keep track of the post history)

As an important comment I'd mention that whereas the project center timeline is user specific (stored in the personal settings), the project details timeline is project specific, meaning that modifying it requires checking out the project in PWA or MS Project Pro. The project details timeline can then be seen from 3 different places :

1. PWA, editable when checking out the schedule (figure 3 and 4),
2. MS Projec Pro, editable when checking out the project (figure 5),
3. The project site welcome page, consultable only (figure 6).

Figure 5: project  details timeline in MS Project Pro

Figure 6: project  details timeline in in the project SharePoint site

Hope you enjoy this nice new feature that brings to the PWA 2013 a brand new view at portfolio and project level. Try it and you'll love it!

EDIT June 10th 2015: Damien brings a useful contribution in his comment below by mentionning that the Project Center timeline is NOT user specific since it is stored in a Sharepoint list.