Beginning of April, Microsoft announced in this article of few improvements, mostly related to Project Online performance, such as the new check-boxes in the Project Center I described in my last post. Another major improvement concerns the limit of projects created in a Project Online instance increased from 5,000 to 30,000. With this improvement comes another one concerning the project sites. The limit used to be 2,000 project sites. If you needed more than 2,000 sites, you had to create and work with several PWA instances. Now there is a one-to-one relationship, meaning that you can have 5,000 projects with 5,000 sites.
In order to optimize PWA instances performance with those news projects and sites limits, the EPT (Enterprise Project Type) configuration has also been updated.
Previously the synchronization settings were at instance level, they are now at EPT level. Moreover, you can set a site creation location for each EPT.
How you should use this new configuration? Here is how I see it.
- You might have an EPT with a large number of small projects running on a short period. In this case, you'll not create any project site and consequently you'll not check the sync permission options.
- In parallel you might have another EPT with an small number of standard projects. In this case, you'll automatically create a project site, you'll check the sync options and locate the site creation in the normal PWA address.
- Finally, you might have an EPT with specific long term projects dedicated to specific stakeholder with a large set of documentation. You'll also automatically create a site with sync options checked, but you'll locate the site creation in another site collection.
Consequently, since those options have been rolled down at EPT level, you won't see them anymore where they used to be. If you go to the Connected SharePoint Sites section in the server settings, you'll see that there is no more "Settings" button.
Also under "Manage User Sync Settings", you won't find anymore the site sync.
Check-out the Microsoft blog to see the other improvements, such as the modified dates added to some Odata entities.
What is happening if you already have some project sites created in the "old" way? (a jérome's edit)?
Well, the story is a bit more complicate then. By default, you have to know that the options are not as set as you would expect.
1. While the Project Site creation will be set to the choice which was made in the "old" menu
2. The synchronization options are both disabled. The impact is that all the team members are losing (or not gaining) the access to the project sites while the project is published. Tasks as well stops to be synchronized which means that no more seen in the home page nor in the tasks menu of the Project Site
It is also worth noticing that the Project site is now created at next publish and not at project creation as it was previously enabling a rapid project creation
So, to wrap-up, if your environment is already having project sites created, I would advise the to take the following steps:
1. Validate that the setting for each Enterprise Project Type is the expected one
2. Open the schedule and publish it (either from Project Online or from Project Professional) - that will trigger a tasks synchronization
3. Change your project team temporarily in adding or removing a resource (who can connect) and publish to trigger the Project Site Permission Synchronization. Then revert the change.
You should now be good to go. let me know if you find any weird behaviours, Guillaume and I would be happy to further complement that post.
