Project versioning and back-up on Project Online: vote on UserVoice!

Since Project Online was launched back in 2013, there is no more back-up and restore feature available.

UserVoice proposed to introduce again this feature strongly used by Project administrators. You can vote here. I had the opportunity to write a review on this idea on Erik's blog. You can find the review here.

I recently added a new idea on the UserVoice page for versioning projects. This is kind of related but the versioning should be accessible to the users (like the sharepoint versioning), not like the initial back-up/restore feature. Moreover the scope should be extended to the new Project Service platform and not only Project Online.

What do you think? Would you vote for this idea?

LAUNCHED - OData Improvements to Include Timestamps for Project Entities

Last year, I was excited about a roadmap feature that had been updated on the Office 365 Roadmap. I talked about it here.

Well, here is an even more exciting update as it has been released the 4th of January. I haven't seen any official blogs yet so I had a bit of an investigation to understand what changed.

Overall, Microsoft has kindly provided the modified information to the following tables;

DataSet	Added Field	Comment
Assignment Baseline Timephased	AssignmentBaselineModifiedDate	Date of the modified baseline (date it has been published)
Assignment Timephased	AssignmentModifiedDate	Date the Assignment has been last modified
Engagement Timephased	EngagementModifiedDate	Date the Engagement has been last modified
Engagements	EngagementModifiedDate	Date the Engagement has been last modified
Project Baselines	ProjectBaselineModifiedDate	Publish date of the last modified baselines
Resource Demand Timephased	ResourceDemandModifiedDate	Date of the Resource Demande last modified
Resource Timephased	ResourceModifiedDate	Date of the Resource last modified
Task Baselines	TaskBaselineModifiedDate	Date of the modified baseline (date it has been published)
Task Baselines Timephased	TaskBaselineModifiedDate	Date of the modified baseline (date it has been published)
Task Timephased	TaskModifiedDate	Date of the task last modified
TimesheetLine Actual	TimesheetLineModifiedDate	Date of the timesheet line last modified

That is really great addition. For example, as Guillaume was stating in his comment from the previous blog, we can now track changes in the baselines and validate when a baseline has been defined.
Therefore, we can easily add a bit of smart in the queries to download only if a data has been modified.

Here is a quick example of a Power Bi report using the Baseline Modification Data to highlight tasks baselined after the project has been baselined.

One thing I am not so happy about is that I was expecting to have a trending capability with some historical data stored somewhere. I guess I was too demanding. The new fields are providing with a last modified date at a lower level than the Project level but are not recording the historical values of the fields before they changed. Something that Microsoft is hopefully considering soon. you can vote here: https://microsoftproject.uservoice.com/forums/218133-microsoft-project/suggestions/15300603-implement-versioning-in-project-online.

Tell me what you think about that added information and what usage you may do of it!