SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Recently you may or may not have seen that Project Online has a new Project Home page to improve access and navigation to the projects that you need access to. Those of you that navigate directly to your Project Online PWA URL probably won’t have noticed the new feature, those of you that use the Project app from the app Office 365 app launcher / waffle might have seen this if your Office 365 tenant has been updated.

Access Project from the Office 365 App Launcher:

Or from the office.com site (click Explore all your apps):

This feature is currently rolling out, at the time of writing clicking the Project app on my tenants just directed me to the default /sites/PWA site as it always has done since Project Online was launched. Whilst this feature rolls out fully you can still try and access the new Project Home by navigating directly to https://project.microsoft.com if this has reached your tenant yet. If the feature hasn’t rolled out to your tenant yet, you might see a message stating that you don’t have access to this page.

On one of my demo tenants I can access this:

When you first access the Project Home app, you will see the placeholders for the projects if you have no data there, you have a favourites sections and a Recent section. Here is the page after accessing a few projects on my demo system:

I have 4 projects in my recent list as seen above. You can hover over the project row in the Recent list to add a project as a favorite using the star icon or click the ellipsis to see a menu and use the the Add to favorite menu option:

This then pushes the projects to the favorites section:

You can then click the ellipsis on the card to remove a project as a favorite:

Clicking the project card or project name row in the recent list will navigate you to the project detail page (PDP) – the last PDP you accessed just like it does from the Project Center page as this uses the projectdrilldown.aspx page which will load the last PDP you accessed for that project.

The recent project list will contain projects from multiple Project Web App (PWA) instances on the same Office 365 tenant to give you that central Project Home page for all projects you accessed. By default you will see 8 projects on the recent list ordered by the last accessed time, once you reach more than 8 project, you have the Show more control:

This will then display the next 8 projects, keep pressing Show more until all are displayed, you then see a Show less control:

You have the same feature on the favorites section too:

Also on this page you can use the Create New > Project feature:

This will launch the Create a new project wizard page on the default PWA instance on the tenant – the default instance is /sites/PWA:

You also have the ability to navigate to the the default PWA instance (_sites/PWA) homepage using the “Go to Project Web App –>” link:

Or the Project link on the top nav bar:

On the settings cog you have the license information:

This loads a license page that displays the licenses for the 3rd party software packages / libraries used in Project Home.

Great to see a new look and feel for Project making use of the Office Fabric UI React components.