Email Alerts and Reminders Arrive for Project Online

The “email alerts and reminders” feature has been available in Project Server 2010 and 2013 on-premise. Now, I’m happy to report, it has also been added to all Project Online tenants.

In Project Online, an alert is an email message that Project Online sends to a user immediately when an event triggers the email. For example, when a project manager publishes a new enterprise project for the first time, Project Online automatically sends an alert email to all project team members, notifying them of new tasks assigned to them in the newly published project.

A reminder is an email message sent once a day by Project Online, reminding the user about tasks or status reports. For example, a team member might set up a reminder email subscription to be notified one day before each status report is due.

By default, the new email alerts and reminders feature is not enabled in Project Online. To enable this feature, the Project Online administrator must complete the following steps:

1. Log into Project Web App with Administrator permissions.
2. In the upper right corner of the PWA page, click the Settings menu button (it looks like a gear wheel) and select the PWA Settings item.
3. In the Operational Policies section of the Server Settings page, click the Additional Server Settings link.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the Additional Server Settings page to locate the new Notification Email Settings section shown in the following figure.

5. In the Notification Email Settings section of the page, select the Turn on notifications checkbox.

6. Click the Save button.

After enabling this feature, users will find two new links in the Personal Settings section of the PWA Settings page, such as shown in the following figure. These links allow users to set up their own subscriptions for notification and reminder emails from Project Online.

By default, all users will be able to see the Manage My Alerts and Reminders link. Clicking this link will cause Project Online to display the Manage My Alerts and Reminders page shown in the following figure. Notice that the options on this page will allow users to set up email alerts and reminders about tasks, status reports, and Queue job failures. By default, the only options selected for each user are for alert email messages about tasks, status reports, and Queue job failures. Users can select their own options individually for alerts and reminders.

By default, all users except members of the Team Members security group will be able to see the Manage My Resources’ Alerts and Reminders link. Clicking this link will cause Project Online to display the Manage My Resources’ Alerts and Reminders page shown in the following figure. Notice that the options on this page will allow users to set up email alerts and reminders about tasks, resource requests (the new Resource Engagements feature recently introduced in Project Online), and status reports. By default, the only options selected for each user are for alert email messages about tasks and status reports. Users can select their own options individually for email alerts for themselves and for email reminders for themselves and their resources.

Image courtesy of Martin Abegglen — CC 2.0

A version of this article originally appeared on the Sensei Project Solutions blog.