There has been a lot of great content put out on the Roadmap feature as of late. I’d like to bring your attention to a blog post by Brian Smith on Roadmap available here. The information presented and discussion in the comments section is worth the read.
Project Online comes in three flavors.
They are not chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. They are Project Online Essentials, Project Online Professional, and Project Online Premium.
I have extracted this table from the Project Online Service Description page to give you an idea of the differences between these products.
Roadmap is new feature available which allows users to visualize the status of projects across tan organization on a single screen. As on Feb 2019, Roadmap can pull project status data from projects managed in Project Online and Azure Boards (aka VSTS).
A common question and a logical one that often comes up is this: Is Roadmap available for all Project plans? Let’s decode it.
The following checks should be done in a sequence to determine is Roadmap is available to you. If one of the checks fail, all the checks following that will also fail.
- Your Office 365 tenant should have at least one Project Online Premium or Project Online Professional plan. This means Roadmap is not available to tenants only with the following plans:
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- Project Online Essentials
- Project Online with Project for Office 365 (retired)
- Project for Office 365 (retired)
- Project Online Premium without Project Client (retired)
- Project Online through Dynamics
- Roadmap should be activated by your administrator. This step will add three new service plans to Project Online Premium and Professional like we see here. If you are not able to turn on Roadmap, it may be due to the one or several of the following reasons:
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- Roadmap is not yet available to your organization. If this is the case, you don’t need to take any action. Be patient, it will be made available shortly; however, you can raise a support ticket to expedite the process.
- Roadmap requires Business Applications Platform support in your region. If that is not yet available to you, Roadmap will not be either. For the current list of countries and regions supported by the Business Application Platform, click here.
- Roadmap requires Common Data Service for Apps on your default CDS instance. This is because Roadmap checks for changes to the connected Projects in Azure Boards and PWA every 15 minutes and updates CDS. You may want to watch this Howard Crow video on the topic of upgrading CDS.
This looks fairly straightforward, but you need to be aware of tenants that have both Project Online Professional/Premium and a retired plan like Project Online Premium without Project Client. Let’s say a user has Project Online Premium without Project Client plan only, and Roadmap is activated at the O365 tenant because the tenant has one Project Online Professional/Premium plan. The user will be able to create in Roadmap, but will not be able to connect to a project in PWA.
This and other nuances of Roadmap availability were discussed during my webinar now available to watch on-demand. Please join me live on June 12, 2019 or check out the live recording. This webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDUs in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle.
Guy Weisenbach
If you are an Education customer it doesn’t matter if you have a Professional plan or not. You can’t get Roadmap. This is very frustrating as I feel like a second-class citizen.