Ira Brown has spent the past year moving organizations off Project Online, and by late August his team had completed most of them. When he joined MPUG to debrief, the first thing he pushed back on was how people frame the work.

The instinct is to think of migration as moving projects from one place to another. Brown, president of Project Widgets, calls that a simplistic view of an enterprise system. Project Online holds enterprise resources, templates, calendars, custom fields, lookup tables, and enterprise project types. Every one of those has to be identified, documented, and rebuilt in whatever comes next.

Most of his clients chose Project Server Subscription Edition. Brown describes it as the least disruptive option from an end user’s perspective, since once the migration is finished the interface is identical to what people already know and the only visible change is a different URL. Some clients moved to Smartsheet. Very few went to Planner, which Brown notes still lacks enterprise custom fields and the enterprise security model that Project Server offers, though he expects that to change as Microsoft continues investing there.

From the migrator’s side, the picture looks different. Three areas consumed the most time.

1. Every report has to be rebuilt

This is the one most likely to catch a PMO off guard. Project Online reporting runs on the OData service, which is what Power BI reports and downstream integrations query. Microsoft has removed the Project OData Service from Project Server Subscription Edition, and directs customers to query the pjrep reporting schema in SQL Server instead. Reaching outside that schema can leave you unsupported. microsoft

Brown says everything built on OData had to be rewritten, including his own product line. Any Power BI report, any system integration, any custom query. If your organization has built up reporting over several years, that is not a task you discover in September.

2. Single sign-on sat on the critical path

Brown expected single sign-on to take work. He did not expect it to become the constraint that governed everything else.

Setting it up requires an Azure application installed on the client side, which means finding the right people inside a large organization and getting them to act. He describes attempts that took two or three tries and timelines measured in weeks and months rather than days.

The reason it mattered so much is sequencing. Enterprise resources cannot migrate until single sign-on works, because those resources need recognizable accounts on the destination system. Projects with resources assigned cannot migrate until the resource pool is in place. A delay at the first step ripples through the entire schedule. Brown’s teams absorbed it because they started early. He was candid that an organization starting now would be in a different position.

3. The configuration layer, not just the data

Custom fields, lookup tables, security groups, categories, calendars, and templates all have to be recreated. Brown’s clients used FluentBooks for that layer and his own export and import widgets to carry enterprise custom field values at both project and task level, along with project ownership and permissions.

Several clients treated this as a chance to clean house. Brown’s team would hand over a full extract of existing resources, projects, custom fields, lookup tables, and calendars, and the client marked what should come and what should stay behind. Organizations that had accumulated hundreds of unused custom fields and long-departed resources arrived somewhere considerably tidier than where they started.

What you gain, and what you should know about timing

One improvement worth naming: Project Online offered no backup schedule. You had one version of a project and that was it. Project Server Subscription Edition lets you schedule daily backups of projects, resources, and custom fields, set how many versions to retain, and perform an administrative restore when a project is corrupted or a change needs reversing.

Standing up the environment is its own project. Creating a Project Online instance took a couple of minutes in a browser. Project Server Subscription Edition requires building Windows servers, installing SharePoint Server Subscription Edition as the foundation, then Project Server Subscription Edition on top, then the instance itself, plus SQL Server. Clients who went the hosted route worked with Project Hosts, which Brown says currently needs roughly two weeks of lead time to build server platforms.

One question came from the room that Brown could not fully answer. An attendee said the hardest part of their search has been finding any replacement capable of traditional Earned Value reporting. Brown noted that Microsoft Project does calculate Earned Value, that some practitioners dislike how it does so, and that third-party tools exist to extend it. He was direct about not being an expert there, and confirmed that Project Server Subscription Edition handles Earned Value the same way Project Online did.

If you have not started

Brown’s advice is to separate two decisions that people tend to bundle together. Extracting your data is urgent. Choosing your destination is not.

Get the project data, resource data, and configuration out of Project Online so it is no longer locked inside a service that is going away. Once you hold it, you can take the time to decide where it belongs and how to work in the meantime. Finishing a full migration by September 30 may no longer be realistic for everyone. Losing the data is a separate and avoidable outcome.

A quick live poll during the session offers some perspective on where people actually are. None of the attendees who responded had finished. Roughly two thirds were still working through it. About half said they had no real control over the decision at their organization, which is its own kind of problem when the deadline does not move.

Watch the replay of this session here:

Real Project Online Migrations: What Worked, What Didn’t – A Conversation with Ira Brown

Ira Brown is president of Project Widgets, which builds migration tooling and is an authorized reseller of FluentBooks and Project Hosts. He disclosed these relationships during the session.