By Eric and Jeff Christoph. Excerpted from transformativems.com for MPUG.

When Microsoft set a firm retirement date for Project Online, most teams that rely on it felt the same thing, and it was not relief. It was the weight of a decision they had hoped to put off. After September 30, 2026, Project Online is gone, and the question of what comes next no longer has the luxury of waiting.

The reflex is to find the closest one-for-one substitute and move on. Eric and Jeff Christoph of Transformative Management Solutions felt that same pull, and then chose a harder path. Rather than scramble toward a replacement they did not love, they set out to learn whether they could build something better suited to the work itself. That decision became ProjectXL, and the story behind it anchors their July 8 MPUG session.

Their starting point was narrow. They needed a legitimate replacement for Microsoft Project and Project Online: a credible critical-path scheduler that was inexpensive and offered at least a basic path toward cost planning. By their account, nothing on the market quite fit that description. Once they had a working scheduling engine, a larger question surfaced. If the scheduling core could be rebuilt, why recreate the same gaps on purpose?

Here the Christophs offer a pointed reading of the tool many of us have used for years. In their view, Microsoft Project was always strongest as a scheduler and never grew into a complete project-controls environment. They describe cost handling that approximated values rather than truly modeling labor, indirect rates, actuals, and a governed Estimate at Complete. They point to control disciplines like funding posture, reserves, and risk that had to live in separate tools, and to a historical view that usually depended on copied files and custom reporting. Those characterizations are theirs, drawn from building an alternative, and they are worth hearing on their own terms.

From that critique, ProjectXL grew beyond a scheduler. The Christophs describe adding a real cost-planning environment, then financial context, then guided user workflows, governed historical snapshots, BI-ready analysis, and a context-aware AI layer built to reason from actual project state rather than to behave like a generic chatbot. The throughline is a single governed environment where schedule, cost, history, and guidance move in the same direction, all aimed at answering one question credibly: what is the best Estimate at Complete available right now?

According to the Christophs, ProjectXL is planned for commercial release in September 2026, with feature finalization in June, alpha testing in July, and a limited public beta in August. They frame that timing deliberately, positioning the product to reach the market as the Project Online deadline arrives.

Their conclusion is the part most worth sitting with. The smartest response to a forced transition, they argue, is to treat the moment as a reason to adopt something more capable than what you had, rather than to hunt for the nearest replica of the old environment.

You can read Eric Christoph’s full account on the Transformative Management Solutions site. Then join Eric and Jeff Christoph live on Wednesday, July 8, as they walk through how one forced transition became the catalyst for a broader project-controls platform.

Register for the July 8 live event: Why Project Online End of Life Might Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us