If you missed last week’s live session with Ira Brown, president of Project Widgets, here’s what you need to know. Ira has been working in the Microsoft project management ecosystem for nearly 20 years, through Project Server, Project Online, and now the transition beyond it. The conversation covered the decisions organizations are wrestling with right now, and the answers were more concrete than most of what’s been circulating about the September 2026 retirement.

The dates that actually matter

Most people know September 30, 2026 is the hard retirement date. After that, Project Online shuts down completely. No read-only access, no extensions, no safety net. But two earlier dates are worth putting on your radar now.

New Project Online licenses stopped being available as of October 1, 2025. And April 1, 2026 is the last date to create a new Project Online instance. If your organization needs a development or test environment, that window is closing fast.

Ira’s most pointed advice: migration projects for complex environments are already underway. One of his current clients has over 1,500 projects to migrate. If you’re waiting for a quieter moment, that moment isn’t coming — and as the deadline approaches, the consultants and firms who specialize in this work will be stretched thin.

What you’re choosing between

Ira walked through four realistic paths:

Project Server Subscription Edition is the least disruptive option for organizations deeply invested in Microsoft Project. The user experience stays largely the same, which means minimal retraining and change management. It’s the right choice if your team relies on enterprise features and you don’t want to rebuild workflows from scratch.

Planner Premium is Microsoft’s cloud-forward recommendation and is likely already included in your existing licensing. It’s a lighter-weight tool — no multiple baselines, no task-level calendars — but for organizations that don’t need the full scheduling engine, it’s a practical path.

Smartsheet has become a serious option for organizations that want collaboration, dashboards, and flexibility without the complexity of a full enterprise PM tool. It’s not a feature-for-feature replacement for MS Project, but for many teams it doesn’t need to be.

Standalone Microsoft Project desktop isn’t going away. If your team saves files as MPPs locally and doesn’t rely on enterprise features like the resource pool or enterprise custom fields, you may not need to migrate at all — just move your projects to MPP format before the retirement date.

Which path is right for you?

• If your team relies on enterprise features and you don’t want to rebuild workflows from scratch → Project Server Subscription Edition
• If you want a cloud-based solution and don’t need advanced scheduling capabilities → Planner Premium (likely already included in your licensing)
• If you want flexibility, dashboards, and strong collaboration without enterprise complexity → Smartsheet
• If your team works with local MPP files and doesn’t use enterprise features → Standalone Microsoft Project desktop — you may not need to migrate at all

PM Master Class – Smartsheet 101: Conquering the Basics

What migration actually involves

Choosing a platform is only step one. Ira emphasized that a thorough migration also means accounting for enterprise custom fields, lookup tables, security settings, enterprise calendars, templates, and any Power BI reports or dashboards connected to Project Online as a data source. Those reports don’t disappear. They just need to be rewired to point at the new platform. The sooner you inventory what you have, the less scrambling you’ll do later.

One detail that often catches organizations off guard: if you run multiple Project Online environments — production, development, test — each one needs its own migration plan.

Pre-Migration Inventory Checklist

Before you move anything, make sure you’ve accounted for:

• Enterprise custom fields
• Lookup tables
• Security settings and permissions
• Enterprise calendars
• Project templates
• Power BI reports or dashboards connected to Project Online
• Multiple environments (production, development, test — each needs its own migration plan)

Watch the full session

Ira covered additional ground in the live Q&A, including specific audience questions about standalone desktop users, data preservation, and what organizations with hundreds of users should prioritize. The full replay is available now in the PM Master Classes library.

Watch the Replay — MPUG Members Exclusive