If you use OnePager with Microsoft Project Online, take note: Project Online’s days are numbered. Although Microsoft has not committed to a firm date, it intends at some point to sunset Project Online in favor of Project for the web, a fully cloud-resident PPM offering that is built on the Microsoft Dataverse rather than on SharePoint.

OnePager will introduce an integration with Project for the web in its 7.2 release in 2023. Theoretically, when Microsoft flips the switch, OnePager users who previously brought in their data from Project Online will be able to instead bring in their data from Project for the web.

I say “theoretically” because Project for the web is far from a finished product, as I wrote in a recent MPUG article. That article detailed numerous deficiencies of Project for the web — the most important of which, for OnePager users, is the lack of third-party application support for custom fields.

Project Online has over 400 predefined fields; at last count, Project for the web has 16. That means a project of any complexity will require heavy use of custom fields to get the same information across. The good news is, Project for the web has a custom field capability that will look familiar to Project Online users. For instance, you can define a Yes/No field named “Flag20” and put “Yes” and “No” values in the column.

The bad news is, custom fields from Project for the web cannot be read by third-party applications like OnePager, and we need your help asking Microsoft to make these fields available.

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