[UPDATE] Improved control of Project Types

Previously Microsoft announced support of up to 30.000 projects in Microsoft Project Online. In order to allow for this number of projects, and corresponding project sites, certain changes has been added to the “Enterprise Project Type” configuration area.

What used to be configured for the entire Project Web Application (Site Collection) can now be configured per EPT – Enterprise Project Type. You will find the new improvements under “Server Settings” -> “Enterprise Project Types”:

1. Site Creation Location
   For each project type you can now change where the project sites should be created. This way you can move some of the sites out of the normal PWA structure, and through this exceed the normal limit of allowed sites per site collection
2. Synchronization
   Before doing any changes to the synchronization remember that sync jobs always impacts performance
   1. Sync User Permissions
      This setting grants access to the sites for each user added to the Project Team and/or assigned to project tasks
   2. Synchronization
      This synchronized your project plan tasks to the task list of a project site (Team Site)

Use case:

A large organization uses Microsoft Project Online. The organization has two project types. Large projects and small projects. Roughly 500 large projects are in the portfolio today + 3000 small projects. For the large projects, team site collaboration and permission control is needed. For the remaining small projects, sites are not needed and the project managers do not add resources to their plans and tasks.

EPT 1: Large projects
Site Creation is set to “Automatically create a site on next publish”
Location URL is set to normal PWA Site Collection address
Sync User Permissions = True
Sync SharePoint Tasks Lists = True

EPT 2: Small projects
Site Creation is set to “Do not create site”
Location URL is greyed out
Sync User Permissions = False
Sync SharePoint Tasks List = False

With the above scenario and settings, only large projects are impacted by forced creation of project sites. user permissions are controlled through the project plan and resource allocation to tasks. Up to roughly 2000 projects, and sites, can be added to the Project Online site collection. In case more projects and sites are needed for large projects, consider creating more EPTs and set up more Site Collections for team site management.

Finally, small projects are created without sites and for that reason has (almost) no limit to how many can be created in the same PWA (Project Web Application).

With this update system administrators of large Project Online deployments should take some time and celebrate as this change should dramatically improve both performance and limitations in general.