If your organization is using Project Online today, you’re probably aware that key features are being deprecated in April of 2026, the most critical one being support for governance workflows (SharePoint feature).
Microsoft is investing heavily in Project for the web (now Planner premium plans) which is underpinned by the Power Platform. This is Microsoft’s go-forward offering for work management and an excellent tool that delivers a truly modern work management experience (see ‘Unboxing’ the New Microsoft Planner for Enterprise Work Management for a detailed walkthrough), and it’s even based on the same scheduling engine from Project Online/Project Desktop. However, we hear from many of our clients that they’re missing advanced features like task-level enterprise custom fields, advanced baselines, deadlines, Earned Value, time-phased data, support for more than 3,000 tasks and more.
There is a way to get the best of both worlds, but a bit of context first.
Think of Project Online as an umbrella term covering three pieces:
Only SharePoint features are being deprecated so far, which impacts PWA, where the more advanced PPM scenarios are handled, like governance, reporting, risks, issues, change requests, financials, programs, and portfolios.
In addition to being the foundation for Project for the web, the Power Platform can also read data from the Content DB, which opens up a world of possibilities. In fact, all of those advanced usage scenarios that were handled by PWA in the past are now supported on the Power Platform.
If your organization is not ready to go all-in on Project for the web or can’t live without some of the more advanced features, you could take a hybrid approach.
At Sensei, we recommend to our clients that they move all features from PWA to the Power Platform to avoid being impacted by the deprecated workflows and other features. This is what’s forcing the immediate issue with Project Online. With Sensei IQ™, a Power Platform solution, we’ve effectively created a replacement for PWA.
This relatively simple change means that you can continue to use Project Desktop with all its advanced features and save schedules to the Content DB while allowing some users to try out Project for the web / Planner in parallel and pull it all together on the Power Platform. This has been Sensei’s approach with Sensei IQ™ all along, so that your most advanced/expert users can continue to use the desktop they’re comfortable with, and the majority of your project managers can likely transition to Project for the web / Planner.
You can also do so much more on the Power Platform than you ever could with PWA. Not only is AI native to Planner, it is also available as Copilot for Power Apps. And, you can do true enterprise resource management, formal programs and portfolios, intake with scoring and prioritization, strategy and much more.
With the Power Platform approach, you can let your teams manage their schedules/plans in the work management tools that make sense to them while you get the standardization you’re looking for at the enterprise level. Most of our clients use a mix of work management tools like Planner, Project Online, Azure DevOps, Jira, Smartsheet and Monday.com with the Power Platform on top.
Microsoft is encouraging their clients to move to Project for the web / Planner as their work management tool and then cover more advanced PPM usage scenarios on the Power Platform. That’s probably an option for 80%+ of organizations today, but many expert users and large enterprise clients have more advanced scenarios currently supported in the Project Desktop and with configurations in PWA. For those clients, we recommend a hybrid and phased transition where the Power Platform takes the place of PWA while still allowing their project managers to use the Project Desktop, saving schedules to the Content DB.
