Assess your Project Online estate

All plans Member

Before you decide anything about migrating, you need an honest answer to a simpler question: what is actually in our Project Online estate, and what shape is it in?

The Estate Assessment answers that. It reads your Project Web App’s reporting feed, analyses every project you select, and gives you a portfolio-level report: task and milestone counts, dependency shape, custom fields in use, cost coverage, how many resources can be matched to real people, a per-project compatibility score, and an effort estimate.

Before you start

Your Project Web App URL, usually https://<your-tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa.
An account with reporting access (membership of the Portfolio Viewers group is enough; no edit rights needed).
An access token. See Get an access token in the migration guide for the two ways to get one.
An Onplana workspace. The assessment works on every plan, including Free, so you can do this before any purchase decision.

Run the assessment

Open Import and choose Project Online OData as the source.
Enter your Project Web App URL and access token, then click Connect. Onplana lists every published project your account can read.
Under Assess your estate (read-only), tick the projects to include. Everything is selected by default.
Click Assess estate. Onplana analyses the portfolio in small batches and shows progress as it goes. A large estate takes a few minutes.
Read the report. Nothing has been created; you can leave at this point, print it, or start importing individual projects from the table.

What the report tells you

Estate summary

Figure	What it means
Projects analysed	How many projects were read from the feed
Working tasks	Real tasks, with summary rows counted separately
Milestones	Tasks flagged as milestones
Compatibility score	How cleanly the estate migrates, weighted by task count so one small project cannot skew it. The plain average is shown alongside
Resource email coverage	The share of resource entries carrying an email address. This drives automatic matching to people at import, so it predicts how much manual reconnection you would face
Dependencies	Total links, and how many carry lead or lag

What to plan for lists the honest gaps, for example resource-scoped custom fields that do not migrate, resources with no email address, and the fact that the reporting feed does not expose currency.

Custom enterprise fields shows the deduplicated inventory of task-scoped fields across the estate, and how many projects use each. These migrate on every plan.

Projects, most attention needed first ranks every project by compatibility score, worst first, so you can see where the work is. Each row can be imported directly when you are ready.

The per-project table sorted worst-first: each row shows task count, compatibility score, dependency count, warning count, and an Import action.

Effort applies the batches-of-ten rule from the migration guide: roughly half a day per ten projects, plus cutover planning.

Reading dependency figures honestly

Task dependencies live in a second Project Online API, separate from the reporting feed. If your token does not authorize it, the report says dependency data was unavailable and shows the count as unknown.

This matters: an assessment that quietly reported “0 dependencies” for a schedule full of links would be worse than useless. If you see this finding, mint a token with broader scope (the Azure AD route with the .default scope covers both APIs) and run the assessment again.

Best practices

Assess before you plan anything. The report is the input to your migration plan, not an afterthought. It tells you the batch count, where the risk is, and which projects to pilot.
Start with the worst project, not the easiest. The table sorts worst-first for a reason. The lowest-scoring project surfaces the tenant-specific quirks you would rather find in a pilot than in batch four.
Fix email coverage before importing. If coverage is low, inviting your team to Onplana first turns matched resources into live assignments, instead of leaving a manual reconciliation queue.
Print or share the report. It doubles as the evidence pack for a migration decision, so circulate it to whoever needs to approve the move.
Re-run it any time. The assessment is read-only and costs nothing, so run it again after cleaning up your estate to see the score move.

Troubleshooting

“Your access token expired.” Normal on a large estate; tokens last about an hour. Paste a fresh one and continue. Analysed projects are kept.
A project could not be analysed. Each project is independent, so one failure never stops the run. Schedules over 20,000 tasks are skipped as too complex; split those or assess them individually.
My project list is empty. Only published projects appear in the reporting feed, and only those your account can read. Check the account’s Project Online permissions.
Dependency counts show as unknown. See Reading dependency figures honestly above.

FAQs

Does this change anything in Project Online? No. The reporting feed is read-only. Onplana only reads.

Does it create anything in Onplana? No. No projects, tasks, or import jobs are created. Importing is a separate, explicit action you take per project from the report.

Do I need a paid plan? No. The assessment runs on every plan including Free, so you can evaluate before you buy.

How long does it take? A few seconds per project. A sixty-project estate takes a few minutes, with progress shown throughout.

Can I assess after Project Online retires? No. The assessment reads the live OData feed, which stops responding after the retirement on 30 September 2026. Assess while the feed is live.

Migrate from Microsoft Project Online, the migration itself once you have decided
Import a Microsoft Project file, the per-file path
Invite your team, the fastest way to improve resource email coverage before importing

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