With all the questions regarding what Project Online does and doesn’t have I thought this worth a repost. –Dan
This is a follow up post to the one on and covers the Server Settings options in Project Online. If you are new to Project Online and never used Project Server 2010 or Project Server 2013 then you probably don’t need to read further. You won’t miss what you never had! This posting is more for the folks transitioning or just wanting to know the differences. In this context I find it much easier to think of Project Online as a new separate product rather than think of it as Project Server 2013 hosted by Microsoft. They might be siblings – but they are not identical twins.
In Project Online there are changes to server settings due to the nature of the service offering – and the fact that you no longer have to manage the server as we do that for you. From early feedback it is clear there is some confusion around some of the apparently missing options so an explanation follows..
In Project Server 2010 Server Settings was available in the left navigation for administrators and it looked like this:-
And in Project Online we now have a couple of different ways to get to the same settings – either use the EDIT LINKS option to make Server Settings appear on the left – or use the new navigation from the gear icon in the top right and select PWA Settings. A clue here that this really is Project Online – the top left says Office 365 rather than SharePoint – which you would see with Project Server 2013 – and the menu with PWA Settings shows the Office 365 Settings option (preview in my case).
This will bring up the PWA Settings page which may look like this:
I say ‘may look like this’ because some of the options will depend on the permissions mode you are currently using. This is similar to Project Server 2013 and is well described in the TechNet article ‘Plan user access in Project Server 2013’ at, but for Project Online there is a way to change permission modes through the UI of the Office 365 Admin page – and you can bring up the following screen by selecting your PWA site then clicking the drop down menu from Project Web App in the ribbon and selecting Settings.
The article at titled Change permission management in Project Web App for Project Online gives all the details – please heed the WARNING section. Changing modes loses any existing permissions you may have set and they won’t come back if you reset back again.
In my initial PWA Settings screenshot above I am in the default, SharePoint Permissions mode – so I am missing a few options compared to the following shot from another instance on my server in Project Permissions mode.
As you can see, with Project Permissions mode comes a new section on Security with the familiar options from the 2010 Security section in the top left of the first screen shot – and a couple of extra options in the Personal Settings – for managing and acting as delegates. Delegation isn’t a feature that is available when you are using SharePoint Permissions. Also this shows that Personal Settings is now a subset of PWA Settings and not its own menu option. The security section isn’t applicable to SharePoint Permissions mode as all control is governed by SharePoint rather than by Project’s groups and categories. This also covers project sites too – so the User Sync section goes away too in SharePoint Permissions mode. Also note that what was called Project Sites is now covered by Connected SharePoint sites.
For Project Online that is all you get and all you need. If you read the other article on Project Server 2013 you will have realized that some of the server settings were moved to Central Administration and as in the Project Online world we administer the server then all those options are handled for you – or are
