Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are purely mine, and may or may not apply to your scenario. Please take this as purely another viewpoint in your analysis. No warranties made.
I had to put in a disclaimer early on in this article, because upgrading an enterprise system is generally not one person’s decision or done in isolation. There are several considerations that may go beyond the scope of this article. So, just keep that in mind.
If you are currently on an on-prem version of Project Server, you might be looking to upgrade to the cloud version of Microsoft Project. Previously this decision was easy. You would look Project Online, the cloud counterpart for MS Project and go with it. However, now we have the re-imagined Project i.e. Project for the Web. So, the question becomes complicated. Which path should you take?
Should you even move to Cloud?
Well, the first question is, should you even move to Cloud? The latest version for Project Server is the 2019 version, and while Microsoft definitely all-in for cloud, they have not discontinued On-Prem versions yet. So, this becomes a broader question of whether you should move to cloud or remain on-Prem. There are several factors in consideration like will all the interdependent applications work in cloud, what is the effort involved vs ROI, and more importantly, where does your organization want to go.If as an organization a decision been made to use Cloud based products s O365, Teams, Power Automate etc., then it is sort of imperative that cloud may be a best bet. if not, you may want to stay on prem and reap the benefits, until, may be one day Microsoft decides to change the on-prem strategy.
OK, so you have decided to move to the cloud. Now, what?
Now, as described above the decision to be made a is between Project Online and Project for Web.
This would have been an easy decision if both the tools had a feature parity. However, as one would expect, Project for Web is fairly new and while powerful, is still not yet at a place that can do what Project Online does.
So, in the next article in this series, we will examine, the feature comparison between both versions, and some additional decision criteria to move to Project for Web or Project Online.
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