No subscription, no per-user monthly fees, no cloud dependency. Everything the desktop component of Project Online does — Gantt scheduling, critical path, resource levelling, baseline tracking — in a perpetual licence that doesn’t expire. For project managers who never actually needed the PWA layer, this is the logical landing point.
Buy Project Professional 2024 — £239The deadline isn’t just 30 September
Most coverage of Project Online’s retirement focuses on the September 2026 date. That’s the final shutdown, but there are two earlier dates that organisations running Project Online have already hit or are about to hit — and both of them matter more to day-to-day operations than the September deadline does.
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5 September 2025
Microsoft announces Project Online retirement
Official announcement on the Microsoft Tech Community blog. The retirement date and transition paths confirmed.
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1 October 2025
End of sale for new Project Online-only SKUs
New Project Online licences no longer available to purchase. Existing customers continue under their current licences until shutdown.
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1 April 2026
No new PWA sites — empty sites become inaccessible
This date has passed. New Project Web App site creation is now blocked across the board. PWA sites with no active projects are already inaccessible.
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2 April 2026
SharePoint 2013 workflows retired
Project Online’s governance layer — workflow-driven project types, demand management, approval routing — runs on SharePoint 2013 workflows. These are now retired. If your PMO depended on automated stage-gates or approval workflows, they stopped working at this point.
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30 September 2026
Project Online shuts down — all data inaccessible
Complete shutdown. No access to projects, schedules, resource data, timesheets, or reports. No recovery after this date.
The April dates have already landed. If your workflows are broken, that’s not a bug — it’s the retirement arriving early. The September deadline is what’s left, and with roughly four months of runway, organisations that haven’t started migration planning are close to the point where the timeline gets uncomfortable.
Experience from previous platform retirements is consistent: data migration takes roughly three times longer than initial estimates. A PMO with a hundred active projects, historical baselines, resource pools, and Power BI connections should not be planning a four-week migration in August. Start now.
What actually lives in your Project Online environment
Before you can migrate anything, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Project Online stores considerably more than just project schedules — and the data that’s hardest to move is rarely the stuff you’re thinking about.
Project schedules are straightforward. Everything else is progressively harder. Historical reporting data and Power BI connections are what reliably catch people out — they’re not captured by the standard MPP export and need separate handling.
How to get your data out
Microsoft provides two documented export routes. The full export data definitions are on Microsoft Learn — worth reading before you start so you understand what each method actually captures.
Method 1: Save projects as .mpp files
Open each project in the Project Professional desktop client while connected to your Project Online environment, then save locally as an .mpp file. This preserves the schedule, task assignments, resource assignments, baselines, and custom field values for that project. It’s the most reliable format for any destination that involves the Project desktop application, and the files are immediately usable in Project Professional 2024.
For large portfolios this is time-consuming but straightforward. The limitation is that it captures project-level data only — it doesn’t export resource pool definitions, enterprise custom field configurations, or timesheet history.
Method 2: PowerShell user data export script
Microsoft provides a PowerShell-based export process for Project Online that produces a broader set of output files including JSON files covering feature-specific data — timesheets, status reports, resource plans, engagements, custom fields, portfolio analyses, and queue job history. This is the method for bulk extraction and for capturing data that .mpp exports miss.
The output is technical. You get structured data files, not a ready-to-import package for any specific destination. This matters particularly for Planner migrations, where there is no import tool that consumes Project Online export files directly.
Export everything before you begin migrating, even if you only plan to use some of it in the new platform. Once Project Online shuts down, there is no retrieval. Historical project data, baselines, and timesheet records that aren’t needed today may be needed for audits, contractual obligations, or performance reviews in two years.
Where your data can actually go
Microsoft lists four official transition options in its retirement announcement. They serve genuinely different needs, and the right answer depends on what your organisation was actually using Project Online for.
| Option | Schedules migrate? | PWA-style portfolio view? | Cost model | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Planner Premium (Plan 3 / Plan 5) | Manual rebuild | ✓ via Portfolios | ~£23–£42/user/month | Teams needing cloud-based PM across M365 |
| Project Server Subscription Edition | ✓ Clean migration | ✓ Full PWA retained | On-premises infrastructure + licences | Large PMOs needing full PWA and resource management |
| Dynamics 365 Project Operations | Different product | — | Subscription per user | Professional services firms needing timesheet + financials |
| Project Professional 2024 (desktop) | ✓ Direct .mpp open | Single machine | £239 one-time | Individual PMs and small teams using desktop scheduling |
The honest position on migrating to Planner
Planner is Microsoft’s preferred migration destination. It’s also the path where the gap between the marketing and the reality is widest.
There is no automated migration from Project Online to Planner. The data models are fundamentally incompatible — Project Online stores projects in a relational database with baselines, dependencies, resource pools, and timephased data. Planner stores tasks in Dataverse. These are different structures. You cannot export from Project Online and import to Planner in any meaningful way. What Microsoft means by “migrating” to Planner is closer to starting fresh while manually recreating the structures that matter.
For organisations that were using Project Online primarily as a cloud-accessible way to view and update project schedules — particularly teams whose project managers were also using the Project Professional desktop client — Planner Premium is a reasonable landing point. The complexity of what you’re leaving behind is low, and the new toolset covers the basics well.
For organisations running genuine portfolio management — cross-project resource pools, demand management, stage-gate governance, earned value reporting — Planner doesn’t replicate this. The full comparison of what each tier actually does is worth reading before you make the call.
Project Online reports built on the ProjectData OData feed will break when the service shuts down. If you’re migrating to Project Server Subscription Edition, you can re-point Power BI reports to the PSSE OData endpoint. If you’re moving to Planner, you’ll be working with Planner’s Dataverse-based reporting, which is a different data model and requires rebuilding the report layer from scratch.
The case for going desktop-first
Project Online was always two products in a trench coat. The PWA front-end — project centres, resource centres, portfolio dashboards — was the cloud layer. The Project Professional desktop client was the scheduling engine that most project managers actually used daily. For a significant proportion of Project Online users, particularly those in organisations with one or two project managers running complex schedules, the PWA layer was largely overhead. The schedules lived in the desktop client; the cloud was mostly for visibility and collaboration.
For that profile, moving to Project Professional 2024 as a perpetual desktop licence is not a downgrade. It’s removing infrastructure complexity and ongoing subscription cost from a workflow that didn’t need either. The .mpp files open directly — no conversion, no data loss. Everything the scheduling engine does in Project Online’s desktop component carries across cleanly.
Five years of Plan 3 subscription for a single user costs over £1,380. Project Professional 2024 costs £239 once. The full cost comparison against Plan 3 works through the arithmetic in detail.
Common questions
No. After 30 September 2026, Project Online environments are shut down completely. There is no read-only access period, no data recovery option, and no extensions. Microsoft has been explicit: after that date, all projects, schedules, resource data, and reports stored in Project Online are permanently inaccessible. Everything you want to keep must be exported before the deadline.
No. Microsoft has not provided an automated migration path from Project Online to Planner. The data models are incompatible — Project Online’s relational structure doesn’t map cleanly to Planner’s Dataverse-based model. Microsoft’s guidance is to export your data and manually recreate the structures you need in Planner. For complex portfolios with resource pools, cross-project dependencies, and historical baselines, this is a significant undertaking, not a migration in the conventional sense.
No. Project Professional 2024 and Project Standard 2024 are perpetual desktop applications — they are not subscription products, they are not part of the Project Online service, and the retirement doesn’t affect them in any way. The retirement is specific to the cloud-hosted Project Online platform (the PWA environment, Project Plan 3/5 as it was previously sold). Desktop editions continue operating normally with LTSC support through 2029.
Project for the Web was rebranded and absorbed into Microsoft Planner in August 2025. If you were using Project for the Web, you are now using Planner Premium — Microsoft made this change without requiring any action from users. The features carried across; the branding changed. This is separate from the Project Online retirement, which affects the SharePoint-based PWA cloud service, not Project for the Web.
Project Server Subscription Edition is the only option that retains the full Project Web App interface. It can be deployed on-premises, in a co-location environment, or on Azure virtual machines. It’s the right choice for large PMOs with complex resource and portfolio management that genuinely requires the PWA layer — but it comes with infrastructure cost and maintenance overhead that smaller teams rarely justify.
Gary Walsh is the Head of Tech Support at Software Supplies, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. Fully Microsoft-certified and experienced across the full business software stack — from Windows and Office to cloud infrastructure and device management — Gary delivers practical, no-nonsense advice that helps users and businesses get the most from their technology.
