Moving off Project Online? Project Professional 2024 is a one-time purchase — no subscription, full desktop feature set, lifetime licence. It’s where most teams land after migration.
Where You Stand Right Now
Before you start the clock on a 60-day plan, spend 15 minutes confirming your current position. Everything that follows depends on knowing exactly what you have and how much of it matters.
- Log in to your PWA site (typically
https://yourorg.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa). Confirm it still loads and you have admin access. If you can’t get in, contact your Microsoft 365 admin immediately — access issues get harder to resolve as the deadline approaches. - Count your active projects. Open the Project Centre and note how many projects have recent activity. This determines how large your export and migration effort will be. Anything untouched for 12+ months is archive material, not migration priority.
- Identify your critical data. Project plans and schedules are the obvious targets, but also check for resource pools, timesheets, baselines, custom fields, and any Power Automate workflows connected to Project Online. These are the assets most people forget until it’s too late.
Audit
Export
Migrate
Cut Over
Audit & Assess
Days 60 – 45Decide what you’re keeping, what you’re archiving, and where you’re going. This is the strategy phase — no data moves yet.
The most common mistake in Project Online migrations is jumping straight to exporting data before deciding what’s worth migrating. Teams that skip the audit phase end up migrating dead projects, broken baselines, and years of irrelevant timesheets — wasting time and creating confusion in the new environment.
- Inventory every project in the Project Centre. Categorise each as active (migrate), archive (export and store), or abandon (no action needed).
- Assign a migration owner. One person with admin access, decision-making authority, and dedicated time. Migration by committee fails.
- Choose your target platform. For most teams, Project Professional 2024 (perpetual desktop licence) is the natural successor. For alternatives, see our Project 2024 vs Plan 3 comparison and comparison with Asana, Monday, and ClickUp.
- Document any integrations: Power Automate flows triggered by Project Online events, Power BI reports connected to the OData feed, third-party tools pulling from the API. These break on retirement day and need replacement plans.
- Confirm your Microsoft 365 subscription includes Project Online. Check the admin centre — you need to cancel the subscription separately after migration, or it keeps billing.
Detailed context: Microsoft Project Online is Retiring — What to Do Next
Export & Backup
Days 45 – 30Get everything out of Project Online. Once the service shuts down, there is no recovery path — Microsoft has been explicit about this.
Project Online stores more than you think. Beyond the project plans themselves, your PWA environment contains resource pool configurations, timesheet data, baseline snapshots, custom enterprise fields, lookup tables, and potentially years of status report history. A complete export covers all of it.
- Export project plans. Open each active project in Project Professional (desktop client connected to PWA), then save a local copy as an .mpp file. This is the most reliable export method — it captures schedules, dependencies, resource assignments, and baselines in a format that Project Professional 2024 reads natively.
- Export resource pool data. The enterprise resource pool doesn’t come out automatically with individual project files. Export it separately via the Resource Centre or the OData reporting feed.
- Export timesheets and status reports. Use the OData feed or the PWA reporting pages to pull timesheet data into Excel. This data is often needed for compliance or audit trail purposes and is frequently forgotten.
- Export custom fields and lookup tables. If you’ve configured enterprise custom fields (cost codes, project phases, department classifications), document them manually. These don’t transfer automatically.
- Verify every export. Open each .mpp file in Project Professional and confirm schedules, baselines, and assignments are intact. Check exported spreadsheets for completeness. An export you haven’t verified is not a backup.
Step-by-step walkthrough: Project Online Data Export Guide
Migrate & Test
Days 30 – 15Set up the new environment, import your data, rebuild critical workflows, and make sure everything works before you cut over.
This is where most of the real work happens. If you chose Project Professional 2024, migration is straightforward — you already have .mpp files from Phase 2 that open directly. If you chose a cloud alternative, each platform has its own import process and you should expect some manual reconfiguration.
- Install and activate Project Professional 2024 on every workstation that needs it. Follow our activation guide — note that Project 2024 activates via setup.microsoft.com, not the Volume Licensing Service Centre.
- Open your exported .mpp files in Project 2024 and confirm schedules, dependencies, and resource assignments survived the transfer. Pay particular attention to baseline data — it’s the first thing to silently break during migration.
- Rebuild any automations. Power Automate flows that triggered on Project Online events need to be recreated against your new data source. If you were using the OData feed for Power BI reporting, rebuild those connections against local or SharePoint-hosted files.
- Train your team. If your team managed projects through the PWA web interface, moving to a desktop application is a workflow change. Run a 30-minute walkthrough of the new process before the cut-over date.
- Run a parallel test week. Keep Project Online live while your team works in the new environment for at least one full week. Use this to catch workflow gaps, missing data, and permission issues while you still have a fallback.
Full migration walkthrough: How to Migrate Away from Project Online
Verify & Cut Over
Days 15 – 0Final checks, subscription cleanup, and the official switch. After this, Project Online is behind you permanently.
The last two weeks should feel anticlimactic. If Phases 1–3 went well, you’re already working in the new environment and Project Online is just a backup you haven’t needed. This phase is about closing loops, not firefighting.
- Final data reconciliation. Compare your exported project count against the PWA Project Centre one last time. Confirm nothing was added or modified since your Phase 2 export. If anything changed, re-export those specific projects.
- Take a full PWA backup snapshot. Even if you’ve already exported everything, download a final copy of any reporting data, status reports, or issue logs you haven’t already captured. After 30 September, there is no going back.
- Redirect integrations. Update any bookmarks, SharePoint links, intranet pages, or documentation that points to your PWA URL. Redirect them to the new project file location or tool.
- Cancel or downgrade your subscription. Project Online is a paid subscription. If you don’t cancel it, Microsoft keeps billing you — even after the service shuts down. Go to the Microsoft 365 admin centre → Billing → Your products, and cancel the Project Online SKU.
- Communicate the change. Send a final notification to all Project Online users confirming the migration is complete, where to find their projects, and who to contact if something is missing.
What Happens After 30 September 2026
After 30 September 2026, your Project Online PWA environment is permanently decommissioned. Microsoft has confirmed there will be no access to project data, no recovery service, and no deadline extension. Any project plans, resource data, timesheets, baselines, or custom configurations that haven’t been exported will be permanently lost.
Your Project Online subscription will also continue to bill unless you explicitly cancel it in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. The retirement of the service does not automatically stop billing.
This is not the same as a product reaching end-of-support (where the software still works, just without patches). Project Online is a cloud service — when Microsoft turns it off, the infrastructure is gone. There is no local copy of your data sitting on a server you control. Everything is in Microsoft’s cloud, and access is being revoked.
The Perpetual Alternative
Most teams migrating off Project Online land on Project Professional 2024. The logic is simple: the subscription model is what got you into this position. A perpetual licence avoids it happening again.
Microsoft Project Professional 2024 — , one-time purchase, lifetime licence.
Full desktop scheduling, Gantt charts, resource management, critical path analysis, earned value calculations, and baseline tracking. Opens .mpp files exported from Project Online with no conversion needed. Your data stays on your machine, under your control, with no retirement date.
Connects to Project Server (on-premises) if you need centralised portfolio management. Does not require a Microsoft 365 subscription to operate.
For a detailed look at what the desktop version does and who it’s built for, see our Project Professional 2024 feature guide and real-world use cases. If you’re weighing it against Planner, our Planner vs Project comparison explains where each tool fits.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Microsoft has confirmed the retirement date is final. There is no option to extend, renew, or maintain access beyond 30 September 2026. The service infrastructure is being decommissioned, which means there is nothing to extend access to — the platform itself will no longer exist.
No. Microsoft has stated explicitly that there is no data recovery path after 30 September 2026. Once the PWA environment is decommissioned, project plans, resource data, timesheets, baselines, and custom fields are permanently deleted. There is no archive service, no grace period, and no support ticket that can retrieve them. Export everything before the deadline.
Yes. Project Professional 2024 connects to Project Server Subscription Edition (the on-premises version) for centralised portfolio management, resource pooling, and enterprise reporting. This gives organisations the multi-user, server-backed capabilities that Project Online provided — but on infrastructure you control, with no retirement risk. The desktop application also works fully standalone without any server connection.
Any Power Automate flows that use Project Online triggers or actions will stop working when the service retires. The Project Online connector will no longer have a service to connect to. You need to either rebuild these automations against your new data source (e.g., SharePoint lists, Planner, or a local workflow) or accept that they will fail silently on the retirement date. Audit your Power Automate flows during Phase 1 so you have time to rebuild the critical ones.
No. Microsoft Planner (including the premium tier formerly known as “Project for the web”) is a task management tool, not a project scheduling application. It does not support Gantt chart dependencies, critical path analysis, resource levelling, earned value management, or baseline tracking — features that most Project Online users rely on. Microsoft positions Planner as the successor, but for serious project management, it is not a like-for-like replacement. Project Professional 2024 is the closest functional equivalent.
Yes, unless you cancel the subscription manually. Retiring a service does not automatically cancel your billing. Go to the Microsoft 365 admin centre, navigate to Billing → Your products, and cancel the Project Online SKU. Do this during Phase 4 of your migration — after you’ve confirmed all data is safely exported and your team is working in the new environment.
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.
