Today I had a look at Project Online and although there have been some changes to Project Online since I last used it, the fundamental product is still similar. I’m especially interested in the Project Online Connector in Microsoft Flow. The connector is a bit limited, however there are some basic operators available that would have helped me in past projects. I guess all this connector needs is more users requesting new actions and triggers.
In this post I’m going to have a look at the actions and triggers that are already there.
List Projects
My starting point is to list all the existing projects using the List projects action
The tooltip is slightly confusing as your project online Root Site URL will most likely be /sites/pwa and I can’t really imagine Project Online existing within /teams/sampleteam.
Create Tasks
Then I tried to have a look at creating a task in every single project by taking the proejct Ids returned by the List Projects
Quite easily I can create a new task with the creates new task action, the options however are quite limited. Also, the creation of the task will fail if a project has been checked out by someone else or if the project hasn’t been checked out. Therefore you will need to handle check in and check out by adding some more actions.
In a similar way it is also possible to create resources or projects. These actions potentially make it possible for Flow to create projects, tasks or resources when users add projects requests to a project request list in SharePoint or any other data source that supports Flow triggers. Imagine creating a team in Microsoft Teams triggering the creation of a Project plan in Project Online without the need to have administration rights in Project Online.
Triggers
There are a number of triggers available within the Project Online connector. These triggers make it possible to trigger a flow when a new project has been created, when a new resource is created , when a new task is created or when a project is published.
These triggers could help for example when you want to inform people when something changes to a project. This way you could for example let a project manager know when a project plan has been updated.
Conclusions
So even though the Project Online connector could do with some additional features. I do think that the current connector could be helpful in many scenarios. If you are interested in making this connector work for you then please do leave a comment below, as I’;m interested to know if this connector is used by many organisations or not.
Thank you for the overview 🙂
actually i use for my company Project Online and i wanted to migrate my workflows to Flow, but this connector is kind of useless if you have custom fields and want to do any kind of approval workflow, it wil be great if this connectors were updated.
Hi Edwin, have you looked at using the REST API for Project Online?
Hello,
There is no option to select Project Type(EPT) while creating a project using Flow. Please suggest how we can do this. Thanks.
Hi Shubham,
That is indeed not available within the connector yet. You might have to investigate using the Project Server REST API?
To quote Churchill this is like a lighthouse in the Alps, brilliant but useless. I cannot believe that there are not connectors to replicate the Workflow that is needed to allow Project Workflow to be deployed – at present it looks like the workflow phases and stages aspect of Project Online is frustrated. I have read about the flows that can currently be created using Project Online data and my reaction is “so what” – they seem to offer virtually nothing of merit or value compared to what used to be possible with Project workflow.
At present it looks like Microsoft are selling a partial solution when it comes to the Project Workflow aspect of PWA.
Came here looking for Project worflow solution using Power Automate, but from the comments I see this is not available yet. Would be a great enhancement since project flows using Sharepoint Design are really limited and visually outdated.
Will take a look in the REST api but I was not willing to expend that much time developing a solution.
The connector has been improved quite a bit since I wrote this post. I would still give it s go. What are you trying to do?
We are moving quickly to utilizing Teams with Project Online. Any guidance or established processes for automating the creation of a Teams channel when a new POL project is created?
Hi David, that is something that should be possible with flow. I would however consider Dynamics (PO module) instead of Project Online. It is a lot easier to integrate with.
Nice overview…but 4 years later, it’s still pretty useless for the simple workflows I need to create around resource onboarding. The REST APIs require delegated authentication, which also seems to be useless as far as I can tell with modern auth, from a simple automation perspective. Extremely disappointed with Microsoft and their disjointed mess of project offerings in 2022.
I would consider the Dynamics Project Office option. It is way better that Project Online.
Hello Pieter,
I tried to look for it, but I can only find “Dynamics Project Operations”, is that the option you are referring to? From what I read, it is focused on companies that operate by “selling” projects, and not for internal portfolio management (that is what I use PWA for).
I also find it frustating that Project Online is being left to the side, but if you look at Microsoft site, it is advertised as its PPM tool.
Yes sorry I mistyped that earlier