Since early this year, Microsoft added significant new features to Office 365 Government that streamline many functions you deal with daily in your government office. One of the newest ones is an update to the software’s Project Online feature. Now you can add more projects than ever before, something you probably need as demands increase.
No matter your government agency title, the projects you’re working on are likely numerous. If you’ve used Office365 Government’s Project Online platform before, Microsoft listened to your concerns about being able to do more.
While they’ve increased project availability, they’ve also done other changes to make your projects complete faster. One particular improvement helps enhance project performance, as well as gaining faster project information.
Look at what’s added, and how Project Online helps in the world of government.
Upping Project Availability
As part of Microsoft’s Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) solution, Project Online originally allowed you to create up to 5,000 projects. If this sounds considerable, it was sometimes too small when running a giant government agency. You may have projects running in the five digits, requiring far more cloud computing power to contain the data.
With Microsoft’s update, they’ve upped project capability to 30,000. They figured this should accommodate most government office settings when critical projects become overwhelming. Plus, Microsoft designed ways to offer this digital space without annoying workarounds to manage data at this level.
While this might sound like enough to make your office more productive, Microsoft just added updates to a related feature: Project sites.
Upping How Many Subsites You Can Use
One of the abilities of Project Online is creating subsites, otherwise known as collaboration sites. These allowed different departments to find information about a project on a personal webpage for more clarity on who’s doing what.
In the previous editions of Office365, you could only create 2,000 project pages. Now you can create up to 4,000 project sites to accommodate the thousands of projects you’re working on. Previously, if you had this many projects, you had to divide them up into multiple Project Web App sites.
Adding more Project Sites lets you set up more personalized, one-on-one communication for individual project team members. What makes this even better is the ability to make a project for a particular office department.
Dividing Projects and Sites Among Departments
Before the changes, you couldn’t use the Project Online feature too easily across differing departments without some complications. Microsoft updated their Enterprise Project Type feature to allow this to work more efficiently.
This means you can collaborate on projects and their related sites across departments normally not communicating with one another. Everything from your HR department to IT staff can have their own projects and sites without conflict. Or, you may choose to host all of your projects in one department when needing to manage your time.
Keeping Up On Project Data
Yet another improvement is being able to go to Microsoft’s Project Center for easier data access on your projects. There, you can keep up on the cost of your projects, though now with faster speeds to avoid wasted time. You can make this work by disabling rollup groups and Gantt charts if you so choose.
When looking up your list of projects, Microsoft just made this faster to retrieve. Through OData performance enhancements, you’ll retrieve data about your projects in a faster way.
Since Microsoft figured many people use SQL Server Integration Services, they’re suddenly making it faster when transferring project data from one place to the other.
More Information
Keep reading us at cFocus Software Incorporated as we explore the continually evolving features in Office365 Government and Azure Government.