Microsoft Project Online retires on September 30, 2026. If your team still runs schedules, resource plans or timesheets through it, that date is not a policy footnote anymore — it is a deadline with your project data on the other side of it.
Whatever you replace it with, the sequence matters more than the choice: what you export, in what order, and how you decide between a lightweight tool, an enterprise suite, or something leaner in between.
The migration itself is not optional and not complicated to start. What is easy to get wrong is treating export as a single click instead of a checklist, and treating the replacement decision as whatever license you already have.
What's actually ending, and when
Microsoft's own retirement announcement sets the date: Project Online retires on September 30, 2026. Sale of Project Online-only licenses to new customers ended October 1, 2025; from April 1, 2026, existing tenants can no longer create new Project Web App sites. After September 30, the service stops answering — not a slow decline, a hard stop. This retirement is specific to Project Online; Project desktop, Project Server Subscription Edition and Planner are not part of it.
What you lose access to if you wait
Everything that lives only inside Project Online goes with it: the enterprise resource pool and its calendars, saved schedules and baselines, custom field configurations, timesheet history, and the OData feed that ties cross-project and financial data together. A single project exported as an .mpp file carries its own schedule; it does not carry the resource pool, the timesheets, or how that project rolled up into your portfolio view. Those live in the parts of Project Online an .mpp export does not touch.
What to export, and in what order
Before anything stops resolving, work through this order — each step depends on data that becomes harder to reconstruct once the previous one is gone:
- Enterprise resource pool: calendars, standard rates, max-units and group membership, first — every project's resource assignments reference it.
- Custom field metadata: name, type, default value, formula and lookup-table associations, before exporting the projects that use them.
- Every active and recently closed project as a native schedule file (.mpp or XML), one project at a time, not a bulk dump you will sort out later.
- Timesheet history and cross-project financial data through the OData feed — this is the data an .mpp export cannot carry, and the feed stops the day the service does.
- A verification pass on every export before you consider the source data disposable. An export nobody has opened is not a backup.
How to decide what replaces it
The honest answer depends on what you were actually using Project Online for, not on what license you already hold:
Three paths, and what each one assumes
- You only ever used it for tasks and schedules. A lightweight tool — Planner or a generalist task manager — covers that ground without carrying over configuration you never used.
- You run many programs with heavy customization and dedicated administration today. An enterprise PPM suite (Project Server Subscription Edition, Primavera) is the direct like-for-like replacement, at the same implementation and administration scale you already carry.
- You are a smaller organization that needs budget, earned value and decision governance across a handful of projects, without enterprise-scale overhead. This is the gap between a task tool and an enterprise suite — where a leaner project-control tool like ControlRoom sits. It will not replace an enterprise PPM rollout, and it is not a task tracker; whether it fits depends on your actual project count and reporting cadence, which you can check directly in a walk-through of the situations it is built for.
Whichever path fits, the decision is reversible; the export is the part that is not, once the deadline passes. Do the export first, and decide on the replacement on your own timeline — not the retirement's.