The code I am walking through here is that which drives the sample I blogged about in the posting https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2017/10/23/microsoft-planner-a-change-management-solution-for-office-365/

In Part 1 I walked through the PowerShell that was reading the messages, filtering out the ones I was interested in by product and then adding the required metadata to get them to the right plan, bucket and assignee – and finally writing that to a storage queue in Microsoft Azure.  Be sure to go back if you didn’t see the update regarding the tenantId – which I had incorrectly hard-coded in the original post and since corrected.

In this part I’ll explain the code that is picking up the messages from the storage queue and creating the tasks.  The first chunk of code is setting things up:

$in = Get-Content $triggerInput -Raw
$messageCenterTask = $in | ConvertFrom-Json
$title = $messageCenterTask.title

# BriSmith@Microsoft.com https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith

# Code to read O365 Message Center posts from the message queue and create Planner tasks

#Setup stuff for the Graph API Calls

$password = $env:aad_password | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force

$Credential = New-Object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $env:aad_username, $password

Import-Module "D:\home\site\wwwroot\WriteTaskToPlan\Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll"

$adal = "D:\home\site\wwwroot\WriteTaskToPlan\Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll"
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom($adal)

$resourceAppIdURI = “https://graph.microsoft.com”

$authority = “https://login.windows.net/$env:aadTenant”

$authContext = New-Object "Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.AuthenticationContext" -ArgumentList $authority
$uc = new-object Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.UserCredential -ArgumentList $Credential.Username,$Credential.Password

$graphToken = $authContext.AcquireToken($resourceAppIdURI, $env:clientId,$uc)

$messageCenterPlanId= $env:messageCenterPlanId

The first few lines are pulling items from the queue – and I’m not doing anything with the title at that point – I was using that when I was testing the code.  The setup stuff for the Graph calls is very similar to that used in Part 1 for the calls to the Service Management API – just with a different Url – this time going to https://graph.microsoft.com.  My $graphToken is used for the subsequent calls.  I’m getting the planId from my Function App application settings environment variables – but as mentioned before if you wanted to perhaps have different products in different plans this could be an extension to the products.json and added to the data going to the storage queue.

#################################################
# Get tasks
#################################################

$headers = @{}

$headers.Add('Authorization','Bearer ' + $graphToken.AccessToken)
$headers.Add('Content-Type', "application/json")

$uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/plans/" + $messageCenterPlanId + "/tasks"

$messageCenterPlanTasks = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -Method Get -Headers $headers -UseBasicParsing

$messageCenterPlanTasksContent = $messageCenterPlanTasks.Content | ConvertFrom-Json
$messageCenterPlanTasksValue = $messageCenterPlanTasksContent.value
$messageCenterPlanTasksValue = $messageCenterPlanTasksValue | Sort-Object bucketId, orderHint

#################################################

# Check if the task already exists by bucketId
#################################################
$taskExists = $FALSE
ForEach($existingTask in $messageCenterPlanTasksValue){
if(($existingTask.title -match $messageCenterTask.id) -and ($existingTask.bucketId -eq $messageCenterTask.bucketId)){
$taskExists = $TRUE
Break
}
}

Next I am getting the existing tasks from the plan – so if you did write different products to different plans this part would need a change.  I’m making a call to the Graph API and getting the tasks for my specific planId – then getting these into an object and looping through and comparing to the message that I pulled from the storage queue.  This might be worth some extra work as all I’m doing is checking if my existing title contains the id of my new message.  If you remember my task title is a concatenation of message id + message title.  It isn’t unknown that a message gets updated – and sometimes the title changes – but the id will not.  I’d miss the updates with this code.  There is a date you could also use and I did consider adding this somewhere I could reference.  It would be easiest adding it in to the title – as if you use something like the first characters of the description it would require another call to task details.  If there were thousands of messages then might even be worth holding that somewhere in an Azure table for reference – but that seemed overkill when I’m only pulling a couple of dozen messages.  YMMV.

# Adding the task
if(!$taskExists){
$setTask =@{}
If($messageCenterTask.dueDate){
$setTask.Add("dueDateTime", ([DateTime]$messageCenterTask.dueDate))
}
$setTask.Add("orderHint", " !")
$setTask.Add("title", $messageCenterTask.title)
$setTask.Add("planId", $messageCenterPlanId)

# Setting Applied Categories

$appliedCategories = @{}
if($messageCenterTask.categories -match 'Action'){
$appliedCategories.Add("category1",$TRUE)
}
else{$appliedCategories.Add("category1",$FALSE)}
if($messageCenterTask.categories -match 'Plan for Change'){
$appliedCategories.Add("category2",$TRUE)
}
else{$appliedCategories.Add("category2",$FALSE)}
if($messageCenterTask.categories -match 'Prevent or Fix Issues'){
$appliedCategories.Add("category3",$TRUE)
}
else{$appliedCategories.Add("category3",$FALSE)}
if($messageCenterTask.categories -match 'Advisory'){
$appliedCategories.Add("category4",$TRUE)
}
else{$appliedCategories.Add("category4",$FALSE)}
if($messageCenterTask.categories -match 'Awareness'){
$appliedCategories.Add("category5",$TRUE)
}
else{$appliedCategories.Add("category5",$FALSE)}
if($messageCenterTask.categories -match 'Stay Informed'){
$appliedCategories.Add("category6",$TRUE)
}
else{$appliedCategories.Add("category6",$FALSE)}

$setTask.Add("appliedCategories",$appliedCategories)

If the task doesn’t exist then I need to add it.  I’ll take this in a couple of chunks and this first part starts building my $setTask object by taking data from my $messageCenterTask and setting the appropriate properties.  First I set a dueDate if one exists, then add the orderHint to add this to the end and set the PlanId and title.

The categories was a tricky one as there are a number of different fields in the message center that carry status information – so I looked across all of them and decided which ones were worth exposing.  This is hard coded based on how you set the categories in your plan – but you can see from my code how I am turning on the individual categories based on the presence of the terms in my array of values in my $messageCenterTask.categories.  So this is the part that turns the coloured tabs on.

# Set bucket and assignee

$setTask.Add("bucketId", $messageCenterTask.bucketId)

$assignmentType = @{}
$assignmentType.Add("@odata.type","#microsoft.graph.plannerAssignment")
$assignmentType.Add("orderHint"," !")
$assignments = @{}
$assignments.Add($messageCenterTask.assignee, $assignmentType)
$setTask.Add("assignments", $assignments)

# Make new task call

$Request = @"

$($setTask | ConvertTo-Json)
"@

$headers = @{}

$headers.Add('Authorization','Bearer ' + $graphToken.AccessToken)
$headers.Add('Content-Type', "application/json")
$headers.Add('Content-length', + $Request.Length)
$headers.Add('Prefer', "return=representation")

$newTask = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks" -Method Post -Body $Request -Headers $headers -UseBasicParsing
$newTaskContent = $newTask.Content | ConvertFrom-Json
$newTaskId = $newTaskContent.id

Continuing my $setTask object I add in the bucketId and add my $messageCenterTask.assignee.  This is actually an array which is why I set up the assignmentType then add it to the ‘assignments’.

I have all I need for my new task now – so I build up the request by converting my $setTask to json and configure my header then make the POST call to the Graph API.  Running this in an Azure Function requires the –UseBasicParsing parameter as the environment is somewhat limited and does not have the full IE engine.

I grab the returned json and pull the task Id out by converting the Content from json to a PowerShell object and getting the .id property.  I’ll need this to be able to add the rest of the task details.

# Add task details
# Pull any urls out of the description to add as attachments
$matches = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
$matches.clear()
$regex = 'https?:\/\/(www\.)?[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._\+~#=]{2,256}\.[a-z]{2,6}\b([-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]*)'
# Find all matches in description and add to an array
select-string -Input $messageCenterTask.description -Pattern $regex -AllMatches | % { $_.Matches } | % {     $matches.add($_.Value)}

#Replacing some forbidden characters for odata properties

$externalLink = $messageCenterTask.reference -replace '\.', '%2E'
$externalLink = $externalLink -replace ':', '%3A'
$externalLink = $externalLink -replace '\#', '%23'
$externalLink = $externalLink -replace '\@', '%40'

$setTaskDetails = @{}

$setTaskDetails.Add("description", $messageCenterTask.description)
if(($messageCenterTask.reference) -or ($matches.Count -gt 0)){
$reference = @{}
$reference.Add("@odata.type", "#microsoft.graph.plannerExternalReference")
$reference.Add("alias", "Additional Information")
$reference.Add("type", "Other")
$reference.Add('previewPriority', ' !')
$references = @{}
ForEach($match in $matches){
$match = $match -replace '\.', '%2E'
$match = $match -replace ':', '%3A'
$match = $match -replace '\#', '%23'
$match = $match -replace '\@', '%40'
$references.Add($match, $reference)
}
if($messageCenterTask.reference){
$references.Add($externalLink, $reference)
}
$setTaskDetails.Add("references", $references)
$setTaskDetails.Add("previewType", "reference")
}
Start-Sleep 2

Adding the task details is basically adding the description, and any references.  Here there may be defined references such as the ‘additional information’ that I pulled through as a true $messageCenterTask.reference but I also used this field for another purpose.  Message Center posts can now be very rich – so can include videos and other Urls pointing to other documents, the video thumbnail etc.  As the Planner description cannot handle this in terms of displaying I chose to add any Urls found in the description text itself as additional references – for ease of linking – so you could easily navigate out to YouTube for example to view a pertinent video.  That is what the regex command is doing – by finding all occurrences of Urls and adding them to the $match array.

For both my true reference ($externalLink) and my found Urls ($matches) I need to do some replacement of certain characters.  This isn’t possible using a full ‘encode’ option – it just needs . : # and @ replacing to avoid some disallowed odata characters.

To add the references I first check if I have any – then  set up the static info for reference objects, then add the matches and add the externalLink if there is one – and set the previewType to reference (which adds the reference as the object ot show on the task tile).  I think we have a current bug with some types of references not rendering – so you may not see the image you are expecting quite yet.

The last line – Start-Sleep 2 was added when I was seeing failures adding the task details probably due to the task not yet being in a state where it could be edited when I make the call in the next chunk of code.  I’m sure there is a tidier way of handling this – but it worked and haven’t revisited it.

#Get Current Etag for task details

$uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks/" + $newTaskId + "/details"

$result = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -Method GET -Headers $headers -UseBasicParsing

$freshEtagTaskContent = $result.Content | ConvertFrom-Json

$Request = @"

$($setTaskDetails | ConvertTo-Json)
"@

$headers = @{}

$headers.Add('Authorization','Bearer ' + $graphToken.AccessToken)
$headers.Add('If-Match', $freshEtagTaskContent.'@odata.etag')
$headers.Add('Content-Type', "application/json")
$headers.Add('Content-length', + $Request.Length)

$uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks/" + $newTaskId + "/details"

$result = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -Method PATCH -Body $Request -Headers $headers -UseBasicParsing

}
#Write-Output "PowerShell script processed queue message '$title'"

To update the task I need to get the current Etag for the details entity of my new task – so the GET call to the specific new task Id /details ensures I have that ($freshEtagTaskContent.’@odata.etag’) for the header for my subsequent PATCH call.  Then it is very similar to the /tasks call – I convert my $setTaskDetails object to json as my request body, create my header and make the patch call.  I was using the final Write-Output to double check what I was writing out – and you can see this in the function activity if you are debugging.

In my tests when running the initial function manually from the Azure portal it only takes about 5 or 6 seconds, but when looking at my hourly runs from the ‘Monitor’ option for the function I’m seeing 1 to 2 minutes, I guess because it needs loading up from cold.  Once this runs it pushes data into the storage queue – and the subsequent function gets triggered for each row (as I write this it finds 10 messages with my products) and each of those jobs takes just 3 or 4 seconds if the task already exists – and only a few seconds more if it needs to create the task.  Monitoring the storage queue using the Azure Storage Explorer I see the items picked up in 30 seconds or so – but seems much longer when I’m demonstrating the sample .

This was announced a while back as you needed to be aware of the impact on reporting – and you should have seen the posting in the Office 365 Admin message center.  This is rolling out now, and the message center post has just been updated to say that we should be completed by around the end of the year.  (If you are not seeing the message center posts – then talk to your admin and share my blog post https://lwal.me/3n).  The official article on the time phased data roll-up feature can be found at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Configure-rollup-of-timephased-reporting-data-in-Project-Online-da8487fe-899e-4510-a264-e2ebc948928c.  I’ve also been beaten to the blogs by Paul Mather (and probably others) so I’ll try not to just repeat the great content that is already out there – but highlight a few of the nuances.

The change has a few different aims – and one is certainly to give you faster reporting against your Project Online data.  This can be achieved if the new granularities of weekly or monthly work for you better than daily – with the added bonus that the publish will be a lot faster too!  We don’t have to break the project data down to a daily level for publishing, then have you pull the daily data only to have you aggregate it back to weekly/monthly again.  It will save space too – both in your tenant but also in any local data warehouse you are using.

The first thing to say is we aren’t changing anything automatically.  We are changing the OData schema so you may need to change your reports to ensure the schema changes do not break anything – even if you stick with ‘Daily’ – see this article for more information on best practices.

If you create a new PWA however, we do now set the default granularity as ‘Never’ so that you will need to make a conscious choice on the granularity you want – or leave it as ‘Never’ if you do not need time phased data (your publish times will be faster!)

I’ll walk through some scenarios, and I’ve also changed my regional site settings to make it more interesting – with my week starting on a Saturday and the first week of the year being defined as the First full week.

I’ll use a dummy project that I’ve created with work, costs, baselines etc. – just so we can see what happens to the data in various scenarios.  This is my plan – with 3 work resources, a material resources, a cost resource and a budget cost resource.

With my new default (as I only created this PWA site this morning) of ‘Never’ for my timephasded data I find that I have no records in any of my timephased data sets.  This is expected!  I’m showing this in Excel – but you’d see the same just browsing to the OData endpoints under …/PWA/_api/ProjectData.  I see 2 projects as it records the Timesheet administrative dummy plan too too – which also accounts for the 7th Task – and the 6 baselines are for the 6 tasks in this project.  The TimeSet just records the days from 1984 to 2149, and will always be 60,631.

I’ll switch to Daily in my reporting granularity settings and republish and see what I see…  and now I have some time phased data – and 828 rows in each of the feeds.  This is a record for each day that has values – and in this snippet I see some costs, actual work and budget cost for one of my tasks.

Next I’ll take a look and see what weekly looks like…. and this gives me 120 records for each time phased data set.  One record for each task for each week there is something to report.  The records aren’t in exactly the same order – but you can seer the weeks that are totaling 120 and 80 are those with 16 and 24 hours per day.  The dates the time shows against – such as 9/30/2017 – are Saturdays as that was the day I had set in my regional site settings as the First day of the week.  I’ll come back to ‘week of the year’ later.

*** Update 11/30 - there is a slight change that will likely arrive before you see the feature - any roll-up such as weekly/monthly/fiscal periods - will record data against the FINAL date of the period rather than the FIRST.  Currently as of 11/30 you will still be seeing 'FIRST' as per my screenshots ***

*** Update 12/5/2017 - back to Plan A - all aggregations will list against the FIRST date in the period - as per my screenshots ***

Next I’ll go to the Monthly option – and that is Monthly set in the reporting time phased granularity page and not using a Fiscal Period of Monthly.  Here I just have 32 records in my time phased data sets (and they are only matching as I just have 1 assignments per task and the same durations for task/assignment) – with each data item being recorded against the 1st of the month – and we get to see all the rows in one view – with the project summary task being at the top.

Now stepping on to Fiscal Periods.  Hey – where did my data go!

As it mentions in the Reporting configuration page – “Important: Reporting data will only be generated for defined fiscal periods. Also, if you change an existing fiscal period, you will need to republish all projects.” and as I have no defined periods (see above – my FiscalPeriods feed is empty) so I will need to go and create some.  I’ll define 2017 first on its own to stress the point – and I’ll use the 4,5,4 method.

Now at this point I discovered a bug of sorts – fiscal periods need to be complete years, and the default for the 4,5,4 pattern leave 12/31 out on a limb…  My Reporting (Project Publish) jobs went down a hole trying to work out what their calendar was and after an hour or so they failed.  We are looking in to it and the fix is easy (once you know what caused the problem – I had a few variables in my plan and hadn’t noticed my year finished too soon).  Not sure if we will address this, but now we are making more use of fiscal periods it might make sense to not allow an incomplete year to be defined.  So once you define the 4,5,4 make sure the final period goes to 12/31- unless you are creating 2018 now too in which case you could start that on 12/31 – whatever works for you.  This same issue can be seen if you don’t have Fiscal Periods defined for the complete duration of your plan – so for example in my case as my plan starts in October 2017 and finishes in March 2018 and my Fiscal Periods start in January – I need to create both the 2017 and 2018 Fiscal Period.  I’m getting some confirmations of this, as the reporting page appears to indicate that you will only get data if you have defined the Fiscal Period – which to me meant that I could ‘choose’ not to create my Fiscal Period for 2018 if I was only interested in 2017 at the moment – so my publish would be quicker and I would use less space and reporting would be quicker (though only for 2017).  However, currently projects will fail (after about an hour in my tests) at the Reporting (Project Publish) unless all the Fiscal Periods you need are created.  I hope to hear that this is a bug.

*** Update 11/30 Confirmed as a bug and we have a fix coming - we will not fail if any missing dates or periods exist.  For example if you only defined Fiscal Periods for 2017 and 2019 then a plan from 2017 to 2020 would only publish the details for 2017 and 2019.  Not sure why you ever would - but that is a good way to describe the behavior you will see) ***

Back to the main story – I have my Fiscal Periods for 2017 and 2018 configured – complete with 12/31 for each year so I publish my project:

Now I see 31 rows – 1 fewer than my monthly based report as the pattern of the fiscal periods doesn’t quite match up to the monthly boundaries.  I can see too that I have records coming from my Fiscal Period feed – and also see the Fiscal Period UID in my TaskTimePhasedDataSet for each row (Previously I just saw the NULL GUID (0000000000…).

Time to take a look at some of the other fields new with these changes and lets dive into the ‘Projects’ feed.  We can see for the project which time phased granularity we have from the new field ProjectTimePhased – so this confirms that when this project was last published the granularity was set to ‘By Fiscal Period’.  We cannot tell what the fiscal period configuration is, but looking at the TimeSet feed we could deduce that from the dates and fiscal periods.

Towards the end of the field list in the Projects feed we have some more new fields – and these relate to workflow and you can read more about these in the support document at https://lwal.me/4f. In my feed these are unpopulated and I am planning another blog posting where I’ll take a deeper look at these, but you will see that we now expose the WorkflowCreatedDate, WorkflowError, WorkflowResponseCode, WorkflowInstanceId, WorkflowOwnerId and WorkflowOwnerName.

With this information we hopefully make it much easier to spot any issues with workflows, and you (The PMO or helpdesk) will be able to proactively see what is happening to workflow across all of your projects rather than waiting for a project manager to come across a suspended or failed workflow.  As I said – more on that in a future post.

So in summary the new options for reporting allow you to considerable reduce the amount of data you might need to access – by 25 times in my example, that is assuming that monthly totals is ok for you – or around 1/6 of the data if weekly is your thing.  And the added benefit not just when reporting on the data but each time you publish too!  You can change these at any time, but you would then need to re-publish all of your projects (or at least the ones you wanted to report on) – so you might also want to look at some kind of automated publish option such as using PowerShell or Javascript.  You can search online for various articles on this – one of my favourites would be Paul Mather’s javascript example.

I’d love to hear back on how you find this works for you and which granularity is best in your scenario.  Or do you think you might change?  Maybe run with Never or Monthly and maybe switch to Daily and republish when you need the deeper granularity?

This post comes from my “You learn something new every day” collection – and after responding to e-mail saying the only way to provision a PWA site in Project Online is through the UI I thought I’d better double check.  I’d also seen a Twitter posting about a new update to the SharePoint Online Management Shell that came out yesterday – so what better time to install it (after uninstalling the previous one) and giving it a test drive.

Here is the download - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588

There are no specific Project PowerShell commands there – I quickly established that hadn’t changed (gcm *PWA* and gcm *Project*) but what about New-SPOSite?  Maybe if I use the PWA#0 template?  But how would I enable the PWA features (I had my on-premises hat on…).

So this is what happened…  First step – Connect-SPOService – and the Url is the admin page – not just the tenant page:

Then I used the New-SPOSite command – with the following parameters:

New-SPOSite -Url https://brismithpjo.sharepoint.com/sites/BlogDemoPS -Owner brismith@brismithpjo
.onmicrosoft.com -StorageQuota 20 -Title BlogPWAFromPowerShell -Template PWA#0

Then went over to my Admin Center to take a look:

And once the provisioning was complete – what would I find?

A working PWA site!  I’m sure plenty reading this are saying “yes, of course” and already knew this – but it had somehow passed me by.  There isn’t unfortunately a way to set permissions mode via PowerShell – as far as I could see anyway – but happy to proven wrong.  It would make a great addition to Set-SPOSite.

I did notice that Set-SPOSite does already have an EnablePWA option – but having executed it against a SharePoint team site it didn’t seem to do what I expected (Add PWA) – so I’ll try and find out more,. as the example on the Set-SPOSite docs page is a little lacking.

This year sees an acceleration in the delivery of new features to Planner and I’m taking the opportunity to walk through some of these and show how one might use them.  The Plan I am using for my examples is one that featured in some of my earlier Planner blogs – and is the Change Management plan for Office 365 – generated and updated daily by an Azure function that reads my Message Center posts and adds them as categorized and labelled tasks – assigned to the person responsible for that workload.  For more information please see Office 365 Message Center to Planner- PowerShell walk-through–Part 2 where I walk through the code.

Groups and Filters

First up are a couple of additions to the ‘Group by’ drop down.  I can now group by due date – to see my late tasks, as well as today’s, this week, next week and future tasks in vertical columns.

Next is group by labels – the coloured fly-outs that let you categorize the tasks.  In my Change Management plan I pulled in the various message center types so I have columns for Action, Plan for Change, Prevent or Fix Issues and a couple of others.  As you can see there will be some tasks that appear more than once – as they were tagged with multiple labels.

Probably my favourite new feature is the Filter option.  This appears top right next to the Group by options and allows you to filter down to specific tasks – and there are some built in filters of the same due date options seen in the above view, or any of the labels, or the assigned resources of free text.  In this next screenshot I have used a combination of these – to show me any tasks that contain the word “New” (entered in the top of the dialog – it says keyword before you type anything) that are also due in the future or have no date, and are labelled as Advisory or Awareness.  You can see in the header my filter now has a (5) next to it as a reminder that filters are set – and while the dialog is open I also see counters for the selected options (Due (2) and Label (2)).  This works dynamically – filtering as you make new selections.

Schedule View

The Schedule view is really cool and can be found in the Plan header – alongside your Board and Charts tabs.  It isn’t in the screenshots above as the feature hadn’t quite hit production as I was writing this – so this example uses a different plan in one of our testing rings.  Any plan with a start and end date will display showing the full duration – in red here for ones that have started and in white for ones yet to commence.  If the plan just has a due date then it just displays on that day.  You can also see unscheduled tasks displayed on the right hand side.

You can also drag and drop – so here I have dragged my iCal Feature task to 2/2 – and it sets the due date for me.

You can also drag the right edge of the task to set a different due date – and have the start date set at the same time.  The schedule view also obeys any filter or group settings – so this next shot shows that I have a filter (I just entered the word ‘Data’) and I’ve changed the grouping to Assigned to.

As I was finalizing this posting the Schedule feature went live in my tenant – so I decided to include the following schedule view from my O365 Change Management plan – but keep the ones above too as they show well tasks that have a start and finish date.  In the following shot you can see the due dates fro several message center items and you will see that MC124413 shows up twice.  This is somewhat intentional as my Azure Function for copying in the messages to my plan will duplicate into multiple buckets if the title hits multiple bucket terms – and in this case it is in my Yammer and Updated buckets.

iCal Integration

The iCal integration will be coming along a little bit later and the option will be under the elipses next to the Schedule option in the plan header.  If you select to “Add plan to Outlook calendar” it will pop up a dialog allowing you to choose to publish the plan to an iCalendar feed – and then add to Outlook.  The plan then gets added to your Outlook as an additional calendar so you can track your plan deliverables.  I’ll add some screenshots once that feature is live in the tenant with my O365 Change Management plan – just for completeness

The sharing of calendars will also be controllable at the tenant level via PowerShell configuration settings - see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=867418

Be sure to visit the full support documentation for Planner at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=703808 and specific information for the calendaring features at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=867416

And finally…

I think this one slipped out a while back – without much of a fanfare – but you can now copy tasks in Planner by clicking the ellipses on the tasks and selecting “Copy task”.  This will then allow you to choose which items you want to be in the copy, and to edit the task name – then when you click Copy you will have a new task.  It will be in the same bucket from which it was copied – but obviously you can move it wherever you need it in the plan.  Don’t forget if this isn’t quite what you need that I posted a blog example of how you might use Graph to clone a whole plan - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2017/02/17/microsoft-planner-how-to-clone-a-plan-with-graph/.

This posting came about from a customer query where they were not seeing all the plans in their mobile clients that they see on their Planner Hub on the web.  And the answer?  When it is a Group – that doesn’t yet have a Plan.  That is one answer anyway, and there could be some others which I will come to at the end.

Groups are getting to be ubiquitous across Microsoft products – Teams, Power BI, Planner, Outlook , Yammer - and I’m sure there are more – all using Groups and the additional features that Groups brings along.  One of these features is Planner – and when you create a Group you get a Plan, no matter where the Group is created from.  As an example let’s take Yammer.  Office 365 Connected Yammer groups are now a thing – and can be used once you set some specific security options in your Yammer Network Settings.  First enforcing Office 365 identity and then you will see that Office 365 Connected Yammer Groups are enabled.

When a new Yammer group is created (I’ve called my example “AYammerUnifiedGroup”) a Group gets created too:

On the Yammer page for AYammerUnifiedGroup you will see links to Office 365 resources of a SharePoint Document Library, SharePoint Site, OneNote and, of course, Planner!

If we jump over to our Planner Hub now we can look under More Plans in the left hand navigation – and there we also see AYammerUnifiedGroup.

How about our mobile client?  Hmm – can’t see it here…

So, why don’t I see it on my Android phone yet?  Lets take a look at the Group.  We can get the Group ID from various places – and I found it by copying the hyperlink for the Planner link on the Yammer page - https://tasks.office.com/d740ddf6-53e6-4eb1-907e-34facc13f08b/Home/Group/fe103374-b2d4-4c57-a9ed-187008ea70b8?auth_pvr=OrgId&auth_upn=BriSmith@BriSMithPJO.onmicrosoft.com – and my Group is fe103374-b2d4-4c57-a9ed-187008ea70b8  (I didn’t click on the link at this time – and you will see why shortly)  I can plug this in to Graph Explorer and see more details about the Group.

Then by adding /Planner/Plans I can see all the plans that are ‘owned’ by that Group – and I can see there are….. Zero.

What is happening here is that the ‘More Plans’ list is really More Groups – and they will not all have Plans, yet at least.  If I click on my AYammerUnifiedGroup under the More Plans list then it takes me into my Plan – and actually creates it at that moment.  Now I have a plan!

I can go back to Graph Explorer and make my query again – and now I see my Plan there too.

Refresh my Planner Hub view on my Android App and the Plan is there too.

I was thinking of calling this blog post Schrödinger's Plan – as you don’t know if you have a plan or not until you look – but then once you look you will have a plan.

Getting back to other reasons – the product group for Planner are always revisiting the API they use for populating lists of Groups/Plans as well as pulling the Plans themselves, to try and ensure that you are seeing the plans you need at the right time – so things may change here, and there could be other reasons you do not see what you expect.  A recent example – you can use the Azure Portal to manage Groups – and it is possible to add an Owner for a Group but not make them a member.  Planner tends to look for the members – so being just an owner might give you some problems.  I’m sure there could be other cases like this – but the main point of the blog was to help you understand the flow happening when Groups get created and when the actual plan exists – as well as showing how Graph Explorer is a useful tool for looking behind the scenes at Groups and Plans.  If I had clicked the Planner link from Yammer when getting the Group ID from the Url – then that action would have caused my plan to be created too.

No cat was harmed during the writing of this blog post.

The new reporting options that are rolling out to Project Online customers allow you to choose how you want your time phased data and give you control of the time buckets you use – and you can choose not to have any at all.  My favourite is to use Fiscal Periods as that also limits the timescale of data that gets published – so reducing the data footprint and publish and reporting times by making sure you have just the data you need.  For example I could choose just to have fiscal periods defined for 2018 and 2019 and wouldn’t need to worry about my 15 year long mega-project – as the data after 2019 wouldn’t be clogging up my system.  But the blog title mentions Portfolio Analysis?  Where does that fit in?  I’ll explain…

When you are creating a new Analysis you can define the time period and granularity – but the granularity is limited to Calendar Months or Calendar Quarters:

And as I have checked the option to analyze project resource requirements against capacity the next page in the setup of the analysis will check if I have resource requirements – and give me a red banner if it finds none.

Often that message will just mean you haven’t published the projects yet – but I know mine are all up to date.  What happened?  Let’s take a look at my Reporting options in Server Settings:

Yes, that will do it!  Having Never set for my reporting options means I am feeding no time phased data through to reporting – and the Portfolio Analysis actually uses that data for its resource requirements.  Which option should I choose?  Any of the others will ‘work’ in that they will show you have requirements – but some will give you the results you want – others less so.  I’ll start with a bad choice so that you can understand how this all fits together.  I’ll go for Fiscal Periods – and I have defined my Fiscal Periods as 4,4,5 (Each quarter split into 4,4, and then 5 weeks).  I was going to make a case for 2,3,5 being a better formation – but I’m guessing not too many of my US readers would get the reference.

Now I need to publish all of my projects that are going into the Analysis and build my Portfolio Analysis again.  I’ve already built an analysis on the same data set in my Project Server 2013 system and I’d expect my requirement details to look exactly like this – as I have exactly the same data.  Here is my Project Server 2013 analysis and I have enough resources to do 3 of my 5 plans.  If you are not familiar with the tool my availability for the different roles is shown in the top grid – then my requirments are listed in the bottom grid – along with the priority of the plans based on my pair-wise comparison to other projects and weighted by the driver priority.

How does this compare to my Project Online Analysis – where I have my reporting using my 4,4,5 Fiscal Periods?  A quick aside – in Project Online we have a bug where we show you the Enterprise Global (EGlobal) as one of the projects you can select for the analysis – please don’t as it will break your analysis.  I have all the same projects and drivers – same resources and used Calendar Months from March 2018 to March 2019 – so it should be the same as the analysis above shouldn't it?  Well if it was I wouldn’t be blogging…

A very different picture…

My analysis say I can only resource a single project – and it looks like I have no requirements at all for resources in March, June and September – but April and July look crazy!  January to March are also showing no requirements and I’ll deal with that first.  My Fiscal Periods were only defined for 2018 – so I publish no timephased data for 2019 – so that makes sense.

But March, June and September?  If I look at the first rows from my time phased data from the OData feed for AssignmentTimephasedDataset this gives me a clue – I see data for 2/26, 4/2, 4/30… and these are the start dates of my Fiscal Periods.

Looking at my Fiscal Period Definitions again I can confirm that none of the start dates are in March, June or September.  That explains why I see no requirements.  But April July and October (and January) each have two of the start dates – so in effect the choosing of the 4,4,5 pattern has doubled up my requirements in some months and isn’t registering at all in others.  This is the extreme example – but you will get a similar but not so pronounced effect if you chose weekly because some calendar months will contain more ‘week start dates’ than others.  The new reporting options will always show the sum time phased data for the period against the start date of that period.  The effect this has on Portfolio Analysis is one thing you need to take into account when making your choice.  So what would work?  Daily certainly would – but you wouldn’t gain any benefit in terms of faster publishing and reporting.  Monthly would also work just fine – as the start date of the period is the start date of the month – and this give good publish improvements over daily.  For my money the Fiscal Period option is the best – but with Standard calendar year as the model.

With this new Fiscal Period defined and reporting configured to use Fiscal Periods I’ll re-publish my plans and build my analysis again.

Perfect!  Matches up to my 2013 one – except for the 2019 data which I excluded on purpose by not setting the 2019 fiscal period yet.  I hope you like the new reporting options and if you are also using Portfolio Analysis I hope this helps you make the right choice!

We are rolling out a change currently that could set some PWA sites to read-only – so I thought it worth mentioning 3 reasons why you might see a PWA site go into a read only mode – which would show as a yellow banner on the PWA pages.  I’ll start with the most recent change.

We have seen a number of customers open cases where their Project Online PWA site appeared to just go away.  Closer examination showed that the customer did not have either a Project Online Professional or Premium license – but just some Project Online Essentials licenses.  I blogged about this combination a while ago.  Normally when a license expires then the site will go into a read only state 30 days later – then after a further 90 days the site will be de-provisioned.  The  challenge here was that there were still valid licenses (the Project Essentials ones) and the sites were not showing as read-only – but would still finally get de-provisioned.  The tenant and billing administrators would receive e-mails warning of the pending de-provision but it appears these where ignored in some cases.  The change means that any sites where the only valid license is Project Essentials will now go to read-only after 30 days (or immediately if the Project Online Professional or Premium licenses expired more than 30 days ago).  Many of the customers who have had this issue appear to be from the Education sector – and it seems to coincide with the change in offering where earlier the EDU customers had a free option for Project Online – but now have a reduced price offering – and some renewed with the cheapest license available and did not choose any Professional or Premium licenses.  I should remind everyone that not only do you require at least one Project Online Professional or Premium license to keep your PWA alive – but you also need these licenses to perform administrative and other regular tasks that many of you users might need to do – so please ensure you are correctly licensed.  See https://products.office.com/en-us/project/compare-microsoft-project-management-software?tab=1 for details of the different licenses and their features.

The 2nd reason you might go into a read-only state is if you are over your assigned quota.  I’ll be following up with another blog that goes into more details here and offers some ways to ensure you are not using more data than you need to – and to avoid the risk of hitting your quota – and I’ll add a link here when that posting is live.

The 3rd is usually a very temporary condition that can occur during maintenance.  Most maintenance is not even noticed by our customers and you will not often see this – but if for example we are failing over a SQL Server or migrating a tenant for load balancing our server farms there can be times when short periods of read-only are experienced.

And the 4th?  Just in case you came here from my click-bait headline?  If the planet runs out of 0’s and 1’s then I guess PWA would go read-only.  I said you wouldn't believe it!

This one should only affect administrators, but the behavior will also help explain why other users may not see the New plan option.  So what does this look like?  When Planner loads initially as it loads the New plan option can be seen – just above the Planner Hub option:

But as the page finishes loading a few calls will have been made to check tenant settings and group memberships – and the UI will be trimmed and New plan option removed:

This was a recent change due the the work we are doing in Planner to support Guest access – and we are trimming the UI so that people who are not allowed to create Groups do not see the New plan option in Planner.  The article at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-who-can-create-office-365-groups-4c46c8cb-17d0-44b5-9776-005fced8e618 explains how to control Group creation and whether Guests can create groups too.  To control other users you can set a setting at the tenant level – EnableGroupCreation = False, and then create a security group populated by all the users who you are allowing to create Groups.  The GUID for this group is set against the property GroupCreationAllowedGroupId.

Where this comes unstuck is if you have configured this option but have not included the admins in the group allowed to create Groups.  Admins bypass this control and can always create Groups – but our checks don’t find them in the group and trim the UI.  In Planner there is no way to determine if the current user is an admin.

A couple of workarounds – firstly if you are quick then you can click on New plan before it goes away and you will be able to create a plan (admins only – if the UI is being trimmed because you can’t create Groups then you will still not be able to create Groups.  The better solution is to add all of your admins to the group you are using to control group creation – then they will not get trimmed UI.

For the inquisitive amongst you take a look at the F12 Developer tools in your browser of choice and you can see the calls that are getting the data to make the trimming decision.

GetCurrentTenantSettings returns the settings to know if how EnableGroupCreation is set (False in this case) and also the group used to control who can create Groups (0ff9c27d-47f3-4d19-b39a-695c8e8ae9d1

{"AllowGuestsToAccessGroups":true,"AllowGuestsToBeGroupOwner":false,"AllowToAddGuests":true,"ClassificationDescriptions":[],"ClassificationList":["Low","Medium","High"],"CustomBlockedWordsList":[],"DefaultClassification":"","EnableGroupCreation":false,"EnableMSStandardBlockedWords":false,"GroupCreationAllowedGroupId":"0ff9c27d-47f3-4d19-b39a-695c8e8ae9d1","GuestUsageGuidelinesUrl":"","PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement":"","UsageGuidelinesUrl":”Http://aka.ms/o365g”}

Once we have this GroupId we can check if I cam a member using CheckCurrentUserToGroupMemberships – passing in the GroupId.  This will return an array of the Groups that were passed in of which I am a member (This time there was only one group – but the same call can be used to test many groups)

"{\"@odata.context\":\"https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/$metadata#Collection(Edm.String)\",\"value\":[]}"

The empty array ([]) confirms that I am not a member so the UI gets trimmed!

The new guest access feature for Microsoft Planner is now enabled for all farms - hopefully you saw the Message Center post!

This Planner task version of the message center post is courtesy of my Office 365 Change Management example using Azure Functions.  There was also a Tech Community blog post by Jo Parkhurst – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Planner-Blog/Bring-your-plans-to-life-with-guests-in-Planner/ba-p/190704.  In this blog post through I’ll walk through some of the aspects of using Guests in Planner.

As you can see from the screen capture above I have added a guest user to my plan – the LU icon – lunchwithalens@gmail.com – which also happens to be me – so not a great example of collaboration – but you get the idea.  We don’t yet have the ability directly in Planner to add a guest (coming soon) – but we can assign guests to tasks for guests who are already in the tenant, having been added through Teams for example (ignore the ‘2’ – I forgot to capture a screenshot when I first added me as a guest):

The important thing to remember here is that we are not federating a login with Google – and it actually creates an account in your Office 365 tenant which needs its own password – not your Google (or whatever) password – and please don’t re-use you Google password – very bad practice.  The person you invite will see an e-mail (in this case in Gmail) – first verifying the e-mail address, and once you do, then you will receive an invite to Teams (in this case):

Then your guest has access to Teams and can start collaborating:

Once your guest has access they will appear to be used elsewhere – such as assigning to tasks in Planner:

One thing that may catch your guest out is the log-in Url they need to use – and for Planner just going to https://tasks.office.com will NOT work as that Url does not know which tenant you are attempting to log in to – and only accepts “work or school accounts”.

The log-in Url needs to identify the tenant – so the full Url would look something like this:

https://tasks.office.com/brismithpjo.onmicrosoft.com

where brismithpjo is my Office 365 tenant.

And that one will work – and the guest sees the plans and groups of which they are members.

There are some limitations on what guests can do in Planner, some based around security (can’t create plans or add other guests for example – and can’t join plans themselves) and others are more related to their limited tenant capabilities (no mailbox) so they cannot comment on a task.  Full details can be found on the support article at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/guest-access-in-microsoft-planner-cc5d7f96-dced-4da4-ab62-08c72d9759c6.

Guest accounts will be listed in the Office Admin center under Users, Guests – as well as in Azure Active Directory:

Just a quick post today to share something that might help scenarios where you need to change a status manager for a task.  As you may well know, it isn't possible to just select anyone to be a status manager for a task – and even in the client application you don’t see people in the Status Manager drop down unless they are already a status manager in the plan – and they only get there by having opened the plan and making assignments (and hence being the status manager for the new task/assignment).  Hopefully there will be a broader change coming – but a recent change in Project Online does bring this a step closer.

You still (as of 5/25) can’t set just anyone programmatically as a status manager using CSOM – they have to be ‘on the list’ – so will need to have opened the plan as mentioned above – but you can set anyone to be an owner (permissions allowing of course).  And guess what?  That gets them on the list!  So if you set the person who you want to be a status manager to be the owner of the plan – you can then set them as a status manager!  You’d probably then want to set the original owner back again.

In code here is a snippet that shows how you might approach this (I don’t set the owner back here – so if you wanted to do that you’d need to persist the actual owner).  This sample could be added as a class in the Github sample at https://github.com/OfficeDev/Project-Samples/tree/master/Create-Update-Project-Samples.  For brevity I’ve stripped out some error checking.

public static void ReadAndUpdateStatusManager()
{
// Load csom context
context = GetContext(pwaInstanceUrl);

            // Retrieve publish project named "New Project"
// if you know the Guid of project, you can just call context.Projects.GetByGuid()
csom.PublishedProject project = GetProjectByName(projectName, context);
csom.DraftProject draft = project.CheckOut();

            draft.Context.Load(draft.Owner);
draft.Context.ExecuteQuery();
draft.Context.Load(draft.Tasks);
draft.Context.ExecuteQuery();

            foreach (var task in draft.Tasks)
{
draft.Context.Load(task.StatusManager);
}

            draft.Context.ExecuteQuery();

// We get the user we want to be our status manager

            User StatusManager = context.Web.SiteUsers.GetByLoginName("i:0#.f|membership|<username goes here>@<and tenant here>.onmicrosoft.com");
context.Load(StatusManager);
context.ExecuteQuery();

// And set our user as the Owner

            draft.Owner = StatusManager;

            foreach (var task in draft.Tasks)
{
try
{
if (!task.IsSummary)
{

// Then we can set our new Owner as a Status Manager
task.StatusManager = draft.Owner;
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.Write(string.Format("Error setting Status Manager:", ex.Message));
}
}

// Publish and check in the project
csom.JobState jobState = context.WaitForQueue(draft.Publish(true), DEFAULTTIMEOUTSECONDS);
JobStateLog(jobState, "Updating project");
}

Regular readers will know that the message center is somewhere that I feel we make it too hard for our customers reach – and the people who could get there (admins) may not fully understand the impact of some of the issues and do not pass on to the people who need to know.  This was behind my example of using Azure Functions to read from the message center and write out to Planner tasks (covered recently too at the Project Virtual Conference) so I was particularly happy to see (ironically on the message center) that a new role is rolling out (pun intended) that will allow Office 365 users to be made Message Center Readers.  Very cool!

This is rolling out and the expectation is that it should be complete later this month (June 2018).  Please speak with your Office 365 admin and make sure someone in your PMO is made a reader and can see the messages pertinent for Project, Planner, SharePoint or any other workloads you are interested in.

The Project and Planner engineering teams have been hard at work improving the accessibility of our products.  A set of documents is now live that walks through some of the screen reading functionality that has been added to help users relying on Narrator or Jaws to navigate Project and Planner – as well as other accessibility features .  The landing pages for Project Web App in Project Online, the desktop client and Microsoft Planner can be found at:

Accessibility support for Project web app

Accessibility support for Project desktop

Accessibility support for Microsoft Planner

The screen reader can tell you where you are on the screen – and for example if you are in the schedule web part it tells you which column and row you are on – and if the field is editable or read only.  Similarly if you are in the desktop client it identifies row and column and the edit options – such as knowing that the duration columns has a spinner control.

Keyboard shortcuts are listed both for the web and desktop client – and worth remembering Alt-q which takes you directly to the Tell Me dialog where you can search for commands and execute them right from the dialog – as an example here I am getting Tell Me to give me the Scroll to Task option rather than hunting it down:

For Planner the various screen elements are described which will help the Narrator user to understand the layout – and details of the keyboard controls are given too.

All the articles also include links to both the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk and for our government, commercial and enterprise customers  the enterprise Disability Answer Desk – where links to all Microsoft’s accessibility resources can be found

A while back I wrote a blog post walking through how one could use Azure Functions, The Office365 Communications API and Microsoft Planner to help with change management in Office 365.  The post was pretty popular – over 10k visits – which is good for my blog – but the consensus was that it was to hard to implement.  Not everyone wants to get deep and dirty with Azure functions (even if I did just use the PowerShell variety!).  The right answer for this problem should always have been Flow and I’m still surprised that we haven’t got an out of the box connector.  I (finally) found a little time – so had a go at creating a custom connector for Flow that would read all of the Messages, both Message Center and Incident – and then you could do with them what you wanted!

Stepping back – the following shows the result of my previous endeavors – and I won’t quite be getting that far with this blog post – and I’ll point out the areas that would still need to be addressed.

The first step is to create our connector – and as this is going to read the Message Center – you need to be an admin – and you will also need to create an App Registration for the connector – so that needs you to be an admin too (or to know one who will work with you to make this happen!).

App Registration

In Azure Active Directory admin center choose App registrations (or the Preview, which I will be using) and click New registration.  You can call it what you like – mine is O365MC – I just want this for my Contoso users and it is a Web app – leave the redirect blank and click Register.

The next stage is permissions – so I click View API Permissions (I’m hiding my Application (client) ID and Directory (tenant) ID – you will need to use your own.

Next click on Add a permission – then select Office 365 Management APIs

– and choose Delegated permission on the next pane – and I’m only interested in Service Health (which includes Message Center) so have selected just that one option and clicked Add permission.

The final permission step is to Grant admin consent – so it should look like this:

Next we need a key for our application so that our connector can prove who it is.  Certificates and Keys can be found in the left navigation with your API registration selected. Clicking New client secret creates the key.  I chose 2 years for expiry.  Copy it from here as it won’t give you a second chance.

We should be good to go now – so we can proceed with our connector.

Custom Connector

Go to https://flow,microsoft.com and then to Data in the left navigation and Custom Connectors.  Click Create custom connector to get started.  I’m creating from Blank – if you know what Postman and OpenAPI are then feel free to take another approach.  I used Postman and there are some good explanation articles around but none specific to these APIs.  Give your connector a name – mine is O365 Message Center Connector and then click continue.  The 1st page of 4 then appears – General information

The important pieces here are the Host - manage.office.com and the Base URL - /api/v1.0/contoso.com/ServiceComms/Messages.  Feel free to add an icon, colour and description – then click forward to Security, and select OAuth 2.0 from the initial option – then Azure Active Directory from the drop down at the top of the OAuth 2.0 form.

I’ve filled in the Resource URL – https://manage.office.com, and the other fields can be set with the data from your App registration.

Client ID is the Application (Client) ID.   Client secret is the key you generated.  The rest leave as is, and advance to Definition.  For now we will just enter the General information and the Request, by selecting import from sample and then just selecting GET and entering a URL.

The full URL is of the form - https://manage.office.com/api/v1.0/<your domain here>/ServiceComms/Messages/api/v1.0/<your tenant name here>.onmicrosoft.com/ServiceComms/Messages

The request is easiest defined by using the json of a returned request as a sample – and if you scroll to the end I have added a sample json you could use.  Just clich add default response – paste in the json and click import.

To see what this did – you can click the ‘default’ button and it will show what it stripped out of the response.  This was a Message Center Response but this could also be used for Incidents.  There are things you can do on this page like hide some of these – or make them ‘important’ (they show up first) – but just for playing around you can leave it at that point.

We are nearly there – but we also need to enter the Reply URl back in our App permissions – this was added as the Redirect URL on the 2. Security page once we saved that page.  Click the page icon to the right of the URL to copy.

Once you have it – back to your App Registration and add a redirect Url – then save

OK, now for the exciting part – Create and Test!  Back to your CustomConnector and click Create connector up at the top right and then click Test – the 4th stage.  We first need to add a connection – so click the + New connection

This will prompt you to log in – then you have a new active option – Test operation – so go ahead and click it and see what happens?  Hopefully OK (200)

So that is working!  Next we can try it in a Flow, and I’m keeping it simple with a schedule to start things off – and run once a day – then this schedule triggers my next thing – which is my custom connector (find it under custom).  I then have an Apply to each – automatic as it detects there will be multiple ‘values’ (Items).  To keep things simple I’m just interested in Project Online items – so I filter Title for ‘Project’ – and then I create a new task in an existing Plan – and add the ID to the Title – then update the Task Details with the actual message.  I added the dates for good measure.  I wasn't intending this as a Flow tutorial – but hopefully you can follow from this screenshot.

After this Flow runs I have two new Tasks – and Task details too!

To get the same features as my Azure Functions example you’d have to have a much more complex Flow – updating Tasks that already exist – copying in the External Links too – but making sure they were not NULL (@empty is your friend) – as well as adding different assignees based on the Task Title and putting in a differen tbucket.  All perfectly possible – but beyond the scope of this posting which was really about getting connected to the Message Center.  Enjoy!

And this is the json to copy in for the response sample.

{

"@odata.context": "https://office365servicecomms-prod.cloudapp.net/api/v1.0/d740ddf6-53e6-4eb1-907e-34facc13f08b/$metadata#Messages",

"value": [

{

"@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Office365ServiceComms.ExposedContracts.MessageCenterMessage",

"AffectedWorkloadDisplayNames": [

"SharePoint Online"

],

"AffectedWorkloadNames": [

"SharePoint"

],

"Status": "",

"Workload": null,

"WorkloadDisplayName": null,

"ActionType": "Action",

"AffectedTenantCount": 0,

"AffectedUserCount": null,

"Classification": "Advisory",

"EndTime": "2018-10-30T23:59:00Z",

"Feature": null,

"FeatureDisplayName": null,

"Id": "MC120728",

"ImpactDescription": null,

"LastUpdatedTime": "2017-09-25T16:15:21Z",

"MessageType": "MessageCenter",

"Messages": [

{

"MessageText": "Beginning September 30, 2018, Visio Web Access (Visio Service) and its Web Part for SharePoint Online will no longer be available. Instead of Visio Web Access you will be able to use Visio Online and to migrate your organization’s web parts to a newer experience with the new Javascript (JS) APIs for Visio Online. Visio Online enables high fidelity viewing, sharing, and collaboration in your favorite browser, without installing the client for all Office 365 licenses. It supports embedding Visio diagrams in SharePoint Online using a modern file viewer web part and with IFrame along with JS API programmability.  \n \n[How does this affect me?]  \nBeginning September 30, 2018, users in your organization will only be able to view Visio diagrams in their browser, but not create or edit. Visio Online viewing is available to most Office 365 subscriptions. \n\n[What do I need to do to prepare for this change?]  \nInstead of using Visio Web Access (Visio Service) and its Web Part for SharePoint Online, we recommend using either: \n- Visio Online and the Document Web Part [Document Web part instead of Visio Web part] \n- iFrame in SharePoint Online for Visio Web Part [iFrame with Visio Online APIs instead of Visio Web Part with Visio Services JS APIs] \n \nPlease click Additional Information to learn more.",

"PublishedTime": "2017-09-25T16:15:21Z"

}

],

"PostIncidentDocumentUrl": null,

"Severity": "High",

"StartTime": "2017-09-25T16:15:21Z",

"Title": "We're removing Visio Web Access from SharePoint Online",

"ActionRequiredByDate": "2018-09-30T23:59:00Z",

"AnnouncementId": 0,

"Category": "Plan For Change",

"ExternalLink": "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=858892",

"IsDismissed": false,

"IsRead": false,

"IsMajorChange": false,

"PreviewDuration": 30,

"AppliesTo": "",

"MilestoneDate": "2017-09-25T16:06:43Z",

"Milestone": "",

"BlogLink": "",

"HelpLink": "",

"FlightName": "",

"FeatureName": ""

}

]

}

As we start deploying the various pieces of infrastructure needed to support Roadmap you may see some different things in your Office 365 Tenant – so here is a quick explanation of the different parts and what they mean – and the most asked question – how to turn it on!.

TL;DR – Just go to Office 365 Admin, Settings, Services & add-ins and look for Project Online – then see if Roadmap is available for you to turn on yet.  If you don’t see Project Online listed then go to https://project.microsoft.com and hitting that page should trigger the back-fill that will make Project Online appear in the Services & add-ins page (although that doesn’t mean Roadmap is ready for you yet).  More info at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/projectonline/turn-roadmap-on-or-off

One thing that people have noticed is the new service plans that show up under Project Online Professional and Premium.

The top 3 are new, and are used behind the scenes for the various parts of Roadmap – Common Data Service for Apps (CDS), Flow for Project – and P3 which you can think of as the Project Online equivalent to E3.  These would have appeared around the end of November – but do not mean that Roadmap is deployed – just some of the pieces we needed in place first.  Along with the CDS comes a new App link to Dynamics 365 – even if you didn’t previously have any Dynamics subscriptions.

Starting today, December 7th 2018, we turned on Roadmap, but just for a small percentage of tenants initially.  The tenant administrator can check if it is available yet for your tenant by going to Office 365 Admin Center - https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/homepage and then the Settings option and the Service & add-ins option under that.

If Project Online isn’t shown it could be that no one has visited https://project.microsoft.com (the new Home experience) recently – as that page is used to trigger the back-fill of other Roadmap requirements – so go to that page – then look again at the admin center.

If Project Online is shown then you can click that option and another pane opens with a switch to turn Roadmap on.  If Roadmap isn’t ready for you then you will see the following:

If Roadmap is ready then you will see the same – without the red note – and you can slide the switch and Save to turn Roadmap on – after reading the mentioned article of course!.

One you have switched on then you can navigate back to https://project.microsoft.com – or hit the Project icon in the App Launcher – and you will land on the Home page – but it will have a new super power – creating Roadmaps!

For further help on Roadmaps you can see our new videos on the Welcome to Roadmap landing page - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/video-welcome-to-roadmap-57764149-51b8-468f-a50d-9ea6a4fd835a.  There will be even more videos arriving from December 10th 2018 onwards.

If Roadmap isn’t ready it could be that we are still not fully rolled out – or that your tenant needs to be updated to CDS 2.0 and we should have more information on that soon.

Enjoy!

You may have noticed recently that the Project Support blog on TechNet has gone away – and you may even have seen an “Oops! That page can’t be found.” message.  The good news is that the content is mostly moved over to a brand new Blog at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Project-Support-Blog/bg-p/ProjectSupport.  Be warned that the migration will have left us with some bad links in the migrated posts and I will try and fix the more obvious ones by making some edits – but for now you may need to search again on the title from the Url and all should be good once our SEO kicks in.  In an ideal world I would have also updated some of the articles at least mentioning that the topic still applies to the more recent releases – but time didn’t allow for that.  We will also be getting up to date with the recent updates in February and March 2019 now we are migrated – and the full pages of updates for each release should also appear over the next few days (You might find a cached version through your search engine in the meantime).

The MSDN blog (the BriSmith one) will also be migrating in the next few months, and content will be split between this blog, the Project one at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Project-Blog/bg-p/ProjectBlog and the Planner blog at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Planner-Blog/bg-p/PlannerBlog depending on the topic.

In deciding which posts to migrate I looked at activity as well as the dates, but there were still some older posts that had valuable information for that very precise issue that not many people might hit – but will be glad to find the post if they do!  If one of your favourite links appears to have not been lost and not in the new blog then feel free to contact me – I can probably find it.  Also another casualy of the move were the great comments that many of you may have contributed over the years.  I do plan on seeing if I can incorporate some of best of these in the body of the appropriate post.