(bright upbeat music)
- IT organizations empower employees
to be their most creative and productive
in how they collaborate across physical
and digital environments.
As Managers of an organization's infrastructure,
you support teams across the company and across the world.
This means not just enabling diverse workflows,
but also balancing needs around Security and Compliance.
I'm Alexandra Lahuerta
and today I'm going to show you how a Project for the web
makes it easy to support diverse needs and workflows.
And these needs are diverse, for example,
the workflows in a Marketing Team
uses to get a product into customer's hands
is very different from how the Facilities Organization
supports the company's physical infrastructure.
And in addition to these different organizational workflows,
you have individuals and small teams
who just need an easy way to manage their projects.
And all of this is in the context of legal
and compliance requirements.
If you have a team in Europe that you need to support,
you may need to think about data residency,
which means that project information for that team
needs to be stored in a European data center.
Project for the web simplifies these capabilities
for your users.
That's because Project for the web
is built on top of the Power Platform.
Now the Power Platform is a set of applications
and capabilities that are there to make it easy
for you to do things like visualize data,
to build custom applications and to create automations
across the tools that your organization uses.
At the heart of all this is the Dataverse.
The Dataverse is essentially an Azure SQL database,
but enhanced with powerful and easy to use tools
for deploying and managing applications.
And the Dataverse what we're going to focus on
when we talk about integrating Project
into your organization.
So when it comes to supporting the needs
of diverse workloads,
the key thing that we will be covering
is the concept of Dataverse environments.
You can think of an environment as an individual database
with different properties, such as who can access it
and what applications store data in it.
Project for the web
supports three different types of environments.
The Default Environment is there to help people
quickly get started creating and managing projects.
It is ideal for workflows that may be more ad hoc
or for projects where the team spans
a broad slice of the company.
This is because everyone in the company
is automatically a member of the Default Environment.
The only thing you need to do
to enable someone to create a work breakdown structure
is to give them a license to Project.
Then that project manager
will be able to work with stakeholders within her own team,
as well as across the company.
If you're looking to have more control
over how Project is used your organization,
or if you need to support teams that have diverse workflows,
then you'll be working with Production Environments.
Creation and deployment of Project
in a Production Environment is a manual process.
In addition to creating the environment,
you'll also spend time setting up security roles
to limit the sets of users who can work
within that environment.
This work pays off in that
you can start more advanced scenarios,
such as enabling Project to support different workflows
for different teams.
Also, unlike the Default Environment,
Production Environments can be backed up and restored.
The last type of environment you can use Project with
is there to support teams responsible for their creation,
deployment and support of custom applications
within an organization.
Sandbox Environments are very similar
to Production Environments,
but give you a place to make changes to software
without putting production workloads at risk.
Once an issue is resolved
or once a custom application is ready for production,
you can convert a Sandbox Environment
into a Production Environment.
Now that we have some background,
I'll show you how to deploy Project in your organization.
This will be a demo
where I'll spend a few moments to familiarize you
with the admin experience for environments,
we'll create an environment and deploy Project into it.
I'll then show you
how you can easily apply a set of customizations
to the Project experience with the Accelerator solution.
And then you'll see how Project Home ties it all together
for your end users.
So let's get started.
Everything starts in the Power Platform admin center.
To get there, we visit admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com.
The Power Platform admin center
gives you everything you need to manage your environments.
If you've used any Dynamics 365 products,
this may already be familiar to you.
This is where you can see all the environments
in your Tenant.
And you have several tools here
to help you understand usage of them.
You can see in this list
that my Tenant already has several environments,
one of these is the Default Environment.
Because we automatically deploy Project
to the Default Environment.
It is easy to get started,
all you need to do is assign users a license to Project,
and you're good to go.
Also because the Default Environment
has generous access rights.
It is great for scenarios
where you have teams that represent
a broad slice of the company,
all working together in different projects.
You'll see in here,
we also already have a Production Environment.
Based on the label for this one,
it looks like it represents the USA region
of our Project Management Organization.
Now let's go through an example.
Let's say we have a facilities team for our US office
that is looking to manage their work
using Project for the web.
They're interested in deeply embedding Project
into their processes
and we'll likely need several customization
out of the box experience.
The first thing we'll do for them
is to create an environment in which they can work.
To do that, we press the New button up here.
We'll give it a name, let's call it facilities USA.
We'll go ahead and just create a production instance.
Alternatively, we could create a sandbox instance
and then create it to production later,
but we're not planning on doing any extensive development.
The next step is to give it a region.
Since this team is in the US,
we will choose a local region for them and press next.
This last step is important
since we need to create a database
where Project data will be stored.
It next asks us for information about the database.
If we like we can choose to give it a URL
that is easy to remember, but it is not critical.
There's one important setting on this page,
which is this toggle here for enable Dynamics 365 apps.
This needs to be no,
otherwise we won't be able to deploy Project.
And the last part is there's an optional step here,
which is to give the environment a security group.
This is a powerful way to limit access to the environment.
Pressing the select button
will open up a list of different groups in your Tenant.
These are both M365 groups, as well as security groups.
A word of caution,
if you have users who will be working extensively
with stakeholders across the company,
take care of when leveraging the security option.
With this form filled out, we then press save.
This is going to take a few minutes
so go ahead and grab a coffee.
Once the environment is ready,
the next step is to deploy Project into it.
First thing to do is click on the environment name,
that will take you into this details page.
At the top here, we have this resources menu
and in there choose the Dynamics 365 apps option.
This takes you to a page that shows the list of applications
already installed in that environment.
We now want to install Project,
so let's press the install app button in the top left.
Pressing that button gives us a menu
with a list of applications
that can be installed in this environment.
Towards the bottom of this list
you'll see one that says Microsoft Project Service Core,
choose that and press next.
Review the terms of service and go ahead and press install.
This process will take about 45 minutes.
When it's done, you can then go ahead and configure Project.
Now we've reached a great milestone.
We've created an environment and deployed Project into it.
Let's take a look at what the experience is like.
Now, anyone who has the appropriate license,
as well as the Project user and Project common roles,
we'll be able to use Project for the web.
To reach Project, users open Project waffle,
and in here they have a list of applications
available to them.
Users will have a Project Power App
for each environment that they're part of.
Here, we have a Power App for the Default Environment,
and then below it we have a Power App
for the Production Environment we just created
and deployed Project to.
You can see the name of the environment here
below the name of the app.
Let's open the app in the new environment
and quickly review the experience.
Now this is the Project app
that comes with all new installations
of Project for the web.
Here on the left we have a navigation menu
and along the top, we have a ribbon.
Now in this space, you'll have a list of all your projects,
right now it's blank.
Let's go ahead and create a new project,
press the New Project button,
and we're asked to fill in some basic information
about this project.
So let's go ahead and give it a name,
and then press save.
And with that, we have the bare bones
needed to make a project.
If you click over in the Tasks tab,
this is where everyone goes to build out their schedule.
And we can go ahead and create a new task.
With that we've just created a project and a schedule
that is stored in this new environment.
Now, in the beginning of the scenario,
we described that the facilities team
might want to have some customizations to this experience.
Maybe they want to be able to manage
an intake pipeline of projects.
Maybe they want to organize projects into programs
and do things like track risks and issues.
Let's see what that may look like.
To do that we'll pop over to a different environment
where we've already made those customizations.
We'll click on the Office waffle again
and this time we'll open up the Project Power App
for the Default Environment.
Here, we can see that there've been many customizations
applied to Project.
We've added some charts,
that are available in the middle of the page
and navigation along the left rail offers more
including new entries for project requests
and program management.
And what's great is that
deploying this kind of experience for your users is easy.
To do that we'll take a look at the Power Apps Maker Portal.
To reach the portal, we'll go to make.powerapps.com.
The Power App Maker Portal gives you all the tools
you need to create and customize applications.
You don't need to install anything on your machine.
All you need is a web browser.
To get started you pick an environment to work in
by clicking here on the top right menu.
We'll switch to that Facilities Environment to get started.
If you look here at the left,
you have all the tools you need to create applications
edit existing ones
and deploy pre-packaged customizations to the environment.
If you're looking to deliver the experience
that I showed earlier,
you can customize the Project Power App yourself here.
Or you can deploy the customizations
via the Project for the web Accelerator.
The Accelerator, is a free starter solution
that you can download and install
on any environment that has Project.
To deploy it, we'll switch to the Solutions menu item here.
Solutions are a way of packaging customizations,
and applications that you can use in your environment.
This environment
has several solutions already deployed to it.
Here you can see the solutions needed to run Project.
To deploy the Accelerator,
you first need to download the zip file.
And once you have it, you can go to the import button,
browse to the location that you downloaded it,
and then just begin the import process.
There are a couple steps here
that you'll just work through around configuration.
And when you're done, press import.
Let's change gears for a moment.
I've shown you how easy it is to enable different scenarios
by creating environments, deploying Project
and applying powerful customizations using the Accelerator.
But to be able to work effectively
Project Managers need a single place
where they can go to reach all their projects.
That single place is Project Home.
To get there, click on the waffle, press the Project button.
Through Project Home,
we've made it easy for your Project Managers
to quickly reach all of their projects,
regardless of which environment the project is in.
In Home they'll see projects that they've accessed recently,
as well as favorites that they've pinned.
In this brief presentation,
we've taken a look at how easy it is
to enable more advanced scenarios for deploying Project.
If you'd like to learn more
about how Project can help your organization
manage their work,
take a look at the links that accompany in this video.
I'm Alexandra Lahuerta, thank you for your time.
(bright upbeat music)