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Project Server 2016—born in the cloud

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We’re pleased to announce general availability of Project Server 2016, which provides significant project and portfolio management (PPM) value to our on-premises customers.

Customers who would like to evaluate the capabilities of Project Server 2016 can download trial versions at this website.

Project Server 2016 value

Project Server 2016 delivers value in the following areas:

  • Evolution of resource management—Project Server 2016 introduces a new interaction model between project managers and resources managers. This new feature is called Resource Engagements and it helps facilitate coordination and commitments around resources and the projects they spend their time on. In addition, resource managers also get a new feature called Capacity and Engagements Heatmap that provides a visual view of the capacity of their resources, so they can make informed allocation decisions. More information about these features can be found at a recent blog post.
  • Performance and scale inspired by cloud—From an engineering standpoint, Project Server is built from the same code used to deliver our cloud service. Everything we learned from running our cloud service at scale in Office 365 contributed towards improving the reliability, scalability and performance of Project Server 2016. This release is a summation of the enhancements we have been making to our cloud service, e.g., unified scheduling, performance and scale optimizations, etc.
  • Infrastructure consolidation—In Project Server 2016, all the project data is stored alongside the SharePoint data in the SharePoint content database. This simplifies the administration of the SharePoint farm since each Project Web App (PWA) site no longer requires a dedicated database that needs to be maintained. This reduces IT overhead and improves the backup and restore story.
  • Ease of deployment—The Project Server 2016 installer is fully integrated into SharePoint Server 2016 Enterprise—a separate installation is no longer required as it was in previous versions.
  • User experience improvements—Users of the browser-based PWA will get some new features, such as the ability to add multiple timelines to the Project Center or schedule pages, as well as the ability to customize the date range or look and feel of these timelines.

Learn more in the Project Server 2016 TechNet documentation. We welcome any feedback through our forums, UserVoice and social channels.