Office 365 - Synchronize Tasks in Microsoft Project to SharePoint Online

A - OBJECTIVE: 

To increase your productivity by managing a single source of tasks effectively across many platforms (Microsoft Project MPP file, SharePoint Task List, SharePoint Calendar), you should consider the synchronization feature of task lists at Office 365 (in the template Project).

4 business objectives you will achieve are:

1. A consolidated single source of tasks in MPP format which can be shared across your team members.

2. A list of tasks in SharePoint which has the same records as the MPP file. From this list, you can customize to have:
(i) a visual dashboard to show how many tasks are upcoming or overdue
(ii) a workflow reminder to be sent daily/weekly to admins or persons-in-charge 

3. A project summary to show (i) current task, (ii) overdue tasks, & (iii) upcoming tasks.

4. An overlaying calendar built in the same task list to show the activities of each members in different color codes.

All are achievable within your Office 365 environment !!!

B - PROBLEMS :

You need to invest in:

1. Some licenses for your team at Office 365. The good thing is that Office 365 allows you to share these good features with external users (e.g. gmail account holder), and the bad thing of this matter is the trade-off for your security.

2. A license of Microsoft Project 2013 Professional edition.

3. Effort to customize some of the work (e.g. dashboard, workflow, overlaying calendars).

C - SOLUTION:

To elaborate all basic details which can address the mentioned

1. From your MS Project 2013 (Professional edition), you open a local MPP file, check its columns properly and synchronize them to Office 365 (Microsoft's reference). 

Note: you should use the column "Resource Names" at MPP file carefully because it will be synced to the SharePoint column "Assigned To" which is a People-Picker field. If the values are not in the People Picker, sync job will get an error.

2. From your Office 365 environment, you can either:
     (i) create a SharePoint site (Project template) manually in advance, or 
     (ii) let MS Project Sync Job initialize a new SharePoint site automatically. 
Subsequently, you can re-visit your site to update SharePoint task list (Microsoft's reference).

D - SOURCE CODE: 

In this section, what you need is SharePoint configuration & some client-side scripts.