Are you still running your projects in Project Online or Project for the web? Then a clock is ticking that is easy to miss in day to day work. Microsoft is shutting down Project Online for good on 30 September 2026. After that you no longer have access to project plans, portfolios and reports, unless you have moved in time.
The tricky part: the shutdown does not happen all at once. Since 2 April 2026 the SharePoint 2013 workflows that many approval processes in Project Online rely on have already stopped working. So if you were counting on automated approvals or stage gates, you have been working with a crutch for a while now, possibly without noticing.
The good news: Microsoft has already set up a new home for you. In this article I show you how to run projects with a schedule, dependencies and milestones in Planner Premium from today, and how to move across in good time before the shutdown.
The countdown: what happens on 30 September 2026
Project Online has been part of the toolkit for many project leads for over ten years. On 30 September 2026 Microsoft retires the service completely. Worth knowing: sales of standalone Project Online licences to new customers already ended on 1 October 2025. On top of that, since 2 April 2026 the SharePoint 2013 based workflows that many companies used to handle their approvals and stage gates no longer work.
As the successor, Microsoft recommends Planner with a Premium licence for most teams. If you already use Project Online, access to the corresponding Premium features in Planner is normally included automatically. Larger organisations with very complex portfolio management can alternatively move to Project Server (Subscription Edition) and run it themselves. For the vast majority of small and medium sized companies, though, Planner Premium is entirely sufficient. Planner itself has developed considerably over the past months anyway, more on that in my overview of the big Planner updates in 2026.
Step 1: check which licence you need
Before you get started, get clarity on your licence. Microsoft has folded the former «Project» product family into Planner and split it into three tiers:
- Planner (basic): already included in most Microsoft 365 plans and enough for simple task lists and Kanban boards.
- Planner and Project Plan 1: the most affordable Premium tier, browser based, with timeline view, dependencies and reports.
- Planner and Project Plan 3 (or higher): adds the desktop client and advanced resource management, for teams with more demanding projects.
The quickest way to find out what you already have is to check the Microsoft 365 admin center under «Billing» and then «Licenses», or simply ask your IT administration. If there is no Premium licence yet: Planner offers you a 30 day free trial so you can try out every feature in this article straight away. And for a more informal project hub with no Premium licence at all, Microsoft Loop as an alternative is worth a look too.
Step 2: create a Premium plan or upgrade an existing one
This is how you get to your first Premium plan:
- Open planner.cloud.microsoft in your browser or the Planner app in Teams.
- Click «My Plans» and then «New plan».
- In the selection dialog, pick one of the Premium options instead of a basic plan.
- If you do not have a licence yet, the 30 day trial starts automatically, or you request a licence directly from your administration.
If you would rather upgrade an existing basic plan: open the plan, click «Timeline» or the three dots (...) and select one of the Premium views. Planner then offers you the matching upgrade right there. All your existing tasks, buckets and labels stay intact, you lose nothing.
Step 3: switch on the Timeline view with the Gantt chart
Now it becomes visible. Open your Premium plan and click the «Timeline» tab at the top. Enter start and end dates for your most important tasks, if you have not done so already.
Planner automatically draws a Gantt chart from that, with every task and its connections. Particularly handy: in the same view you can see the critical path, meaning the tasks whose delay directly affects your end date. 📊 Every other task has slack, these ones do not. That tells you at a glance where to step in first when things slip, instead of reviewing the whole plan for every problem.
Step 4: set up dependencies between tasks
Without dependencies, any schedule is just a collection of individual dates. Only with them does it become a real project.
- Open a task in the Timeline view.
- In the «Dependency» field, select the linked task.
- Set the dependency type: «Finish to start» (the most common one, task B only starts once A is finished), «Start to start», «Finish to finish» or «Start to finish».
Once the link is in place, Planner's scheduling engine takes over the rest. If a supplier's delivery slips or a task takes longer than planned, Planner automatically adjusts all downstream start and end dates. You no longer have to work out by hand which sub task is now running how late.
Step 5: set milestones
For the big fixed points in your project, ordinary tasks are not enough. Create milestones instead: in the Timeline view, click «New task» and switch on the «Mark as milestone» option. A milestone gets only a date, no duration. It marks a point in time, not work.
Use milestones for things like «Kickoff», «Design sign off» or «Go live». 🏁 That way everyone on the team sees at a glance where the important fixed points in the project sit, without having to click through every single task.
Step 6: secure your Project Online data in time
The final step concerns everyone who is still actively working in Project Online. Secure what you need long term, and do it early: export important reports and portfolio overviews, document your existing approval processes from the SharePoint workflows and do not leave the migration of running projects to Planner until September.
If you manage a larger number of projects or complex portfolio structures, talk to your IT administration or a Microsoft partner early on. A structured migration can be carried out cleanly in a few weeks, but hardly at all in the last few days before 30 September.
A tip from practice
Once your Premium plan is set up, use the Planner agent (formerly Project Manager agent) via the floating icon at the bottom right of the plan. Ask it directly: «Which tasks are on the critical path and currently at risk?» or «Summarise the status of all milestones this week for me.» The agent reads your entire schedule and answers with a concrete list, instead of you clicking through the whole Gantt chart yourself. 🤖 On larger projects with many dependencies and several milestones in particular, that saves you several minutes of searching every week and you never walk into a status meeting unprepared again. For the ongoing coordination on individual tasks, it is also worth a look at task chat, where the discussion stays right with the task instead of disappearing somewhere in a Teams channel.
Conclusion & next step
Retiring Project Online sounds like a major upheaval, but in practice it is mostly a question of timing. If you move now, you have until 30 September to set everything up properly and get comfortable with the timeline, dependencies and milestone view at your own pace. If you wait until September, you will be doing all of that under time pressure.
Try it now: create your first Premium plan today and enter the dates for your currently most important project. After the first schedule alone you will notice how much clarity you gain. 💪
