Migrate from Planview PPM Pro to Microsoft Project

PPM Pro Portfolios are top-level strategic containers with alignment scores and portfolio-level financials. Microsoft Project has no Portfolio object. We map each Portfolio to a top-level Project record with a Project Summary Task representing portfolio-level metadata. Portfolio alignment scores and strategic goal references migrate as custom fields on the summary Project. If the customer has fewer than five Portfolios, we recommend the summary-Project approach; for more than five, we recommend a separate Excel or Power BI portfolio tracking workbook maintained outside Project.

PPM Pro Programs group related Projects under a Portfolio with program-level budgets and status. We map each Program to a top-level Project or a Project Summary Task within the corresponding Portfolio-level Project. Program budget totals and owner assignments become custom fields on the destination record. Because Microsoft Project has no native Program object, Programs and their contained Projects share the same scheduling context, which may affect timeline rollup visibility compared to PPM Pro.

PPM Pro Project records map directly to Microsoft Project Project records. Standard fields migrate: Project Name, Start Date, End Date, Status, Priority, Owner, and Description. Custom User-Defined Fields of type Text, Number, Date, and Dropdown map to Project-level custom fields in Project Online or Project for the Web. Active/inactive status mapping and any archived-project handling depend on whether the customer wants closed projects imported as historical reference or excluded from the active workspace.

PPM Pro Tasks map to Microsoft Project Tasks with WBS hierarchy preserved as task outline levels. Start date, finish date, percent complete, duration, and effort hours migrate directly. Gantt dependency links (Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish, Start-to-Finish) are reconstructed from the PPM Pro task link records. Predecessors and successors map to Project Task dependencies by Task ID resolution. We flag any circular dependency references detected in PPM Pro and raise them before import so the customer can resolve manually.

PPM Pro Resources (people or roles with capacity, skills, and utilization data) map to Microsoft Project Resources. Resource name, email, type (material vs work), max units, and cost rate migrate. Availability calendars migrate as resource calendars in Project. Department and cost-center mappings from PPM Pro become custom resource fields in Project. If the destination is Project for the Web (Dataverse-backed), resource management capabilities are more limited than Project Online; we confirm the destination version during scoping.

PPM Pro Time Entries record hours logged against Projects and Tasks by Resources with dates, hours, and cost codes. In Microsoft Project, historical time entries do not create native timesheet records unless Project Online Timesheets are enabled in Project Web App. We map Time Entry hours to Assignment Actual Work on the corresponding Task-Resource assignment. Cost amounts from PPM Pro time entries become custom fields on the Task since Project cost tracking is primarily forward-looking. We flag any billable vs non-billable time entry flags for manual categorization in the destination.

PPM Pro Demand Requests capture project intake before formal approval with requester, estimated effort, priority, and status. Microsoft Project has no demand management object. We do not migrate Demand Requests as live records. Instead, we export the full Demand Request history as a CSV artifact with all fields, deliver it as a named file, and document that the customer should evaluate Project Online Project Hub or a separate SharePoint list for demand intake post-migration. Approved demand requests that have already become PPM Pro Projects migrate as standard Projects.

PPM Pro User-Defined Fields of type Text, Number, Date, and Dropdown on Projects and Tasks map to Project Online Enterprise Custom Fields or Project for the Web Dataverse custom columns. We identify all active UDF definitions during discovery and pre-create the corresponding fields in the destination before data import. Dropdown UDF values become custom field lookup tables in Project Online. We handle type-level data mapping (e.g., a PPM Pro Number field with currency formatting maps to a Project Number field with manual unit designation).

PPM Pro project-level budget records include planned cost, actual cost, labor cost, and expense line items. Microsoft Project supports cost fields per task and per resource but not a multi-level budget breakdown structure. We map planned cost to the Project Summary Task cost field and actual cost to a custom field. If the customer uses PPM Pro cost codes, we map them to Project cost categories or custom fields and flag any multi-level cost hierarchy that cannot be represented in a flat cost structure. Currency mismatches between PPM Pro multi-currency budgets and Project's single-project currency are flagged during scoping.

PPM Pro User records (name, email, role, active/inactive status) map to both Microsoft Project Resources (for scheduling assignments) and, if Project Online is the destination, to Project Web App users. We extract every distinct user referenced on Project, Task, Resource, and Time Entry records and match by email against the destination environment's user roster. Users without a match in the destination go to a reconciliation queue for the admin to provision before record import resumes.