Today I discovered Project Web App. I'd always wondered why the Project Professional licenses we had were called Project Online even though they were desktop apps, and now I understand.
I had already progressed quite far in creating a way for our field foremen to update their task status using a sharepoint list connected to a project file, but then my boss asked me to find a way to set up reminders of upcoming tasks, and researching that lead me to discover Project Online and the Project Web App.
One thing we had run up against previously was that Microsoft Teams creates a Team Site for each of your teams, and the Project Site I created in sharepoint was different and separate than these team sites. In an effort to standardize on using the Team Site that already existed for our project, I exported the MPP from the Project site and resynced it with the Team Site that we already had for our project. This was fine, and would have continued to be fine, except then I discovered the PWA.
I spent a lot of time today trying to reason through the best way of testing the PWA with our current task list. I settled on exporting the MPP completely, and then using the "Save to Project Web App" wizard that exists inside the Project Online desktop app. I figured this was a good route because none of my existing sharepoint sites were showing up in Project Web App when I hit "add existing sharepoint list to Project Web app", and I suspected I was running up against a limitation of Classic vs Modern site structure.
I managed to get my MPP file in Project into Project Web App, and that was going fine, except now I wanted to associate it with the Microsoft Teams project site that we had created for this project. I went to that Teams project site, and enabled "Project Functionality" and "Project Web App Connectivity" in the site features, but upon going to the Connected Sharepoint Sites configuration page in PWA and choosing my project, hitting Edit Site Address and pasting in my Teams project site URL, I was presented with an error dialogue that "The Specified Site is not a child of the default site collection"
After some googling I've found that there was once a Project Server option that would allow you to specify project sites outside of the default site collection. I don't entirely understand site collections, or what site collection my sites are part of, and I couldn't find that option in Sharepoint Online in the PWA settings page or anything.
What's the best way to do this? Ideally I'd like to use the sharepoint site created by Microsoft Teams as the canonical project site, as we lean heavily on OneNote and the notebook we are editing is attached to that site. Additionally it would be nice to be able to push the task list from that site to the Microsoft Teams interface using the "sharepoint list" tab element, but that doesn't seem to show my task list as a choice.
I feel like this whole thing is caught in a limbo due to the creation of Modern sites, and their associated change in site structure. Documentation has not been updated for the Office 365 workflow, PWA is still firmly in the land of Classic, etc.
UPDATE: After some reading, I now realize that Office 365 Groups that are created by Microsoft Teams are actually Site Collections, and not Sites. Additionally it would seem PWA actually has its own site collection, and i'm left wondering if that site collection is the one it was referring to as the "default site collection" or if it was in fact talking about the actual default site collection for my sharepoint instance.
Is it possible to allow PWA to work on sites outside of that default site collection it is referring to? The option used to exist in Project Server, and now in Project Online it seems to have disappeared.
