Provision Project Web App Within SharePoint 2016

Description

Project Server is now integrated with Share Point 2016. This article describes how to activate the Project Server Web App within Share Point.

Microsoft Project Server 2013 as stated on the Microsoft Office Product website,

"It is a flexible solution for project portfolio management (PPM) and everyday work. Team members, project participants, and business decision makers can get started, prioritize project portfolio investments and deliver the intended business value from virtually anywhere."

 

This was sold as a separate license for use with Share Point 2013. It also needed a separate installation.

For using it within SharePoint 2013 we had to run the Project Server installer and then run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard. The wizard had to be run on all application servers in the farm before you could start using Project Server. However, Microsoft realized the need for integrating it into Share Point. In Share Point 2016 it comes inbuilt as a Service Application within the system. All you have to do is create the Service Application and activate a couple of features. The good thing is you don’t need a separate license for using it within Share Point 2016 and the bad thing is in future they intend to license it.

Let’s try to provision Project Server Service Application and Site Collection in our Share Point 2016 environment.

• Go to Share point Central administration.
  
  
  
  
• Select ‘Manage Service Applications’ from the ‘Application Management’ section.
  
  
  
  
• From the next window click on ‘New ‘and select ‘Project Server Service Application’.
  
  
  
  
• Next step involves the creation of the Project Server Service Application. Specify the name of the Service Application and provide a managed account to administer the application.
  
  
  
  
• Click ‘OK’. This will successfully provision the Project Server Service Application.
  It will be listed in the available Service Application group as shown below:
  
  

Now we are all set to start off by creating a new Project Web App instance. But if we go inside the Service Application we won’t see any options to create one. Neither it is available anywhere within the Central Admin.

The work around is to create a Team Site and convert it into a Project Web App. Let’s see how to do it.

• Create a New Site Collection. It can be any template. Let’s take a Team site.
  
  
  
  Upon successful creation of the Site collection we have a fully functional team site.
  
  
  
  
• Once the Site Collection is created, Navigate to Site Settings –> Site Collection Features.
  
  Here we can see a couple of Project Server features that were installed as a part of the Service Application creation
  
  
  
  
• Enable “Project Web App Settings” feature and you have the site converted to a Project Web Instance. But it gave me an unexpected error as below:
  
  
  This is something Microsoft will have to look into in the final release as this comes up intermittently. Let’s power up PowerShell and try to activate the feature from there .
  
  
  
  Thus we have successfully turned the Project web app feature from PowerShell.
  
  
  
  Finally we have converted the Team site into a Project Web App. If we go back to Central Admin and navigate to the Project Server Service application, we can see our recently transformed site under it.
  
  

So we have seen how to create a Project Server service application and convert a Team site into Project Web App from the UI. SharePoint Preview does not give us any other option to create the Web App directly from the UI. However we have an option to use PowerShell and create it directly which we will see in my upcoming article.