Bauer Automate - Blog #ProjectPoint

The Register That Still Knows Where Everything Is

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0600

Six months into the year, someone asks a simple question: where does the Henderson project keep its documents? If your project sites were built by hand, the honest answer is a search, a guess, and a message to whoever set it up, if they are still here. The site exists. The board exists. The register of risks exists. What does not exist is one place that reliably knows they all do, and how to get to each one.

That is the quiet failure of building sites one at a time. Each one is fine on the day it is made. But nothing holds the list of them all, so the map of your portfolio lives in people's heads and in half-remembered links, and it degrades a little with every project, every reorg, and every person who leaves. The problem was never making a project site. It was keeping a growing pile of them findable.

Making the site is the easy part

Provisioning a workspace is a one-time act. Keeping a portfolio of workspaces navigable, so any project can be found by someone who did not set it up, is the ongoing one, and it is the part hand-built sites never solve. A folder of bookmarks is not a map. A Teams message asking "what was the site for Henderson again" is the sound of the map having failed.

The register is the index, and it links back

ProjectPoint's answer is that the Projects list is not just where projects are started; it is the index that stays current by construction. When a project is provisioned, its record links itself back to the new site and to its Planner board. The register does not drift out of date, because the linking is part of the same run that creates the site, not a step someone has to remember afterwards. To find any project, you open the register, find the row, and follow the link. The list that starts your projects is the same list that always knows where they went.

The hub routes people, in your own navigation

Findability is not only the register's job. Each new project site joins your hub, and the hub navigation updates so the project appears where people already look, with audience targeting so they see the projects that are actually theirs rather than everyone's. The homepage is generated with the project's own details filled in, so a person opening a project for the first time lands somewhere oriented instead of on an empty site they have to decode. The map is not a document you maintain. It is the way the sites were built.

Why this is the part you buy first

This is the entry tier of a project management platform, and it is deliberately the foundation. The registry and the provisioning engine are the component that is built, demonstrable, and buyable today, and the reason they come first is that everything else the platform adds, the

risk and decision registers, the time and budget capture, the reporting on top, is only worth putting inside a project site if the project site can be found later. The map has to hold before the things on the map are worth drawing.

The limit worth stating plainly

ProjectPoint creates project sites and keeps them indexed. It does not archive them, expire them, or decommission them when a project ends, and it has no sprawl reporting or permissions auditing across your tenant. If the problem you actually have is controlling the whole lifecycle of sites at scale, closing down the finished ones and policing who can see what, that is a different category of product with a different buyer, and those tools are usually complementary to this one rather than in competition with it. We would rather point you at them than pretend a provisioning engine is a governance platform.

Get in touch, and we will show you a register that still knows where everything is.

Book A FREE Discovery Call

No Two Project Sites the Same

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0600

Open your last three project sites side by side. If they are three different shapes, that is not a tidiness problem. It is the reason nothing can be found in the same place twice, and the reason every governance conversation has to be had again on every project.

That inconsistency has a simple origin. Every one of those sites was built by whoever had time that week, structured however they happened to be thinking about the project that morning, with permissions set from memory rather than from a policy anyone wrote down. None of that is negligence. It is what happens when "stand up a project site" has no fixed answer, only a person doing their best against a deadline.

One office's habits become three

Now multiply that by three offices. One office's habit of naming a folder a certain way becomes three different habits, one per office, and none of the three people involved did anything wrong. Each is being reasonably consistent with themselves. The firm is not being consistent with itself, and because nobody individually caused the drift, nobody individually owns fixing it. It just accumulates, one project at a time, until "where do we usually put the meeting minutes" has three correct answers depending on which office you ask.

Careful is not a system

The instinct is to fix this with a memo: a naming convention, a checklist, a line in the kickoff agenda. It does not hold, for the same reason it never holds anywhere else in a firm's document practice. A consistency problem is not solved by asking people to be more careful under deadline pressure. It is solved by making the consistent version the only version anyone can produce. The site has to arrive built. Nobody should be assembling it by hand in the first place, no matter how careful they mean to be.

What actually gets cloned

That is what a golden template means in practice: cloned in full every time a project starts, not handed over as a starting point for somebody to finish. The site is created and joined to the right hub automatically, and the hub navigation updates to point to it. From there the clone runs layer by layer: the same site features, the same permissions, the same content types and site columns, the same list structure, the same library structure, the same navigation, the same default folder content already in place. A Planner board is created alongside it, seeded with the template's own tasks rather than handed over blank. The homepage generates itself, project details already filled in. None of it is a scaffold somebody finishes later. It is the finished site, on day one, the same shape as the last one and the one before that, whichever office opened it.

A project list that stays true

There is a second piece that matters as much as the site itself. The project record that started the whole process, the row in the project registry, links back automatically to the site and the board it just created. That sounds small until you have watched a project list go stale the ordinary way: a project gets added, a site gets built by hand somewhere else, and six months later the two have drifted apart, or the link never gets made at all because making it was one more manual step nobody prioritized. Here the link is not a step somebody has to remember. It is a direct consequence of provisioning, which means the project list stays a true index of where the work actually lives instead of becoming one more record somebody has to reconcile against reality.

What this does not do yet

One limit is worth stating plainly, because a reader who discovers it later stops trusting everything else in this post. The template improves over time. A site provisioned before an improvement lands does not receive it after the fact. There is no drift detection today, and no way to re-apply an updated template to a site that already exists. Every project going forward gets the current template. The ones already built keep the shape they were built with. That is a real gap, not a hidden one, and it is better to know it now than to discover it in a steering meeting.

Get in touch, and we will walk your last three project sites side by side.

Book A FREE Discovery Call

The Day Project Online Switches Off

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0600

On 30 September 2026, Microsoft switches Project Online off. Access to the service goes with it, and so does the project data that has been living inside it.

That is the whole fact, and it does not need decoration. The date is fixed, it is public, and it is close. Whatever is sitting in Project Online today, schedules, task lists, project history, is only reachable through a service Microsoft has already scheduled to disappear. If your organisation still runs projects there, this is not a warning about something that might happen.

It is a countdown to something that will.

Where Microsoft points you next

Microsoft's own answer for what comes after Project Online is not a straight swap. Project for the Web, the product Microsoft built as the next generation of Project, retired in August 2025. What Microsoft offers today in its place, and what the premium tier is now branded, is Planner Premium.

That is worth sitting with before you assume it covers the same ground. A tool built for managing projects is being followed by the premium tier of a task app. Whether that is enough depends entirely on what you actually used Project Online for, and the honest answer for most PMOs is that it does not cover the same ground. More on why below.

The honest limit, said here and not on a call

There is no tool we have found, ours or anyone else's, that lifts a Project Online project's full history out of the service and lands it somewhere new intact. If a vendor tells you they can move your Project Online data out, ask them to show you the tool actually doing it, against real data, before you take the claim on faith. We do not have that tool. We are not going to imply we do to make this an easier conversation, and a workspace built on that implication would not be worth much anyway. This is the part of the post that does not help us, and it is why the rest of it is worth reading.

Two different problems

Once the history question is out of the way, it is worth separating what is actually being compared. Scheduling and workspace are two different problems, and Planner Premium only answers one of them.

Planner Premium answers what tasks exist, in what order, and by when. It does not answer where the project's documents live, who has access to them, what the risks are, who the stakeholders are, or what was decided along the way and why. Those are workspace questions, not scheduling questions, and a scheduling tool getting better at scheduling does not make them go away.

Why that will not change on its own

That gap is not a missing feature waiting on a future update. It is structural. Planner Premium stores its data in Dataverse, not SharePoint, and a Dataverse record is not a SharePoint site. There is no project site attached to a Planner Premium plan, no document library, no content

types, no site columns, no navigation, and no permissions model built around the project. Those are the pieces that would need to exist for Planner Premium to answer the workspace questions above, and none of them are part of what it is.

That means the gap does not close by waiting. Planner Premium can get a better Gantt-style view, a faster board, more fields, and it will still have no project site behind it, because that was never what it was built to be.

What a project workspace looks like instead

A SharePoint project workspace is a different kind of thing entirely: a site built for one project, with its own document library, its own content types and site columns already set up for what that project needs, its own navigation, and default folders already in place. A Planner board
sits inside it, seeded with the site's own starting tasks, and the site links back to a central project registry so the record of what projects exist stays accurate instead of becoming a list nobody trusts.

This does not replace the Planner entitlement already included with most Microsoft 365 licences. It rides on it. The board is still a Planner board, opened the way your team already opens one. What changes is everything around it: the site the board lives inside, the documents that sit next to it, and the record that ties the two together.

None of this reaches back into Project Online. It is not a migration, and it does not claim to be one. It is where your next project lives, built correctly from the start, inside the Microsoft 365 you already have.

If Project Online is still where your projects live, get in touch!

Book A FREE Discovery Call