Discontinued features and modified functionality in Project Server 2013

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This article describes features and functionality that have been discontinued or changed in Microsoft Project Server 2013.

Project Site Permissions removed from the Project Site Provisioning Settings page

In previous versions of Project Server, the Project Site Provisioning Settings page included a Project Site Permissions section. In this section, an administrator could select a check box to automatically synchronize Project Web App users with project sites when those sites are created, when project managers publish projects, and when user permissions change in Project Server. If the administrator cleared this check box, Project Server users were never automatically synchronized with project sites.

In Project Server 2013, the Project Site Permissions section of the Project Site Provisioning Settings page has been removed.

Reason for the change

This option was removed because improvements were made in Project Server 2013 to increase processing speed for user synchronization requests, which made having a separate permission for this purpose unnecessary. When user synchronization is enabled in Project Server 2013, publishing a project automatically synchronizes the list of users for the corresponding project site.

Project task synchronization with Exchange Server

In previous versions of Project Server, users could manually set up synchronization with Exchange Server so that they could manage tasks in a simple way using Outlook. In Project Server 2013, this feature has been significantly modified to provide an improved and more robust integration with Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Foundation 2013. However, support for integrating Project Server 2013 with previous versions of Exchange Server has been removed. Project Server 2013 can only be synchronized with mailboxes hosted on Exchange Server 2013.

Reason for the change

By requiring Exchange Server 2013 for Outlook integration, all of a user's tasks, including those from Outlook, SharePoint Foundation 2013, and Project Server 2013, can be aggregated and synchronized on a single SharePoint site. This provides a broad, inclusive view of all tasks on a single user's plate, across multiple task tracking systems. This is a much more complete model than what was included in previous releases of Project Server.

Backwards compatibility support

In previous versions of Project Server, users could connect an earlier version of the Project Professional client application to a later version of Project Server. For example, users could connect Office Project Professional 2007 to Project Server 2010. This was referred to as "backward compatibility mode," or BCM. In Project Server 2013, BCM is not supported. Users must have Project Professional 2013 to connect to Project Server 2013.

Reason for the change

BCM functionality was not commonly used in previous versions of Project Server.