How to Import Microsoft Project for the Web (Premium) into Onplana

How to Import Microsoft Project for the Web Premium into Onplana

Microsoft consolidated To Do, Planner, and Project for the Web into one Planner app inside Teams in 2024. The unified UI hides a real architectural split underneath:

• Basic Planner plans live in Microsoft Graph as flat task collections per group
• Premium plans (Project for the Web with Gantt, dependencies, resources) live in Dataverse, Microsoft's relational database for Power Platform, with a 40+ field schema across multiple tables

If you're paying for the Premium tier and you import via the basic Planner Graph endpoints, you lose every field that justified the upgrade. Onplana ships a separate Premium importer that reads from Dataverse directly, so the dependencies, scheduled effort, and resource assignments come across with the rest of the project.

This post is the step-by-step guide to running that import.

Quick check, do you actually need the Premium importer?

Look at any plan in your Planner app inside Teams. If you can do any of these, you're on Project for the Web Premium and the Premium importer is the right tool:

• Set finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, or start-to-finish dependencies between tasks
• Enter scheduled effort in hours/days, not just a due date
• See a Gantt chart with critical path
• Assign multiple bookable resources to one task with allocation percentages
• Define custom fields via the Power Platform admin centre

If your plans are flat task lists with buckets and you can't do the above, that's basic Planner, and the basic Planner importer is the right tool.

In the Onplana plan picker (Migrate → Microsoft Planner) every plan carries a tier badge, basic or premium, based on a single sample-task probe. If the badge says premium, switch to the Project for the Web tile in the wizard.

What gets imported (the field-by-field translation)

The Premium importer reads from five Dataverse tables in parallel and assembles them into a single Onplana project:

The mappings worth flagging:

• msdyn_progress is a 0..1 decimal in Dataverse, multiplied by 100 in Onplana. A 47% complete task appears as progress: 47 after import.
• msdyn_effort is in minutes, divided by 60 and rounded to 2dp for Onplana's estimatedHours. Null/zero stays null, Onplana doesn't fabricate an estimate when Dataverse didn't have one.
• Priority option set values map: 0=Low, 1=Medium, 2=High, 3=Urgent → LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH / CRITICAL. Anything ≥3 clamps to CRITICAL (some installs add custom values up to 9).
• Dependency type uses Microsoft's option-set encoding: 1=FF, 2=FS, 3=SF, 4=SS. Note the off-by-one, FS (the most common type) is value 2, not 1, because Microsoft sorted alphabetically rather than by frequency. The importer's mapping table handles this so you don't have to.
• Lag converts minutes to days. Dataverse stores lag in minutes; Onplana stores in fractional days. A 4-hour lag becomes 0.17 days.
• Parent task linkage runs in two passes. Pass A creates every task with parentId = null and builds a Dataverse-id → Onplana-id map. Pass B walks the tasks and sets parentId from the map. This avoids forward-reference problems when child tasks appear in the response before parents.
• Status is inferred from progress, not stored directly. progress >= 99.9% → DONE, progress > 0 → IN_PROGRESS, otherwise → TODO. Microsoft's msdyn_completedon timestamp isn't separately mirrored; the progress signal is enough.

The consent prerequisite, and why it's separate

Project for the Web Premium needs one extra consent step beyond the Microsoft connection that powers basic Planner import. Here's why.

AAD access tokens are scoped to a resource. The Microsoft connection that backs Planner has a token whose audience is https://graph.microsoft.com. If you call Dataverse with that token, Microsoft 401s, you'd need a token whose audience is https://contoso.crm.dynamics.com.

Onplana solves this without a second OAuth round-trip per user. The trick:

The flow:

1. User connects Microsoft (one time) with the Dynamics scope ticked alongside Tasks/Groups
2. AAD records the consent and issues an offline_access refresh_token that carries access to every resource the user consented to
3. When you click Import in the wizard, Onplana swaps that refresh_token at the AAD /oauth2/v2.0/token endpoint, requesting ${instanceUrl}/.default
4. AAD returns a Dataverse-scoped access token valid for ~60 minutes
5. Onplana caches the token in-process, keyed by (connection-id, instance-url), with a 50-minute TTL

A 5,000-task import burns one token swap, not 5,000. The cache survives across imports against the same instance.

The catch: the AAD app registration that powers Onplana's social sign-in must declare Dynamics CRM → user_impersonation as a delegated permission. Microsoft requires this be enabled on the AAD app side; user-level consent on its own isn't sufficient. If the consent is missing, the import returns a 412 CONSENT_REQUIRED and the wizard banners "Reconnect Microsoft with the Dataverse permission" with a link to Settings → Integrations.

If you're an AAD admin reading this:

• Microsoft Entra admin centre → App registrations → [the AAD app you registered for Onplana] → API permissions
• Add a permission → Dynamics CRM → Delegated → user_impersonation
• Grant admin consent if your tenant requires it for org-wide access

One-time setup, applies tenant-wide. Without it, even users who tick the dynamics scope at consent get a 412 because the underlying permission isn't enabled.

Step-by-step import

Once consent is in place, the user-facing flow is four short stages:

1. Instance verification

Open Migrate → Project for the Web (Premium). Paste your Dataverse environment URL, find it in the Power Platform admin centre under Environments. Examples:

• contoso.crm.dynamics.com
• contoso.crm5.dynamics.com (sovereign-cloud regional suffix)
• https://contoso.crm.dynamics.com/

Onplana normalises the input (adds https://, strips trailing slash) and runs a WhoAmI call to verify the token works against the instance. The response includes the organisation's friendly name; the breadcrumb at the top of the wizard renders contoso.crm.dynamics.com (Acme Corp) for confirmation.

If the test fails, the banner tells you why with a stable error code:

Code	Meaning
CONSENT_REQUIRED	AAD app missing user_impersonation; reconnect with dynamics scope
UNAUTHORIZED	Token rejected; user lacks access to this environment
FORBIDDEN	User authenticated but no read on this environment
INVALID_INSTANCE	URL doesn't parse as a Dataverse host

2. Project pick

Onplana enumerates every msdyn_project row the user can read. The picker shows:

• Project title
• Last modified date (Dataverse modifiedon)
• Scheduled start → end window
• Progress percentage (calculated from the project header, not aggregated)

Search by title. Click to advance.

3. Preview

The preview screen shows counts that justify the Premium import:

• Tasks, total tasks across the project (not just leaf tasks; summary rows are imported too)
• Dependencies, how many msdyn_projecttaskdependency rows
• Buckets, how many msdyn_projectbucket rows (these become epics)
• Assignments, how many msdyn_resourceassignment rows (these resolve to assignees)

Plus the first 5 task titles, so you can verify it's the right project.

4. Import

One click runs the full pipeline. For a 200-task project with 80 dependencies and 30 resource assignments, this typically completes in 25–35 seconds. The wizard shows a "Importing project. This may take a minute for large projects with many dependencies…" spinner and navigates to the imported project on success.

The import response includes:

{
  "projectId": "ckxyz...",
  "taskCount": 198,
  "bucketCount": 6,
  "dependencyCount": 79,
  "assignmentCount": 28,
  "unresolvedAssignees": 2,
  "warnings": ["2 resource assignment(s) could not be matched to an Onplana member..."]
}

unresolvedAssignees > 0 is normal on the first import, invite the missing users to Onplana, then re-run the import (idempotent reconciliation will fill them in).

Idempotency

Same pattern as the basic Planner importer. Every imported project carries externalSource='PROJECT_SERVICE' + externalId=<dataverse-project-id>. Re-running finds the existing project and reconciles in place, same project id, updated tasks. New tasks added in Project for the Web appear; deleted tasks are removed; modified tasks update fields and dependencies.

Same idempotency holds at the Task level: each imported task carries externalSource='PROJECT_SERVICE' + externalId=<dataverse-task-id>. Re-imports update by id, not by title or position.

What still falls back to manual

A few items the importer surfaces in result.warnings rather than carrying across automatically:

• Custom fields defined via solution components. Project for the Web Premium supports admin-defined attributes via the Power Platform solution layer. Onplana's importer doesn't auto-create matching CustomFieldDefinition rows yet, it surfaces the column names in warnings. We'd rather not silently drop fields without telling you. If your project has 10 custom fields it'd map to 10 warnings; you'd then create equivalent Onplana custom fields manually and (if needed) re-run the import after a future enhancement that fills them in.
• Cost / actual-cost columns. Premium has cost fields (msdyn_plannedcost, msdyn_actualcost). Onplana's finance is rate-card × hours, not raw cost columns. The mismatch is intentional, we surface budget through actuals, not through pre-loaded cost fields. If you need to mirror raw cost data, capture it as a custom field for now.
• Project teams. Premium lets you assemble a msdyn_projectteam distinct from per-task assignees. Onplana doesn't surface a separate team-membership concept beyond the existing org-member relationship; team membership is captured implicitly via assignee resolution at the task level.

These are the documented gaps as of April 2026. The roadmap covers all three; the importer surfaces them visibly so customers know what they're missing rather than wondering why a field disappeared.

Pairing this with the rest of the integration story

Project for the Web Premium import is the third leg of Onplana's Microsoft 365 deep integration:

Surface	Onplana entry point	Direction
Microsoft Planner basic	Plan import + optional live sync	One-way mirror or one-shot
Microsoft Project for the Web Premium	This importer	One-shot (idempotent re-imports)
Microsoft To Do	Bi-directional sync	Two-way per-user
Microsoft Teams	Native app + SSO	Embed

If your team uses more than one of these surfaces, common for orgs that have both a PMO running Project for the Web Premium and individual contributors managing their day in Microsoft To Do, all four integrations stack. PMs work in the rich Onplana surface; ICs see their slice in To Do; the team continues meeting in Teams.

When it's time to test

Pick a non-critical project, internal tooling, a maintenance plan, anything not a Q3 commitment, and run the importer end to end. Free tier covers 5 projects with full Premium import, no upgrade needed for the test.

If the dependencies and resource assignments look right after the import, that's the signal. Run it on production projects next, and if your AAD admin needs the user_impersonation permission added, send them the section above, it's a one-time setup and our migration guide has the full prerequisite list for the integration.

→ Create a free Onplana account · What's new in integrations

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Related reading:

• Migrate Microsoft Planner to Onplana, basic-tier importer if your plans don't need Premium fields
• Microsoft To Do Sync With Onplana, pair the import with mobile sync for assignees
• Microsoft Project Online vs. the New Microsoft Planner, context for the consolidated Microsoft PM surface
• How to Migrate from Microsoft Project Online, full Project Online → Onplana playbook
• Critical Path Method (CPM) Explained, the scheduling fundamentals your Premium plan already encodes
• What Is a Gantt Chart?, how Onplana renders the schedule once it's imported
• How AI Actually Runs Project Management Inside Onplana, the AI features that activate against your imported project