Support & Deployment Center

What SharePoint permissions are required for the first installation?

To upload the package to the App Catalog, you need SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator rights in Microsoft 365. To add the web part to a site and allow it to initialize the underlying lists, you need Site Owner / Full Control permissions on that specific site collection.

How do Project Leaders and team members get access?

PPM Compass 360 uses a simple, secure native SharePoint permission model managed directly through SharePoint's standard "Share site" screen:

• Editors (Site Members): Project Leaders, sponsors, deputies, and team contributors are added as Site Members. They can create and edit PPM data, but cannot delete anything ("Contribute Without Delete").
• Readers (Site Visitors): General stakeholders and executives are added as Site Visitors with read-only access. Site Owners can toggle whether Visitors see financial figures via Settings.
• Site Owners: Retain full administrative control and are exclusively authorized to delete records.

Assigning a project role inside the app never alters SharePoint permissions automatically. If someone with Visitor access is selected for a project leadership role, the form automatically alerts the user that they can only read and prompts a Site Owner to grant them Member access.

How does the 30-Day Evaluation / Trial version work?

The trial version is 100% fully featured with no artificial project caps, no feature disabling, and no watermarks. You can test all 7 project workspace tabs, standard risk & issue governance, the dedicated My Portfolio dashboard, and report exports with your live team. When you purchase an annual license, your existing SharePoint lists and project data carry over seamlessly without needing reinstallation.

Can we export data if we ever decide to uninstall?

Yes! Because all data is stored directly in standard SharePoint Online lists, you retain 100% ownership at all times. You can export the entire portfolio to Excel directly through the web part or native SharePoint list export anytime.

What output formats does PPM Compass 360 provide?

We provide one-click exports in Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx), and PDF formats directly from the app.

Our primary design philosophy is screen-first governance: all project reviews, milestone checks, gate approvals, and steering decisions should happen live with the application on the screen, rather than assembling disconnected decks. However, as PPM practitioners, we know leadership committees and audit stakeholders frequently require portable documents.

The Excel export provides a comprehensive, structured copy of your entire project and portfolio dataset in one file. This gives Project Managers total peace of mind - they hold full data sovereignty at any second, and can directly feed this structured tabular data into AI tools (Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini) for their own custom scenario models, forecasts, and executive briefings.

How does PPM Compass 360 handle portfolio scale, and will it hit SharePoint's 5,000-item List View Threshold?

PPM Compass 360 is engineered specifically to bypass SharePoint's 5,000-item view thresholds. Rather than relying on a single bloated list template, the solution is built on a purpose-built multi-list relational architecture that cleanly decouples project master records, milestones, risks & issues, status history snapshots, financial ledgers, and configurations.

During automatic workspace provisioning, all foreign keys and query fields (ProjectId, ProjectNumber, Status, ReportingMonth, IsActive) are automatically indexed. The client query engine strictly uses positive seekable OData operators and monotonic ID-cursor pagination (Id gt {lastId}) rather than unindexed table scans.

This architecture easily handles up to 200 projects per site (ideal for up to 100 projects in parallel within a department). It has been stress-tested and benchmarked with 230 projects and 10,000 risks and milestones, and all future releases will be benchmarked and tested against this enterprise-scale database. For multiple business units wanting separated governance (e.g., R&D vs. Manufacturing vs. Commercial), separate SharePoint site collections are recommended.

How are product updates and data migrations handled?

PPM Compass 360 is actively maintained with continuous enhancements. After each update, a Site Owner runs Setup once (the app shows a reminder); it carries existing list data forward, preserving all projects, historical status reports, decision records, and audit logs. Because new releases may introduce structural list additions, rollbacks to older versions are not supported once upgraded; we recommend validating new releases on a staging/sandbox site collection before updating production. Full version details and changelogs are available on our Release Notes page.

Are Power Automate approval workflows and email reminders supported?

Yes. To run automated approval workflows (such as Change Request approvals) and periodic email reminders (such as monthly status reporting deadlines), Power Automate must be enabled in your Microsoft 365 tenant. These turnkey workflows are configured separately on the respective SharePoint lists using standard M365 entitlements without premium connector costs.

How does version history work for audit compliance, and will keeping extensive history cause tenant storage bloat?

Every operational item retains full forensic version history - supporting up to 100 major versions per item and 300 major versions on core project records. This gives a version trail with timestamps, user attribution and prior values that you can use as evidence in your own audits. Site Owners keep full control of the lists, including edit and delete rights.

To protect your enterprise tenant storage, the automated setup wizard provisions strict version retention caps on all portfolio lists rather than leaving versioning uncapped. Furthermore, SharePoint Online lists store metadata diffs using delta compression (storing only changed text attributes, not duplicate binary documents). As a result, hundreds of project updates across a large portfolio consume negligible tenant storage (megabytes, not gigabytes), drawing from your existing Microsoft 365 storage pool at zero extra licensing cost.

How does PPM Compass 360 compare to heavy enterprise suites like OnePlan, pmo365, or BrightWork 365?

We believe in transparent, right-sized tool qualification:

• When you need a heavy enterprise suite (OnePlan, pmo365, BrightWork 365): If your organization requires deep, bi-directional API pipelines with enterprise ERPs (SAP, Oracle), automated critical-path scheduling across 10,000 sub-tasks, or a 6-month consulting rollout with dedicated systems integrators, those heavy enterprise platforms are designed for that complexity.
• When you need PPM Compass 360: If your organization wants a clean, 5-minute deployment that solves portfolio governance, RAG status visibility, milestone phase gates, risk mitigation, and executive reporting directly inside SharePoint with unlimited users and zero per-seat friction, PPM Compass 360 is built specifically for you.

Does PPM Compass 360 include daily project task planning, or replace tools like Microsoft Planner and Jira?

No - and that is intentional by design. We believe in giving Project Managers complete flexibility to use whatever execution tools already exist within your company and suit the specific needs of each project (whether that is Microsoft Planner, Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, or an Excel checklist).

What PPM Compass 360 provides is the macro portfolio governance layer that leadership and Project Sponsors actually need: structured milestone-level tracking with realistic date accuracy grains (Exact Date, Week, Month, Quarter) that can be extended into checkpoints to build an honest, transparent picture of the project timeline.

Forcing an entire organization to adopt a single monolithic task tool turns a simple software rollout into a painful 12-month corporate transformation project with heavy user resistance. PPM Compass 360 gives leadership portfolio-wide visibility, objective RAG rollup, risk management, and phase gates in 5 minutes - without interfering with how project teams execute their daily deliverables.