Project Professional 2024 Review: Offline Scheduling, One Payment

Fix it now

Microsoft’s perpetual scheduler for this generation is called Project Professional 2024, licensed for one PC, Windows only, and supported until 9 October 2029. It ships in the Office LTSC 2024 family without an LTSC tag in the name. It produces project files rather than a portfolio in the cloud, and for planners who hand over a schedule that is still the right shape of purchase.

1. Buy it if planning is file-based: you build a schedule, baseline it, track against it and share it as a document or a PDF.
2. Buy it if the machine is offline or on a network where a subscription sign-in is awkward, since it activates by volume methods or a one-off key rather than a daily check-in.
3. Buy it if you plan a few projects a year and cannot justify a monthly charge for an application opened in bursts.
4. Skip it if several people need to work on the same plan, or if the team should update progress themselves rather than telling you.
5. Skip it if it has to run on a session host or non-persistent virtual desktop, where the subscription plans carry shared computer activation and this does not.
6. Check Project Standard 2024 first. If you never manage shared resources or collect timesheets, the cheaper perpetual edition may be enough.

The name matters when you order. Microsoft’s volume line-up for this wave is Project Professional 2024 and Project Standard 2024; there is no product called Project LTSC Professional 2024, and a quote using that name is worth querying.

If the file-based model fits you can stop here. The rest covers what Professional adds over Standard, what the subscription plans do that a file cannot, and the dates to plan around.

Why it happens

Start with the name, because it decides what you order. The 2024 volume-licensed products in the Office LTSC family are Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024, Office LTSC Standard 2024, Visio LTSC Professional 2024, Visio LTSC Standard 2024 – and, without the LTSC tag, Project Professional 2024 and Project Standard 2024. The deployment product ID is ProjectPro2024Volume. A retail Project Professional 2024 for a single PC exists alongside it. If a supplier quotes ‘Project LTSC Professional 2024’, they mean this product under a name Microsoft does not use.

The scheduling engine is the reason the application persists. Task hierarchies, dependencies with lead and lag, constraints and deadlines, calendars for working time, automatic and manual scheduling, the critical path, baselines and variance against them. Nothing in the lighter task tools handles a large dependent schedule with the same precision, which is why it survives in construction, engineering and anywhere a plan is a contractual artefact.

Professional differs from Standard in the resource half rather than the scheduling half. Microsoft’s own description of Project Professional 2024 covers managing resources to build project teams, submitting timesheets to capture project and non-project time, and synchronising with Project Server, alongside the built-in reports such as burndown and resource overview. Project Standard 2024 covers the scheduling, tracking and reporting without that resource and timesheet layer. If you schedule work but never balance shared people across projects, Standard is likely to be enough.

What you give up against the subscription plans is collaboration and portfolio. A file is edited by one person at a time, and progress arrives by mail or in a meeting rather than from the people doing the work. Microsoft’s subscription route is now the Planner and Project family – the Project desktop client comes with Planner and Project Plan 3 – and the naming has moved enough that reading the entitlement list rather than the product name is the only safe approach on a quote.

The licence is one PC, Windows only, and it carries no rights to the next version. Support ends on 9 October 2029, five years from release, with no extended phase. The application will keep running after that; it will simply stop receiving security fixes. One useful compatibility note: Project 2024 can sit on the same machine as Microsoft 365 Apps, provided Microsoft 365 Apps is version 2408 or later, so a subscription Office estate with a perpetual scheduler on a few machines is a supported arrangement rather than a bodge.

Full reference

Perpetual against the subscription plans

Deployment and activation

• Volume copies deploy with the Office Deployment Tool on the PerpetualVL2024 channel, using product ID ProjectPro2024Volume or ProjectStd2024Volume.
• Activation is by Active Directory-based activation, a KMS host or a MAK key, which is why it suits machines that are not on the internet.
• Check the result with cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus from the Office program folder.
• Project 2024 coexists with Microsoft 365 Apps on one machine from Microsoft 365 Apps version 2408 onwards.
• The retail edition is licensed for one PC and requires a Microsoft account to install and reinstall.

Cheaper routes worth checking first

1. Project Standard 2024, if you never assign and balance shared resources or collect timesheets.
2. The Planner and task tools already included with Microsoft 365, if what you actually need is task tracking with assignments, dates and progress rather than dependent scheduling.
3. One shared planning workstation, if the business produces two or three schedules a year and one person writes them all.
4. A subscription seat for the single person who needs the team to update their own tasks, alongside perpetual licences for everyone else.

The dividing line is genuinely simple. Buy a scheduling application when you need dependencies, baselines and a critical path. If what you need is a list of who is doing what by when, the tools you already pay for will do it and will do it in a browser.

Planning around the dates

• 9 October 2029 is the end of support for the 2024 generation, with no extended phase behind it.
• There are no upgrade rights: the next release is a fresh purchase unless your volume agreement says otherwise.
• Microsoft has reorganised its project and task products around Planner, so read the entitlement list on any quote rather than the product name.
• If several people need to edit the same plan, that is the argument for a subscription rather than for a second perpetual licence.

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