Administrative Help

External Resources Overview

External resources are enterprise users who do not have the ability to log on to PPM. Using external resources gives project managers and planners a way to plan and track resource allocation for team members who are external to PPM.

Like regular users, each external resource can be assigned to a resource type and included as a team member on workspaces where project managers can assign tasks and issues to them. The Capacity Planner and Resource Allocation applications include both external resources and regular team members when calculating capacity and allocation for workspaces.

The primary difference between external resources and other team members is that external resources cannot log in to PPM, so any items assigned to them that require updating (such as tasks or issues) must be updated by the project manager or another team member with permission to do so. External resources do not count against licensed seats so they do not reduce the available number of PPM seats in your organization, but in most ways they are treated exactly as regular users.

Note: External resources must be created from the Administrative Zone. Unlike regular users, external resources cannot be created from within a workspace, even by users with administrative permissions.