Frequently Asked Questions

Milestone is a self-hosted project management platform designed as an alternative to Microsoft Project and separate complex capacity planning solutions. Built for Engineering, R&D, IT, and Professional Services teams managing complex multi-site projects with overlapping phases, percentage-based resource allocation, and cross-department coordination. A key differentiator is our multi-tenant architecture, which lets each department have their own isolated workspace.

Yes, Milestone supports importing .mpp files and exporting in MS Project compatible file format. It supports all four dependency types (Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish, Start-to-Finish) and preserves task hierarchies, resources, and lag times.

Milestone offers several advantages over Microsoft Project: an intuitive drag-and-drop interface with live updates, skill-based resource capacity planning at staff level, custom columns per site or globally, automatic bank holiday calendar retrieval based on location, easy vacation scheduling with one-click Outlook export, multi-site coordination with confidentiality controls, What-If scenario planning, and support for overlapping project phases.

Milestone is a self-hosted solution—you deploy it on your own infrastructure, so your data never leaves your servers. This gives you full control over data security and compliance. The software is made in Switzerland.

Key features include interactive Gantt charts with drag-and-drop and live updates, multi-site resource planning, percentage-based staff and equipment allocation, skill-based filtering, custom columns (per site or global), automatic bank holiday calendars, vacation scheduling with Outlook export, Microsoft Project import/export, What-If scenario planning, and enterprise-grade security with Microsoft Entra SSO support.

Milestone is designed for Engineering, R&D, IT, and Professional Services teams managing complex projects across multiple departments, sites, or locations. The multi-tenant architecture makes it ideal for organizations that need departmental separation while maintaining central oversight. It's well-suited for engineering firms, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, biotechnology, IT departments, and professional services.

What-If mode is a sandbox environment that allows you to experiment with schedule changes without affecting your live data. You can test different scenarios, move tasks around, adjust resource allocations, and then either apply the changes to your real project or discard them entirely.

Yes, multi-site resource management is a core feature of Milestone. You can view resource availability across all your locations while maintaining project confidentiality. Each site can see that resources are allocated without necessarily seeing the details of projects at other sites.

Milestone allows you to define skills at the staff level and filter resources based on required competencies. This makes it easy to find the right people for each task based on their expertise, certifications, or specializations.

Milestone automatically retrieves bank holiday calendars based on your site locations—no manual entry required. For staff vacations, individual team members can easily schedule their time off and export their vacation entries directly to Outlook with a single click.

Yes, Milestone supports Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD) single sign-on for enterprise authentication. This allows your team to log in using their existing corporate credentials.

Custom columns allow you to add spreadsheet-like metadata to your projects, phases, and subphases. You can create text fields, checkboxes, or dropdown lists, and choose whether each column applies to a specific site or is shared globally across all sites. This makes it easy to track any additional information your organization needs.

Multi-tenant architecture allows you to create completely isolated workspaces for different departments within a single Milestone installation. Engineering, R&D, Sales, Marketing, IT—each can have their own projects, resources, and configurations without seeing each other's data. This is a key differentiator: most project management tools force all departments into a single shared workspace, making confidentiality and customization difficult. With Milestone, you get departmental separation with central IT management.

Yes, Milestone features real-time collaboration with live presence indicators. You can see who is currently working on which projects and what modifications they are making in real time. This helps teams coordinate better and avoid conflicts when multiple people are planning simultaneously.