Task pane add-ins for Project
Project Standard 2013 and Project Professional 2013 both support task pane Office Add-ins. You can use task pane add-ins to integrate project, task, resource, and view data in a project with other Office 2013 client applications, SharePoint applications, Web Parts, other webpages, and external data.
Office Add-ins is an extensibility model that is supported in several Office 2013 client applications. The full add-in platform includes contextual, content, and task pane add-in types. Outlook 2013 supports mail add-ins, which can show a webpage within an email message or calendar appointment item that is related to content in the item. Word 2013 and Excel 2013 support content add-ins, which can show a webpage as embedded content in a document. Word 2013, Excel 2013, and Project Professional 2013 support task pane add-ins, which can show a webpage in a task pane where the content is related to contextual information within the project.
For example, a Project add-in can summarize data in the active project and show additional data about a selected task or resource. Related data in the add-in can come from an external source such as a SharePoint list, reporting tables in the Project Server database, a web service, or another enterprise application. A task pane add-in can be developed with HTML 5, JavaScript, JQuery and other JavaScript libraries. A task pane add-in does not directly support ActiveX, Silverlight, or Flash components. Although an Office Add-in could use an IFrame element to access a server-side web application that uses ASP.NET and the .NET Framework 4.5 library, that kind of solution is not recommended or supported. The add-in can be developed to save data locally or write data to an external location.
Note
Task pane Project Add-ins can access data from Project Online by using OAuth authentication. With Project Professional 2013, you can develop task pane add-ins that access both on-premises installations of Project Server 2013 and on-premises or online SharePoint 2013. For example, see Connecting a Project Task Pane add-in to PWA in the Project Programmibility blog. > Project Standard 2013 does not support direct integration with Project Server data or SharePoint task lists that are synchronized with Project Server.
For more information about add-ins for Office 2013, see Office and SharePoint Add-ins.
Developing task pane add-ins
The developer documentation for Office and SharePoint Add-ins includes comprehensive articles and references. For an introduction to developing add-ins for Project Professional 2013 and other Office 2013 client applications, and for the JavaScript reference and XML manifest reference, see Office Add-ins.
The Project 2013 SDK download includes the Project OM Test sample add-in that shows how to get the GUID of a task, resource, and view, how to get properties of the active project, and how to set a task, resource, or view selection changed event handler. When you extract and install the SDK and samples in the Project2013SDK.msi file, see the \Samples\Apps\Copy_to_AppSource_FileShare subdirectory and the \Samples\Apps\Copy_to_AppManifests_FileShare subdirectory. The JSOMCall.html sample uses JavaScript functions in the office.js file and project-15.js file, which are included in the download. You can use the corresponding debug files (office.debug.js and project-15.debug.js) to examine the functions.
The HelloProject_OData sample add-in for Project Professional 2013 was developed with Visual Studio 2012. The add-in uses a REST query of the ProjectData service to get reporting data for project cost and other information, and then compares the current project with the average values for all projects in Project Web App.