Many enterprise organizations create multiple projects to meet their business needs. Although we recommend maintaining a single project for simplicity, there are situations where multiple projects are necessary. Working with two or more projects raises several questions about the tasks that are supported.
This article answers those questions. For more information about specific cross-project features, see Work across projects.
Projects
How many projects should I create?
In general, we recommend that you create a single project. However, certain business needs, such as supporting a public project or applying security policies, might require creating more than one project. For more information, see one of the following articles.
Can I connect to more than one project at a time?
When you connect from a web browser, you can connect to different projects from different browser tabs. When you connect from a client or IDE, you can only connect to a single project at a time. For more information, see Connect to team projects.
How do I view all projects available to me?
How do I turn off cross-project collaboration?
If you want to limit users to view or modify select work items, set permissions on Area Paths. However, there's no method for limiting users to linking work items that reside in different projects.
Dashboards and reports
Can I create a dashboard with information that spans two or more projects?
Note
There's a suggested feature, Single Dashboard for Multiple Projects that you can review and up vote.
Can I create a report that spans two or more projects?
Yes. The Analytics service and Power BI reports support the creation of reports that span two or more projects. For more information, see Create a Power BI report with an OData Query.
Azure Boards and work tracking
Can I query across projects?
Yes. You can create work item queries that span all projects within an organization or filter for specific projects. Also, you can use the search tool to perform work item searches across all projects in an organization. For more information, see one of the following articles.
Can I view a board of work items defined in different projects?
Yes. The Query Based Boards Marketplace extension supports this feature. You can view a board view of a flat-list query of work items.
Can I link work items across projects?
Yes. You can use any link type you want to link work items defined in different projects. You must define the projects within the same organization or project collection. For more information, see Link user stories, issues, bugs, and other work items.
Can I query for work items linked across projects?
No. There's a prohibitive performance cost for trying to execute such a query, so it isn't supported.
Can I export a cross-project query to Excel?
No. Cross-project queries don't open in Excel. However, you can export a cross-project query to a .csv file, open it in Excel, and import it to Azure Boards. For more information, see Bulk import or update work items using CSV files.
Can I link work items across organizations or collections?
Can I perform capacity planning across projects?
No. Azure Devops doesn't store capacity planning data in the work tracking data store or Analytics service, as it isn't a supported feature.
How do I manage dependencies across projects?
To manage dependencies in Azure Boards, you can link work items using the Predecessor/Successor link type. To learn how, see Link user stories, issues, bugs, and other work items.
Can I query for work items linked across projects?
No. There's a prohibitive performance cost for trying to execute such a query, so it isn't supported.
Azure Boards customization
Can I apply an Inherited process defined in one organization to another organization?
Yes. To perform this operation, you need to export the process and import it to the other organization. While there's no import/export user interface, you can use the Process Migrator for Node.js application.
Can I apply an Inherited process defined in one collection to another collection?
Yes. To perform this operation, you need to export the process and import it to the other collection. While there's no import/export user interface, you can use the Process Migrator for Node.js application.
Azure Repos
Can I set branch policies across repositories within a project?
How can I find all completed pull requests across projects?
There's no user interface feature to extract this information. You can use the REST API to get this information as follows:
- Get all projects using Projects-List.
- Get all repositories of each project using Repositories - List.
- Get all pull requests of each repository using Pull Requests - Get Pull Requests.