Enhancements to Planner in Microsoft Teams channels
By adding Planner as a Teams tab, you can now seamlessly create and add both basic and premium plans directly to your standard Teams channels. This includes the ability to start a plan as a tab from any of our out-of-the-box templates. This unified experience means everything you need is now in one place, making it simpler to collaborate on shared projects right within your conversations. Try it out To get started, follow these steps: Select any standard Teams channel. Select the Open Apps icon at the top right of the channel and search for Planner. Select Pin a tab for Planner. Select Save. You can now add an existing plan to the channel or create a new plan. Note: When you create a new plan, you have the option of starting from scratch or trying one of our templates. These templates range from event planning to building a CRM pipeline. A video demonstrating how to pin a tab for Planner and create a shared space for using the app in a Teams channel. What’s new to Planner in Teams channels One of the most significant advantages of adding Planner as a tab to a Teams channel is the ability to track your work, visualize progress towards goals, and monitor workloads—all within the context where your team works. Our most recent updates extend this benefit further by integrating both basic and premium plans directly into your Teams channels. By consolidating these into a single interface, you can now create and manage your plans without needing to switch between different apps or tabs. As your project requirements grow, you can also easily upgrade to a premium plan from a basic plan right within the Teams tab. This transition between plan types ensures that you can get access to the features you need as seamlessly as possible. This includes capabilities such as: Task dependencies: View and manage the relationship between interconnected tasks. Task history: Review all progress and changes made to tasks. Custom fields: Keep track of important information specific to your plans and workflows. Subtasks: Break down complex deliverables into smaller, more actionable tasks. People view: Visualize and manage team members and their workloads, assign tasks, track progress, and collaborate efficiently, ensuring everyone stays aligned and productive. Goals view: Set, track, and link project goals to tasks, ensuring alignment and visibility of progress towards key objectives. Copilot: Leverage AI to assist users in planning, managing tasks, and generating project insights, enhancing productivity and project visibility. Baselines: Capture and compare the state of a project at specific moments, helping to track progress and identify variances from the original plan. Portfolios: These plans can now be added to portfolios. Check out the full list of advanced capabilities with premium plans in Planner. If you don’t have a premium license, you can still try the feature by acquiring a free 30-day trial. Your team can continue to edit the same fields as before on the premium plan with their Microsoft 365 subscription. Share your feedback We’d love to get your input on this new experience! We're committed to continuously improving your experience with Planner, and your perspective is one of the channels that enables us to shape future investments. There are several ways to share your feedback with us—either via the Planner Feedback Portal or directly in the Planner app in Teams by selecting More (the questions mark) in the upper right corner, then Feedback. Resources Check out the Planner adoption page. Sign up to receive future communication about Planner. Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates. Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of Planner. Watch the recording from September's What’s New and What’s Coming Next + AMA about the new Planner. Visit the Planner help page to learn more about the capabilities in Planner.What's new in Microsoft Planner – December 2024
We’re excited to wrap up the year with some major updates, including the rollout of the new Planner for the web, portfolios, and Project Manager agent, to name a few. Customer feedback continues to inform improvements to our product, so be sure to check out the updates we have in the works at the end of this article! A look back at Planner’s Microsoft Ignite announcements We recently announced several new capabilities at the Microsoft Ignite conference to make it easier for you to coordinate your projects. Planner for the web: The new Planner for the web is now generally available, and it’s packed with features to help you manage all your work seamlessly across Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project, while leveraging the AI capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Planner (preview). To try out the new Planner for the web, you can go to planner.cloud.microsoft today. Portfolios: With portfolios, users with a Planner and Project Plan 3 or Planner and Project Plan 5 license can easily group related plans, track progress from a high-level view, and organize tasks visually with the Roadmap view. This means you can keep an eye on all your plans in one place and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Read more at: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/plannerblog/manage-multiple-plans-effortlessly-with-the-new-portfolios-feature-in-microsoft-/4342145?previewMessage=true Project Manager agent: With Project Manager agent, we’re bringing the power of AI directly into your plans. As your virtual project manager, Project Manager agent serves to streamline your workflow by handling tasks so you can focus on the big picture. Learn more about Project Manager Agent in our Ignite blog: Unleashing the power of agents in Microsoft Planner | Microsoft Community Hub App-powered tasks in public preview The app-powered tasks feature offers your organization more control over what users see when they open their tasks in the Planner app in Microsoft Teams. Instead of showing only the standard set of task fields, you can provide users with an experience tailored to the task at hand. That experience might be a workflow-specific set of fields or step-by-step guidance to walk the user through a workflow from beginning to end. To use this feature, your organization will integrate a Teams app with the task, which will enable app-powered task functionality. Learn more about the public preview of tailored task experiences with app-powered tasks or how to manage app-powered tasks in Planner for tailored task experiences. Project Operations and Project Online plans in the new Planner You can now view Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Project Online plans in the My Plans section of Planner. This update makes it easier than ever to keep track of all your work in one convenient place. Bugs fixed in the new Planner We wanted to take a moment to thank you for your customer feedback, and this month we wanted to highlight two notable bug fixes that you helped us identify. Now, labels associated with tasks get transferred over when you copy a plan. Furthermore, you should expect date formats to match your locale settings. Coming soon Based on your valuable feedback, we’re rolling out new features to make your planning experience even better. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming soon: Smart backgrounds: Get ready to customize your plans like never before! With smart backgrounds, you’ll be able to quickly spot the right plans. This feature was part of our legacy Planner experience, and we’re now enabling it for basic plans in the new Planner. Board view for My Tasks: Board view in My Tasks offers a visual representation of your tasks similar to a kanban board, making it easier to track progress and manage your workload. See all your tasks at a glance and move them between columns to update their progress. Board view will be available in addition to the existing grid view in My Tasks in early 2025. New Planner tab in Teams: Collaboration just got easier! With the new Planner tab, you can add any plan—basic or premium—directly to a Teams channel. This means you can work on shared projects seamlessly, right alongside your conversations. Removing the default filter: We understand that changes can be challenging, especially when they affect your preferred way of working. When we released the new Planner, we introduced a default filter to hide completed tasks as a temporary measure to help manage clutter in existing plans. However, this made it difficult for many users to find their completed tasks. With the recent update that saves your filter settings, you now have more control over your task visibility - you no longer need to change the filter to match your preference each time you visit a plan. We are now removing the default filter to give you full control over your plans. Additional column customization options: We’re currently rolling out the ability to reorder your Grid columns in the My Tasks and My Day views and are planning to launch the ability to hide columns after. Stay tuned for next month’s update on how you can use this feature to focus on the most important details of your plan. Share your feedback Tell us your thoughts on the new Planner for the web by using the Feedback button in the top right corner of the app. We also encourage you to share any features you would like to see in the app by adding it to our Planner Feedback Portal. Your feedback helps inform our feature updates, and we look forward to hearing from you as you try Planner’s new and existing capabilities! Resources Check out the Planner adoption page. Sign up to receive future communication about Planner. Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates for Planner. Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of the new Planner app in Microsoft Teams. Watch the recording from September's What’s New and What’s Coming Next + AMA about the new Planner. Visit the Planner help page to learn more about the capabilities in the new Planner.How Microsoft Planner Works
*** Update 11/5/2021 - we now have a public article of the various limits in Planner - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/planner/planner-limits *** Planner is pretty straightforward to use, so I guess you all know how it works – but the aim of this blog is to explain how some of the features are implemented and the parts of the Microsoft stack they use – which I hope will help you understand some of the scenarios where Planner might not work. This could be situations where you are in certain configurations where you might have changed some settings in Exchange Online or Office 365 not realizing that this would impact Planner. TL;DR - Comments are in the Group inbox, Attachments in the Group's SharePoint document library - and the Planner has it's own stuff stored in Azure. Read on to find out how Planner really works!Use sprints to be more Agile in Planner
The Planner team uses the sprints feature in premium plans to schedule tasks, balance our team’s workload, and run team retrospectives. Today, we want to share some of our tips for how sprints planning in the new Planner app in Teams can transform both your individual task management and collaborative team processes.How do I find all my Planner plans?
One question we often get in support is, “How do I find all my Planner plans?” The answer to this is not too tricky—the tricky bit is ‘all plans; rather than ‘all my plans’—as, due to security and privacy controls, you can only ever see plans that are in a group where you are a member (and being an owner does not automatically mean you are a plan member as far as Planner is concerned). But with that constraint how can I get a list of all my plans other than looking at the Planner hub? PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph API are one way.
My tasks gets upgraded with Charts and Schedule view
We’re bringing the power of the Charts and Schedule views to My Tasks! Few of us collaborate on just one plan at a time: in fact, you’re probably working on five, ten, maybe even dozens of plans right now. My Tasks helps you manage this by aggregating all your tasks across plans, making it easy to focus on your work inside of Planner.
