Microsoft is rapidly adding new features and updates to Office 365 to further improve its offerings but they have also been adding completely new products and applications. Last year saw the introduction of Sway, Delve and Office Video to Office 365 and more recent additions include Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner. This article looks at Microsoft Planner to show its features, benefits and give you ideas on how to adopt it.
Power BI for Office 365 Planner come together to give you full visibility of Planner data – and all you need is 10 minutes of your time to install our Power BI Reporting Pack just the way you need it to be. Office 365 roadmap Add another plan to your group No need to recreate files, notes, or member lists: Get more accomplished by adding another Planner plan to your Office 365 group. Microsoft Planner is an Add-in for Office 365 that helps you organize teams and stay on top of your projects. It’s incredibly easy to use, fully integrated with all of your Office apps, and free so long as Planner is included with your Office 365 subscription.
Note: This article was originally published on 11 Feb 2016 but has been updated to provide the latest features.
What is Microsoft Planner?
Our simplest explanation is that it’s a way to organise teamwork and tasks – similar to Asana, Slack or Trello for task/ project management. Office 365 Planner provides a hub for team members to create plans, organise and assign tasks to different users and to check updates on progress through dashboards. It also provides a centralised place where files can be shared and gives visibility to the whole team. As an Office 365 app, you can find Planner within your Office 365 home under your apps.
Who can get Microsoft Planner?
Outlook 365
Planner is included for anyone on the following Office 365 plans: All enterprise plans (E1, E3, & E5), which includes government and not-for-profit plans, Education plans, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium.
Why use Planner?
There are two main reasons why you should consider switching to Planner for task and project management: Microsoft integrations and cost.
Microsoft integrations
Planner natively integrates with all the other Office 365 applications and using a tool within the Microsoft ‘ecosystem’ is very efficient. Microsoft have created a suite of apps that all complement one another and work beautifully together. Using Planner means that you can easily integrate your tasks into Outlook, attach and view task documentation by linking to SharePoint, discuss a project within Teams while having you Plan open, hop onto a video call (with Teams, formerly Skype for Business) and much more! Using a third party tool requires switching in and out of applications and reduces productivity and can cause annoyance when trying to integrate or link to another well used application.
Cost
The other very simple reason to consider Microsoft Planner is cost. It’s included with all the business Office 365 subscriptions, so if you’re using Office 365 at work then it’s very likely you have access to Planner. Project or task management tools cost extra and add additional licence costs to your company, so adopting Planner can cut costs. It is definitely worth reviewing to see how it compares to anything you are paying for.
Planner and Groups
Office 365 Planner ties in very closely to Office 365 Groups (another large topic in itself; we recommend reading this great article from one of our partners, Sharegate, to find out more about Groups). Every time a new plan is created then a new Office 365 Group is automatically created and vice versa - if you have a pre-existing Group then a plan will automatically be created for this Group. All of this is all powered by Office Graph, which uses machine learning to map relationships, data and activity to create a more personalised experience. You can find out more about that here in ‘What is Office Delve and Office Graph?’
Using Planner
Plans
To start, you need to create your first plan. As mentioned earlier, if you have any pre-existing Groups set up then then will automatically have a plan created against them and will appear on the Planner homepage. If not, you can create a plan quickly by clicking New Plan:
To get a high level overview of your plans you can got to the ‘Planner Hub’ which shows a snapshot of how your plans are progressing (once you’ve added members and created tasks). I really like how visually simple it is yet it shows all the key information easily so you can see what is late, in progress, not started and completed.
Groups
With your new plan you can add group members – just start typing and it will automatically list contacts after you type 3 letters. If the contact isn’t listed then you can type in their email address – but only business email addresses are allowed.
Whoever is added to the Plan will also be added to the Group automatically and they will see the Group appear in their Outlook. The Outlook Web App, just shows all Groups together but if you favourite a plan in the installed Outlook, then it appears in your favourites at the top; if not, it just appears below your Inbox in a Groups section, like below:
Groups in Outlook Web App and Outlook
When anyone is added to a plan they receive an email notification into their main inbox welcoming them to the Plan and team and gives some useful starter information.
Tasks
Once you have your plan you can start creating tasks or ‘cards’, which can be done before or after you add team members. Within your Plan on ‘Board’ you will see the option to add new task:
Once you’ve created task – which has very little information – you can click onto it and then add in more detail if required, such as: assigning to members, adding start and due dates, descriptions, attachments (which connect to OneDrive or you can upload a file), links, checklists and finally comments. There are also little ‘post-it’ tabs on the side, which you can use to colour co-ordinate different tasks. This is how it looks:
You can view your tasks on the Board tab or the Charts tab. The Board tab shows what stage the tasks/ cards are at and gives the detail into each task. if a task is overdue than the date is highlighted in red. If you complete a task you can either tick it (which appears when you hover over the card), or you can simply drag the card from In Progress to Completed.
The Chart view gives a high level overview of the tasks within the Plan. It breaks it down into the status of the tasks; not started, late, in progress and completed and also shows where the tasks are assigned. I think it's a great way of quickly seeing the status of a project and especially if anything is overdue.
Along the side navigation you can see you favourite plans and non-favourites and you can also go to ‘My Tasks’ to just see your tasks for all Plans and the stages they are at.
Notifications
Notifications are always one of the trickiest aspect of task management. Too few and you don’t stay on top of what you need to do or miss discussions; too much it gets very annoying quickly.
At the moment any activities within the Plan are emailed into the Group inbox, which is a shared mailbox with the whole team (or ‘Group)’. If you subscribe to the Plan then you will be emailed (directly to your inbox) when tasks are completed, assigned, commented on etc. If you unsubscribe you still get email notifications in your inbox (as well as in the Group mailbox) but just around your tasks.
Integrating with Outlook
As well as getting email notifications, you can also view your tasks in your Outlook calendar. To do this, simply follow these instructions and you can then view your tasks and get reminders in the familiar Outlook experience.
Integrating with Teams
Planner integrates very well with Microsoft Teams - another 'new' app from Microsoft that acts as a central hub for teamwork and communication. (Note: Teams is replacing Skype for Business) You can read more about it in our Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Teams. Within Teams you can now add a tab with a plan, so that you can review and amend tasks without having to leave Teams. This could mean that you review your project, notice that something is behind schedule, check the document you need to review and then instant message your colleague to get an update - all within the same window in Teams. Adding a Planner tab is very simple (as well as any other tabs to Teams, such as OneNote, Dynamics 365, Power BI etc) and you can see what's possible for Planner in Teams here. Please note, you can also add tabs that pull through data from other project management tools, such as Asana, Trello or Wrike if you determine that Planner isn't right for you.
Learn more
For more help and support for using Planner you can get tips and how-to from Microsoft’s support area here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/microsoft-planner-help-4a9a13c6-3adf-4a60-a6fc-15c0b15e16fc
Conclusion
In terms of project management, it seems like it is currently aimed at being a ‘lightweight’ task and project management app, but as it is continually updated this could change. The introduction of Microsoft Teams as a central teamwork hub and the ability to integrate Planner 'plans' into Teams has made this combination a much more robust offering that could take on the likes of Asana or Wrike. And with Microsoft's continual investment and roadmap (which takes on user feedback - so do share your opinions to help shape the product) we expect to see Planner continue going from strength to strength.
While it is still relatively early days since the launch of Planner, there are a number of key reasons why you should consider switching to it: it's Microsoft integration and the fact that its included at no extra cost. The true benefit of Microsoft Planner lies in its native integration across the Microsoft stack; particularly with email (Outlook) and document storage (SharePoint and OneDrive for Business). This native integration makes working across all your apps extremely simple and keeps everything within the same ecosystem rather than switching in and out of third party tools. What’s even better, is that it also means that businesses can access a project management tool at no extra cost to their Office 365 subscription and potentially remove the cost of a separate tool. We urge any Office 365 to try using Planner and get a feel for it to see if it could replace something you're already paying for, or to adopt it and bring new benefits to your company.
If you would like to find out more about Office 365 or have a demo of the solution, then please contact us.
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How do I turn off Planner for my organization?
When Microsoft Planner is included in your subscription, it's automatically turned on for everyone in your organization. If you want to control which people in your organization have licenses for Planner, for example, if your organization isn't ready to begin using Planner, you can remove or assign Planner licenses by using Office 365 PowerShell.
To control which users have Planner licenses, follow the instructions in How to use Office 365 PowerShell to manage Microsoft Planner licenses. When running the scripts in Office 365 PowerShell, the DisabledPlans value for Microsoft Planner is PROJECTWORKMANAGEMENT.
Note
Removing a user's Planner license only prevents them from navigating to Planner using the Planner tile. Users in your organization without licenses to Planner can still create and modify plans at the direct Planner URL: tasks.office.com. You can remove users' ability to create plans at tasks.office.com (see How do I manage who can create a plan?), but you can't remove their ability to see and modify existing plans at tasks.office.com at this time.
How do I manage who can create a plan?
Every time a person in your organization creates a plan in Planner, the plan's list of members automatically form a Microsoft 365 group. So to control who creates a plan, you need to control who can create Microsoft 365 Groups.
Admins can control who can create a Group by using Azure Active Directory (AD) PowerShell. Follow the instructions in Control who can create Microsoft 365 Groups to:
- Disable Group creation for all users in your organization.
- Allow specific users to create groups (for example, all Planner users) while group creation is disabled.
Important
- Disabling group creation for your organization will affect users of other Microsoft services that need group creation, such as Exchange Online. Make sure to account for all people in your organization that need the ability to create groups when you configure this setting.
- Controlling who can create Microsoft 365 Groups only prevents users from creating new plans. They will still be able to see and modify existing plans at tasks.office.com.
How do I change the domain that Planner email notifications come from?
If you are interested in having your notification emails come from a custom email domain, follow the steps described in Multi-domain support for Microsoft 365 Groups - Admin help.
Can people outside of my organization get invited to participate in a plan?
Yes. Guest access allows you to invite people who aren't part of your Microsoft 365 organization to participate in a plan. Guest users will have limited functionality, but can perform the following tasks:
- Create and delete tasks and buckets
- Edit task fields
- Attach a file or link to a task, if given additional permission
- Edit the plan name
For more information, see Guest access in Microsoft Planner.
Can people in my organization use Planner if they don't have an Exchange Online mailbox?
- If you are using Microsoft Planner in a hybrid environment in which your users may have Exchange Online or on-premises mailboxes, note that:
- Planner has full functionality when your user has a product license that includes Exchange OnlinePlanner users without Exchange Online may have the following issues:
- Users may have issues with viewing or adding comments to a task.
- Users may have issues viewing their favorite plans in Planner.
For more information, see KB article 3169632.
How do I make sure all my users can get emails for Planner?
In Planner, users can choose to receive emails when tasks are assigned to them or when tasks are due soon or late (see Choose whether to have email sent directly to you). However, email will only be sent to users who have a product license that includes Exchange Online. Users at organizations using on-premises Exchange Server or hybrid configurations may not receive all Planner emails.
How do I turn off Outlook calendar sync in Planner for my organization?
Outlook calendar sync in Microsoft Planner allows users to view their Planner schedule in Outlook. This feature is turned on automatically in Planner. If you want to turn this off for your organization, follow the steps in Turn off Outlook calendar sync in Planner for your organization.
How do I install or activate Planner for my organization?
Planner comes with these subscriptions:
Planner Office 365 Kanban
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Office 365 E1
- Office 365 E3
- Office 365 E5
- Microsoft 365 A1
For more on these subscriptions, see business plans, enterprise plans, or education plans. If your current subscription doesn't include Planner, the only way to get Planner is to switch to a subscription that does.
Can I see who is already using Planner, or see a list of all the Planner sites?
You can see a list of all groups in the Microsoft 365 admin center, in the Groups section, and find out more detailed information about these groups using Microsoft 365 Reports in the admin center - Microsoft 365 Groups. Every group comes with a plan, but a list of plans and active usage of plans are not included in these reports right now.
How can I apply CA policies to the Planner iOS and Android apps?
What Is Ms Planner
To apply CA policies to the Planner iOS and Android apps, please make sure that CA policies are enabled for Exchange or SharePoint within Microsoft Intune in the Azure portal. Enabling CA policy for Planner alone (without policies enabled for Exchange or SharePoint) does not apply the policies for the Planner iOS and Android apps.