The New Microsoft Planner Tutorial 2024

[@MeeTime]

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[@ashatkus]

can you create a template to use across multiple projects? Many of the tasks are the same for each project, so having a template to import for new projects would be super helpful. I did see I can copy the project, but when I copy it, and add it to team, it's updating tasks from the one I copied from.

[@JHurtigh]

Great stuff, Gavin! As always answering all the questions raised by watching the MS release material! 👍I thought I'd force myself to dive into the new Planner by moving all my personal tasks to an individual premium plan but just realized you can't move tasks to and from a premium plan. Have you heard anything about when that feature can be expected? Not being able to use the Task list as an inbox before triaging tasks into Planner seems like a real deal-breaker.... :(

[@MeeTime]

Thanks Johan 👍 No, I've not heard anything regarding this. Development always seems sloooooooow after a "big" release so wouldn't hold my breath. Agreed RE: the inbox deal-breaker. Seems like we are now living in Limbo between To Do and Planner even more than before when I was hoping that MS would use the New Planner (and personal Plans) to get rid of this purgatory - seems like we'll have to wait even longer. FYI - if you are able, I've gone all-in on Motion for my personal tasks: get.usemotion.com/im6h2y958ctb

[@JHurtigh]

Thanks@@MeeTime, I'll make sure to check that out! 👍

[@matthewkling9520]

Thank you for the video, well done. Kinda new to most of this stuff but learning quickly thanks to great people like you. My question is… if I create a plan and assign tasks, share to group, will everyone in that group be able to see assignments even if the people who aren’t assigned to a task? If so, is there a way to manipulate visibility permissions?

[@MeeTime]

Yep, Planner is for shared tasks and a Plan's permissions are determined by the Group/Team. Any Plan in a group can be seen by the whole group - assignment just makes the tasks visible in "assigned to me" and allows filtering by person etc. but anyone who has access to the Plan can see any task. There are no further granularity of permissions apart from to have different groups and therefore different Plan's for each level of privacy you require. What's the use case you are coming across where you don't want people to see other's tasks? If this is for manager to direct report tasks you could be better using Microsoft ToDo with shared list for each person you want to delegate tasks to.

[@matthewkling9520]

Thanks for the info. Want to track tasks with my direct reports and other teams. I am trying to avoid creating a bunch of sharepoints. Would like the utilize a tool with the the “planner” type environment. Have used To Do as of yet but will check it out.

[@matthewkling9520]

*haven’t

[@phstanfield]

Thanks for the update Gavin! MSFT seems to be dropping the ball. They should own this project planning/collaboration ecosystem, but are frustrating loyal clients with shoddy product management.

[@MeeTime]

Agreed. This could be an area they lead, given the history of Microsoft Project.

[@travisbroadhead2249]

Thanks for this great breakdown! Can’t believe that the assigned to me section is not connected with the premium project plans at launch tbh, haha, but I’m staying optimistic for this revamp of Planner in general to keep improving over time.

[@MeeTime]

Thanks for taking the time to comment Travis. What's top of your wish list for improvements?

[@travisbroadhead2249]

@@MeeTime I'd love to be able to @mention someone on a card so that they get a teams notification. It goes to an email notification that team members can disable which makes it almost useless to comment. I run a lot of projects that repeat annually, so having the ability to see all of the thought process on why we made choices the year before would help.

[@MeeTime]

@@travisbroadhead2249 Yeah, that's a good one. It would be good if commenting would be developed as a feature across all MS apps, so that there are no differences in behaviour causing people to not know if it is bug or a feature when something is missing from one app to another.

[@AllanWith]

Honestly, I fear that the approach they’ve chosen is setting them up further for underdelivering… from a coding perspective it seems like they still have at least four different products which can do similar things, that they have to maintain and develop: Planner, Planner Premium, DevOps and Lists. I guess you could also include Loop. None of them are ideal at what they do, and each have glaring shortcomings that are addressed by the other products. But together, there’s a great product in aggregate. I wish we could have the structure, addins and source code support from devops, combined with the commenting system and flexibility of Lists, the Gannt charts of Project for the web and the integration of Planner/ToDo with Outlook and Office in one product. Add the ability to make our own power automate flows and logic and you’d have a super strong product. The one thing still missing is the ability for a project manager to look across a bunch of projects to have better portfolio management capabilities. That’s something they’ve talked about for the new Planner Premium and something I’m still curious about.

[@lukemanning3825]

I found adding a premium plan to a team required using the project app for the tab not the planner app is that your experience as well?

[@MeeTime]

Yes, good point, Luke, I forgot to mention that. I got so used to them not being integrated anywhere outside of the Teams sidebar app, which is essentially what the current state of Premium Planner is - Planner + Project on the web

[@AdCasey79]

Is there a way to see who created a task? We are an ecommerce team looking to add content creation tasks to our content teams planner app. We would not use the assign feature as the manager of the content team will manage who in their team will complete the work. But for their team members reference, how would they know which member of the ecom team created the task if they needed to get in touch to speak with them about it?

[@MeeTime]

If you go into each task, at the bottom of the comments section starts with who created the task

[@mayacamhi1166]

I think I've gotten around the Planner permissions issue? You can add a website tab to a channel and put the web address of the plan in there.... Still confused about the limitations here since I'm piloting it with just a few people. Does this workaround allow specific people to view or edit?

[@MeeTime]

You need to manage permissions for the Plan separately to the Team, which might not be an issue if there is not many members changing. The other thing that could hamper the workaround is that Microsoft said they are essentially disabling the website tab feature. You can still add a website as a tab, but it will just open that site in a browser rather than showing it in Teams. It will be interesting if this also happens with their own sites e.g. using Planner in this workaround.

[@hazala6046]

So the premium planner is exactly like the Microsoft project?

[@MeeTime]

It is one and the same thing really, now just shown in the same app

[@TerryAtkinson-fp8gt]

So if I want to have a conversation about a task like we can in Trello then we need a premium plannner plan. But only I need the premium plan licence to set it up and everyone else can use it ? Is that how it will work eventually? I don’t have the new experience yet. And we are moving away from Trello because they are now charging per workspace member and we are already paying for 365. I have a premium licence but I still need a premium planner licence on top of that ?😔

[@MeeTime]

You can still create a thread with a link back to the whole plan from a basic plan, but yes, a premiem plan (nee Project) allows conversation thread with a link back to that individual task.

[@tomrubane3185]

How would you add resources (for lack of better term) to a project, such as a Client's name, contact person, contact info; project brief, etc. In other words, important info that is not actually a task.

[@kodowdus]

I use the "attachments" feature to link to OneNote pages that contain references to all relevant resources.

[@MeeTime]

You could stick all that info in the notes section, assuming you don't need to sort by any of those. Other options, especially for client name (depending on how many clients you have) is to look at using labels or buckets

[@kodowdus]

@@MeeTime Why not use the "attachments" feature as I indicated below, since it makes it easy to include hyperlinks?

[@MeeTime]

@@kodowdus You could use attachments but sounded more like the original request was additional metadata rather than wanting to link out to a OneNote page etc.

[@adamb7230]

As a team manager, is there any way to view all tasks across the company assigned to my team on any given day so I can balance workload?

[@MeeTime]

Not really. Planner premium (depending on the Project Plan) has roadmaps (in Project for the web, web app) which you can roll up important elements from each project to get an overview. Good for programme managers. For normal managers, just wanting to see everything their team is assigned to, there is no great way to do this in Microsoft's offerings unless you build something bespoke in Microsoft Lists etc. If all the tasks for your team were in one Plan, you might be able to get a decent view in Planner Premium by filtering on different days, weeks etc. and/or using the charts with different filters

[@toddjconklin]

I am the owner of a new business with a new team, so this is all new to me and a steep learning curve, but this question is my biggest need - to shuffle tasks between our small team. And ideally for my team members to take ownership of the load sharing, and take tasks of my list (for example) and add to their own. I did some searching and came up with this KZbin video on Project: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pnXXnpd7nrN8qsksi=bGlTtgbXg9JBXFNE. It seems exactly what I (and you?) Are looking for is it not? Is this People View in Project still available in the new Planner?

[@toddjconklin]

Nevermind, I just reviewed and saw this was covered at around 27:00. Does that not answer the question above?

[@MeeTime]

@@toddjconklin The people view in Planner Premium (or Project on the web Plan 3) is only for each individual Plan or Project - I think the original request was seeing all tasks across the entire company, which might be split across multiple plans/projects - but I might be wrong

[@gauravrajwanshi]

Can we tag team members now in comment section?

[@MeeTime]

Microsoft say... 👎 🤷

[@nicola3444]

Claiming that "..if you have any task to do across your organization then Microsoft planner is still the best...) is a bit of a salesman pitch far from reality. I can mention several solutions far more intuitive and easy to use than MS Planner. Most of them for free...

[@MeeTime]

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I don't sell Microsoft licences so don't push their products, Nicola. I think I did say "pragmatically" and "usually" in that same sentence and offer further clarification in the video "for most people" and "for most organisations" and explained why. If you want to check another product, go for it. Here's my take on Motion: kzbin.info/www/bejne/n6HHeIGXd79lbbM

[@psykecarlosmadeit]

Can you please name them?

[@rahimovassagh4569]

very disappointed

[@MeeTime]

😢