With the release of Microsoft Teams, Office 365 customers can now use Planner in the same interface as their shared chat-based workspace. While Teams is in Preview, the Planner tab will have a limite...
Updated Jan 26, 2021
Version 6.0
Blog Post
Desperately keeping tabs on the development roadmap and announcements relating to planner. Such a great app that I've embraced in my organisation and slowly but surely have gotten a pretty good update. The maintenance is starting to get messy though. I'm typically the poweruser and knowledge centre in relation to Teams, O365, Sharepoint and the likes. Really keen on the below mentioned in the blog
-Users will the ability to have multiple plans per Office 365 Group within Planner. When we complete that work, you’ll also be access any of the Plans you started in Teams as well.
One of the major points of interest and adoption when it came to me, was how quick and easy it was. It's so self intuitive and straight forward. But it's starting to become a mess now with so many O365Groups and Sharepoint sites being created when we trigger a new plan from planner.
The ability to house multiple plans in a single Group would be brilliant. Appreciate there is obvious integration points between all the core products, but sometimes we just want to raise and manage a plan, and don't actually need a new sharepoint site for it, as we have existing ones managing projects or releases or whatever, and the same in terms of communication groups.
As a real world example I've just spun up six plans. These are IT centric projects and they are relatively quick implementations but just need some tracking ensuring the team stick to dates and deliverables. We already have a longstanding Sharepoint site for this work with legacy information and comfort for the team in terms of using, and we also utilise that O365 group for communications via email and also the teams channel that spawned from that creation.
Now I've got six new O365Groups we will never use but will be "there" in peoples Groups tabs, along with six new sharepoint sites that will never get opened. What tends to happen, as there still appears to no sufficient archiving or completion function, is we just delete these groups, and the plans which would have been cool to have to reflect back on, get dumped also. And I take screenshots of them before deletion.
Appreciate your team gets hit with loads of these requests and they may be interpreted as "groans" but I hope you realise it's because you have deployed a really great application for planning that is I guess for a lot of people, exactly what works and what gets end user engagement quickly and easily, as opposed to having to setup internal training and seminars to try explain how MS Project works, and ensuring everyone keeps to standard practice. And more time goes into talking about MS Project then the actual project itself. Especially for the smaller, quick win, quick implementation projects, that I know form the majority of our work as opposed to the large scale implementations or projects.
Keep up the great work.