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Enhancements to Planner in Microsoft Teams channels

NancyatMSFT's avatar
NancyatMSFT
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Feb 06, 2025

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: 

  1. Select any standard Teams channel.
  2. Select the Open Apps icon at the top right of the channel and search for Planner.
  3. Select Pin a tab for Planner.
  4. Select Save.
  5. 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 

  • Sign up to receive future communication about Planner.  
  • Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of Planner.  
Published Feb 06, 2025
Version 1.0

6 Comments

  • TonyStark's avatar
    TonyStark
    Iron Contributor

    NancyatMSFT 

    Banners on project.microsoft.com have started to appear, informing about "Planner" as an upgrade for "P4TW" and "Planner Portfolios" as upgrade for "Project Roadmap".

    That's great with what the new Planner offers and all.... but, can you confirm that project.microsoft.com will remain unchanged.... P4TW & Roadmap functionality, that is? In addition to the standalone MS Teams tabs apps for P4TW & Roadmap?

    Mostly concerned about "Project Roadmap" as standalone functionality and MS Teams tabs app, as it has a very valuable functionality in the form of being able to use it for creating a high-level timeline for a single project (which for example can include connections to P4TW and ADO)...which "Planner Portfolios" really isn't a great fit for.

    Everywhere I read, it says that project.microsoft.com will remain unchanged.... can you please confirm?

    Thanks in advance!!

    /T

  • Alastair100's avatar
    Alastair100
    Brass Contributor

    Hi Nancy, with the recent changes to Planner now pinned plans on the left side window are not automatically sorted alphabetically. Instead they are now sorted by order you added them to be pinned. Alphabetical sorting makes it much easier to find the plans you need. Please could this be bought back.

    The same feedback for the My plans window. There is no way to sort the plan by name alphabetically making it hard to find the plan you need quickly. 

    Please could this be added back. 

    Thank you

    • rtockes's avatar
      rtockes
      Copper Contributor

      NancyatMSFT​ yes, I also support alphabetical sorting for plans in the side bar and on the "my plans" page. Is there a work around or is this something that will be added back in? It is painful to search for plans as the list gets longer and longer

  • noriyuki Vietlele I've shared your feedback with our team. We've added the Planner tag / task thread issue to our backlog as something to investigate, and we're actively working on a fix for the issue regarding redirect from a task thread to a Planner task. Thank you for trying out this feature and letting us know what could be improved!

  • noriyuki's avatar
    noriyuki
    Copper Contributor

    Hello,
    I tried to use the new feature of Planner, but when there are multiple channels in Teams, creating Planner tags for each channel and the task threads of the created tasks are not posted well in the Teams channel posts. Also, even if it is posted, it is not redirected well from the task thread to the Planner task.
    I would like you to improve it somehow.

    • Vietlele's avatar
      Vietlele
      Copper Contributor

      Right. I meet the same problem. At a moment I thought it bug