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Manage multiple plans effortlessly with the new Portfolios feature in Microsoft Planner

Meet_Sanghvi's avatar
Meet_Sanghvi
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Dec 03, 2024

Learn about Portfolios, a new feature designed to help users track and manage multiple plans in Planner.

Managing multiple plans across different projects can often become overwhelming for team leads, project managers, or any user handling various deliverables. To simplify the process, we’ve designed a ...
Updated Dec 02, 2024
Version 1.0
Nick_1020's avatar
Nick_1020
Copper Contributor
Mar 31, 2025

Almost useful... a few more features, please. Without these, we aren't really managing portfolios but rather just viewing them in an akwardliy limiting way. Your Planner service is so easy to start with but fails quickly at even moderate scale.  

  1. Bring into the grid view: planned effort, remaining effort, projected end date
  2. Add totals... grids without totals are less useful
  3. Add an export button... excel or CSV
  4. Add a basic dashboard tab like we have for individual plans
  5. Give us a connector for power apps so we can make reports and dashboards

Happy to talk to anyone there about these. I'd consider them basic tables stakes features for project management tools. You are so close and already on about everyone's enterprise desktop... let's finish already. I'd rather have actual portfolio management than copilot buttons. Hard to justify more seats when other services do this well and completely. 

  • samdcuk's avatar
    samdcuk
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 04, 2025

    Fully agree. I expected more features with the additional portfolio option, but it's quite limited. Would like to see more features in light on merging with project, for better visibility of portfolio management, with some dashboards tracking things like task status in charts, akin to how you can do similar for development work in Azure Devops. 

    For managing multiple concurrent projects effectively it's not clear the value this has over other project management apps. You also end up losing a lot of features when upgrading plans from Standard to Premium, like checkboxes on cards and comment sections. Losing features for a "Premium" plan makes no sense 

    • Nick_1020's avatar
      Nick_1020
      Copper Contributor
      Jul 04, 2025

      The service is for sure predictably below average. Why?? So close… especially with Copilot and native integrations with other services. Why can’t they just not be bad at it :)

  • robhprojility's avatar
    robhprojility
    Brass Contributor
    Mar 31, 2025

    Hi there Nick, FYI you can do the majority of what you are looking for above (1-5) in the Planner Power App.

    1. The Power App provides this with basic setup
    2. This can be done in the Power App or a Power BI report
    3. This can be done in a Power BI report, exporting the visuals and/or the data
    4. The Power App, build a dashboard with Power BI
    5. It's already there, all the data in Planner premium (the source of data in the Portfolio) is stored in the Microsoft Dataverse database, and is available for reporting using Power BI

    Happy to share some examples if you'd like to see them?

     

    • kefir_os's avatar
      kefir_os
      Copper Contributor
      Jul 09, 2025

      Hi robhprojility​, can you please provide more details re 5? I cannot find the my portfolio data (portfolio, project statuses) anywhere in the Dataverse. 

      • icetsw's avatar
        icetsw
        Occasional Reader
        Sep 08, 2025

        Hi robhprojility I'm having the same challenge as you in locating the Portfolio data object. No problem with the other Planner data, just cant seem to find the Planner Portfolio data in Dataverse in PowerBI. Did you manage to find yours?

    • stama's avatar
      stama
      Copper Contributor
      Apr 09, 2025

      Hello robhprojility can you share how you created #4? I have about 8 different Projects and it is difficult to remember where a task was created. The search feature is only with one Project.

    • Nick_1020's avatar
      Nick_1020
      Copper Contributor
      Mar 31, 2025

      Yes, please. But if it's the suite of power apps that already exist, those are available at the 5 subscription level and felt unfinished or unmaintained last time I checked, mid '24. Should be basic UI the web app, not custom-built integrations. The Planner app has seen so many welcome updates, why not natively? Would love to talk...