What’s new in Microsoft Planner – May 2025

Hi Owen, glad it was somewhat helpful.  With any solution there's always gotchas!

On your other questions:

• Backup and restore
• Bulk updates
• Resource management and task dependencies across multiple projects

For backup and restore, there's good news here. While it's not possible to backup the Default environment and it's data specifically, if you work with your IT group to setup a 'named' environment of Planner and the Power App, that database can absolutely be backed up and restored.  There's even the ability to move the solution configuration between environments if you intend to do a prod/dev setup.  

For bulk updates, maybe if you share a bit more about what you're looking for here, we can come up with ideas/options? In the end of the day you are writing back to a database, so understanding the specific use case would be helpful.

For resource management, that's definitely possible based upon how the Planner Premium scheduling engine works. Alot of that happens via the Power App and Power BI reporting, here's a link to a webinar covering this specific topic and the solution's capabilities: https://youtu.be/6eZIzN211cA?si=63OBAuEu3CBEKVJW 

If you need more than what this offers, the Project Online solution is available, which gets to a much more granular resource management level (timesheets, % allocation on activities, resource requests, etc.) 

Finally on task dependencies between across multiple projects, you are correct, this is currently a function that Planner Premium does not support, mainly because there's no way to open multiple plans simultaneously and create those linkages. That's another thing Project Online and Project Pro do really well, so if this is a requirement, that solution may be a better fit. 

Reach out or direct message me if you'd like to have an offline conversation about any of this.  Thanks.

Before adding fancy features that no-one is asking for PLEASE fix the basics first, so Planner can actually be used by real project managers (I understand Microsoft itself doesn't use it for project management which says something). If this doesn't start happening our organisation will be switching to Asana or Monday pretty soon.

• Backup and restore for a plan (the current copy feature is not complete). This is a huge risk right now.
• Bulk update of tasks
• Fixing the bug on effort calculation when duration is changed
• Proper resource management including multiple projects
• Task dependencies between different projects
• Speed, both in basic usability and the backend

It's very disappointing that powerful features like easy to use Power Automate flows and Calendar View are not making the cut. These are currently part of Planner Basic but won't be part of Planner Premium (for the Web); they are not mentioned on the RoadMap and I don't see any mention of them in any relevant Blog posts. 

These are incredibly valuable easy to use features that are inexplicably being left behind in favor of an AI Project Manager that auto-generates random tasks based on buzz words? This doesn't bring any value to Professional Project Managers and appears to be targeted at novices who struggle to even come up with tasks for their plan. If the goal of this product merger is to make Project Management easier to implement and use, why discard features that are already part of the platform and also make it more customizable and user friendly?

Planner Premium has been integrating the old features of Project for the Web for over a year now and it is still less feature rich than Project for the Web and without some of the features of Planner Basic, with the only actual *new* product additions are custom backgrounds and this rehashed Copilot agent that requires a Loop subscription. It's shockingly underwhelming for the amount of time spent on developing this product.

The fact that Planner is unable to easily import an excel file or .csv file is just beyond me.  I had to learn how to code to use copilot in order to create a flow to import an excel sheet with a few dozen tasks.  I don't understand why there are so many simple integrations or communications with other Microsoft products that are simply MISSING, but exist in other non-MS apps. 

Hi NancyatMSFT​ can you clarify the term 'platform' in your posting - "bringing all your task management tools under one unified platform."  I tend to think of platform as the underlying architecture - so does this mean that a single API (Graph or Dataverse) will be able to access any task come August?  Or do you mean platform just as the application that gives a unified UX, but the platforms beneath are still disparate?  Thanks, Brian.

Why am I still confused about the tool and the missing core features that all other project and task management tools have?

• Sorting columns in grid view
• Bulk change tasks
• Group tasks in Grid view
• Seemlessly move tasks from 1 project to another
• Mentions in comments and task descriptions
• Advance task descriptions with image upload enabled
• Comments to the task on the task and not in a Teams chat
• Easy to move a project from one team to another team
• The custom fields library is super limited
• Make it easy to move a task from a basic plan to a premium plan

I might come back and expand the list once I encounter more obstacles, as I do on a weekly basis. Perhaps someday you will create one tool to manage projects and then make that tool exceptional.

After a few years of hoping for a great product, I'm considering going back to Project Online just because the core features exist for planning, tracking, and sharing project information. There seems to be a great team of developers working on Planner, but the product management/feature approvals are not impactful at all. Someone please get the core features included before touting AI agents that still leave users without tools they want and need. I'm guessing anything tied to AI will win as a feature right now. Maybe try dogfooding Planner on a sizeable project to validate complaints and feature requests mentioned on the forums, comments, feedback, etc.

Bom dia! NancyatMSFT​ obrigado pelas atualizações. Cada dia mais o planner vai ganhando corpo. Mas ainda me restam algumas dúvidas - Qual a previsão para adicionar a funcionalidade de menção por @ no planner premium e básico assim como é no outlook ou teams? 

New update that misses key features like @mentions, better comment formatting, inserting blocks of code or treating the comments as first-class citizens, allowing, for example, to upload images or videos.
Are all these updates oriented to managers?