Recent Discussions
Improve Resource Capacity and Baseline Governance in Planner Premium
Microsoft Planner Premium works well for assigning individual users to tasks within a single plan. However, significant limitations appear when organizations move from managing isolated plans to managing programs and portfolios. For Planner Premium to become a truly enterprise-ready project and portfolio management solution, Microsoft should urgently address the following three areas. 1. Cross-plan resource capacity management When a person is assigned to several tasks or multiple plans, Planner Premium can accumulate more work than the person’s actual daily, weekly, or monthly capacity. Although effort can be adjusted manually in the Assignments view, this becomes extremely difficult when managing many tasks, resources, projects, and concurrent assignments. Organizations need a consolidated capacity management capability across all plans, programs, and portfolios. Planner Premium should allow organizations to: Define each person’s available capacity. Allocate people using percentages, such as 20%, 50%, or 75%. Consolidate assignments across multiple plans. Detect overallocations before they affect delivery. Compare demand versus capacity by day, week, and month. Consider vacations, absences, calendars, and reduced availability. Generate warnings or optionally prevent assignments that exceed capacity. Support resource-leveling and workload redistribution. The People view is useful within an individual plan, but portfolio managers need visibility across the entire portfolio. Without cross-plan capacity management, portfolio planning remains incomplete because organizations cannot reliably determine whether they have enough available resources to deliver their commitments. 2. Generic resources and role-based planning Project plans are often created before the final team members are known. At the planning stage, organizations may know that they need a SAP consultant, solution architect, developer, business analyst, or infrastructure specialist, but they may not yet know the specific person who will perform the work. Planner Premium should support generic resources or role-based placeholders that can be assigned to tasks before a named person is confirmed. These resources should include information such as: Required role or profile. Skills and experience level. Required capacity. Planned participation period. Estimated cost or rate. Business unit or location. Staffing status. Once the appropriate person is identified, the generic resource should be replaceable without losing the planned tasks, dates, effort distribution, cost information, or dependencies. This is essential for resource forecasting, staffing requests, project approval, and early-stage portfolio planning. 3. Baseline security and separation of duties The project baseline is the approved reference used to measure schedule and effort deviations. For this reason, baseline creation, replacement, and deletion should not remain freely available to every user who can edit the plan. In many organizations, the project manager maintains the schedule, while the PMO, portfolio administrator, sponsor, or governance committee controls baseline approval. Allowing the same person to modify both the current schedule and the baseline against which performance is measured creates a clear conflict of interest. Planner Premium should introduce optional baseline governance capabilities, including: A dedicated Portfolio Administrator or PMO role. Separate permissions to create, replace, or delete baselines. A baseline change request and approval workflow. Mandatory justification for baseline changes. Complete audit history. Protection or locking of approved baselines. Comparison between the original baseline, current approved baseline, and current schedule. Integration with formal project change-management processes. This should be configurable. Smaller organizations may prefer a simple model, while organizations with mature governance processes need stronger controls and separation of duties. Why this is urgent Microsoft Planner Premium is increasingly being positioned as a solution for project and portfolio management. However, portfolio management requires more than consolidating project status, dates, and progress. It also requires: Visibility of resource demand and availability across multiple plans. The ability to plan resources before individual people are confirmed. Governance controls that protect approved project baselines. These are not minor enhancements. They are foundational capabilities for enterprise project, program, and portfolio management. Microsoft has a major opportunity to make Planner Premium considerably more valuable for PMOs and organizations managing multiple concurrent projects. I strongly encourage the Microsoft Planner product team to prioritize: Enterprise resource capacity management. Percentage-based allocation. Generic resources. Cross-plan workload consolidation. Portfolio-level resource forecasting. Controlled baseline permissions and approvals. These improvements would significantly reduce manual work, prevent resource overcommitment, strengthen governance, and make Planner Premium a much more credible enterprise PPM platform.
[BUG] msdyn_project silently renamed from "Plan/Plans" to "Project/Projects" in new environments
We need clarification from Microsoft on whether this is a bug or an intentional breaking change. Overnight and without any announcement, the msdyn_project table now ships with display name Project / Projects in newly provisioned environments. Dev and UAT environments provisioned a few months ago have Plan / Plans out of the box. All environments are running the exact same PSCore version: 1.0.163.730. The entity is as expected, marked non-renameable — read-only in the maker portal — so there is no way to align environments manually. Solution import from an existing environment (where msdyn_project = "Plan") into a newly provisioned Production environment fails with: 0x8004023B: Entity 44286cce-2389-4532-ac04-7a18a2818e9a is not a renamable entity. Hence Entity Display Name cannot be modified The only workaround — and why it is not acceptable It is technically possible to manually edit customizations.xml inside the solution ZIP before importing, removing the <DisplayName> node for msdyn_project. The import will then succeed, but Production will permanently show "Project" while Dev and UAT show "Plan" — a broken inconsistency across environments. More importantly, this is not how ALM is supposed to work. Developers should never have to manually patch solution artifacts to work around a platform-level inconsistency introduced silently by Microsoft. This is incompatible with automated CI/CD pipelines and unsustainable for any team managing multiple environments. The question for Microsoft Is this a bug or a planned change? If it is a bug: when will it be fixed, and is there a supported workaround in the meantime? If it is a planned change: why was it not communicated, and what is the supported migration path for teams with existing environments and solutions? [UPDATE]: After 3 attempts of resetting and reprovisioning the Production environment, msdyn_project finally came up with Plan / Plans — same process, same PSCore version each time. The behavior is non-deterministic. The only workaround currently available is to keep resetting your environment until you get lucky, which is not an acceptable answer for any type of deployment.Planner tab missing from Teams channel only shows as separate app
Our users can no longer open the Planner in the Teams channel; they can only access it via the app. This has been the case for a short while now. Does anyone know of a fix for this, or is this how it’s supposed to work? It cannot be selected via apps.
Filtering on labels with AND logic please
Hi, Currently planner is filtering on labels using OR logic, this is a big problem for us. We want to label tasks with labels Software, Hardware, Product_A, Product_B etc. So if I filter and selects labels Software and Product_A, I want to see only the Software tasks for Product_A. But with the built in OR logic I also get the Hardware tasks which is annoying and complicates things. I'm not looking for a workarounds like exporting it to lists, using power automate or grouping on labels. Just a simple tickbox somewhere to use AND logic instead would be very much appreciated.
Top Level Task Marked as Complete
Recently, one of the users of a large Planner project marked the top level task complete and then it appears they marked it not complete. This appears to have reverted the entire status of every task in the 1000 item project to incomplete with a 0% status. I see this is the history log, their name is on every task's history now. Is there any way to revert this or lock out non-base level tasks from having a "complete" selector?
Planner release Custom Templates
From the ignite series pack, about Publishing a plan as a Custom Templates, the screen shot shows “Goals”, which I understand is only available in Premium Plans. Can you create Custom Templates from a Simple Plan? Or is it only available in Premium? Or is this screen shot showing post the feature where Simple and Premium Plans are combined into one? Is the combining of Simple and Premium Plans also being deployed as part of this major release?Planner major release @ mention feature
1.Can you misnomer someone who is not assigned to Task, but a member of the MS 365 Group? Or can you only misnomer someone assigned to the Task. E.g. Mary Jane is assigned the Task and wants to misnomer on of her direct reports (Todd Jones) that is helping gather info for the task. however Todd is not assigned to the Task. Can Mary Todd?Planner major release new Task feature and E5 licenses
BANNEDUSERNAME Is the new Task Chat feature available for E5 licenses? It’s not listed in the notes in the message centre https://admin.cloud.microsoft/?https://admin.cloud.microsoft/? - “Microsoft Planner will add a new service plan enabling task-based chat for improved collaboration, rolling out worldwide in early January 2026. This feature will be ON by default for eligible licenses, including Planner Plan 1, Project Plan 3 and 5, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations. No immediate admin action needed.”Planner major release
BANNEDUSERNAME what does this statement in the Message centre MC1193421 mean about Comments and Tasks on Planner. I thought the change was regarding Comments going away? “There are no changes to email notifications for the existing task comments experience, meaning that an email notification will be sent to all group members associated with the plan when a task comment is added.”Project Manager agent in Planner
BANNEDUSERNAME In the latest Ignite series pack about the changes coming with Planner I notice in the screen shots about the Task Chat that the Comments heading is still showing. In the Message Centre for the Major release coming mid Jan-mid Feb 2026 that the Comments is going away. Can you clarify if the screen shot is showing a Task that previously had a Comment on it, and is now showing the Task Chat pane? I'm preparing communications and end user support materials for this change. The Comments feature has been heavily used by one of my Executive stakeholders and I'm keen to explain what he can expect with this release come mid Jan. This is the slide image from Ignite.
Planner personal plan bucket deletion inconsistent across tenants
Hello, we are seeing inconsistent behavior when deleting buckets in Microsoft Planner personal plans and would like to confirm whether this is an expected limitation or a known issue. In a Planner personal plan that is not connected to Microsoft Teams or a Microsoft 365 Group, tasks can be deleted successfully but buckets cannot be deleted and return a 403 Forbidden error even when the DELETE request includes a valid If-Match header with the latest odata etag value. The same scenario works correctly in other tenants where bucket deletion in personal plans succeeds using the same API calls and permissions. We have confirmed that this issue is not related to retention policies such as Microsoft Purview because bucket deletion works in group based plans when performed by a Global Administrator. It is also not related to GPO or Intune policies, and the request format and permissions have been validated by testing both as the plan creator and as a Global Administrator. Based on this behavior, bucket deletion in Planner personal plans appears to behave differently depending on the tenant even when the scenario and permissions are the same. Could you please confirm whether bucket deletion in Planner personal plans is officially supported, whether this tenant specific behavior is an expected design limitation, whether this is a known issue that can be escalated as a bug, and whether there are any recommended approaches for managing or cleaning up personal plans in enterprise environments. Thank you. (403 Forbidden)
Easily assign person(s) to subtasks
Hi all, I'm wondering if there's an option to easily assign person(s) to all subtasks of a summary task at one go. In our situation, we would like to assign all these subtasks of a summary task to the same person(s). However, at the moment is seems you have to assign the subtasks individually, which is quite labour intensive. Does anyone of you know a good workaround? Thanks in advance for your response, JasperMicrosoft where is the love for my Custom/non-default environment?
Like a lot of customers I have a custom environment for planner. I feel like a second class citizen when so many updates are for the default environment. Has anyone heard any news about advancements in a non-default environment. Specifically a way to get all tasks in one place for all resources?Feature Request: Enhanced Text Field Support in Custom Fields for Premium Plans
Hello Microsoft Planner Team, As an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, I've recently started using Microsoft Planner Premium for my engineering team's sprint management. While the custom fields feature has been incredibly useful, I've encountered significant limitations with the "Text" field type that are impacting our workflow. Current Issue: I created a custom field called "Scrum Notes" to capture detailed sprint-related information. However, when I enter multi-line text, it automatically converts to a single line, making it difficult to read and organize structured notes. Feature Requests: I would like to request three enhancements for custom fields with "Text" type: Multi-line Text Support: Enable newline characters (\n) to be preserved when entering text in custom fields. Currently, all text is collapsed into a single line, which severely limits readability for longer notes. Expandable Text Preview: Display up to 300 characters in the Grid view with an "expand" or "show more" option when clicked. This would allow teams to see a preview without cluttering the view, while still being able to access the full content when needed. Rich Text Formatting: Add support for basic text formatting (bold, italics, bullet points) within text-type custom fields, similar to the formatting available in the Comments section. This would significantly improve the organization and readability of notes, especially for technical documentation like scrum notes, technical decisions, or implementation details. Use Case: Our team uses the "Scrum Notes" field to document: Sprint planning decisions Technical implementation notes Blockers and dependencies Action items from standups Without multi-line and formatting support, these notes become difficult to parse, forcing us to use external documentation tools, which defeats the purpose of having centralized task information in Planner. Impact: These enhancements would make Microsoft Planner significantly more powerful for engineering teams and other technical users who need to capture detailed, structured information directly within their project management tool. I'd appreciate any feedback from the community on whether others are experiencing similar limitations, and if there are any workarounds currently available. I've also submitted this feedback through the in-app feedback mechanism. Thank you for considering this enhancement!
Nested Parent/Subtasks in Board View
I recently upgraded to planner and project plan 5 (planner premium), with one of my most anticipated features being subtasks and dependencies. My group usually uses board view to look at our tasks, but if I make a parent/subtask relationship in the grid view, the parent task is not shown in the board view. I know most people use one plan for one specific project, but my tech impaired supervisors need one place to look at all projects, so I need to have everything in one plan to reduce difficulties in navigating planner and finding tasks. I am testing out using portfolios for this reason as well. I am hoping someone else has the same wish and this can become an action item in the future.
Auto mark done for planner task when flagged email has been marked complete
Current Behavior: When an email in Outlook is flagged for follow-up, a corresponding task is created in Planner under the “Flagged Email” section. However, if the user marks the email as Complete in Outlook, the related Planner task remains in the Not Started status. Impact: This creates inefficiency and confusion in task management. Users must manually mark the Planner task as completed even though the email was already marked complete, resulting in duplicate effort. Proposed Solution: Automatically update the Planner task status to Completed when the associated flagged email in Outlook is marked as complete.
Recent Blogs
- Turn any basic plan in Microsoft Planner into a reusable, shareable template to speed up planning and ensure consistency across plans. Custom templates capture key plan elements such as tasks, goals,...Jul 14, 2026
- Learn how Microsoft Planner MCP Server helps agents automate routine work management and unlock intelligent workflows.Jun 23, 2026
