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Is Planner discontinued by Microsoft?
There is zero development in Planner's roadmap. Microsoft Project is promoted heavily, and is essentially a Planner with a Gantt chart. So, do I need to bother about Planner or should I switch to Project?
Hi Kiril, Planner is certainly not discontinued and we continue to invest in both Planner and Project. In Planner currently quite a lot of the effort is preparing for some features coming along soon - and hopefully you should be seeing more on the Roadmap - as well as new changes that probably don't justify a full Roadmap entry, like the recent addition of the Priority field and the very recently added Priority charts.
As Project for the web gets new features it will certainly be a lot more than Planner with a Gantt chart - and it is already well beyond that in terms of the scheduling capabilities and depth of plan that it can support compared to Planner.
Best regards,
Brian
9 Replies
Hi Kiril, Planner is certainly not discontinued and we continue to invest in both Planner and Project. In Planner currently quite a lot of the effort is preparing for some features coming along soon - and hopefully you should be seeing more on the Roadmap - as well as new changes that probably don't justify a full Roadmap entry, like the recent addition of the Priority field and the very recently added Priority charts.
As Project for the web gets new features it will certainly be a lot more than Planner with a Gantt chart - and it is already well beyond that in terms of the scheduling capabilities and depth of plan that it can support compared to Planner.
Best regards,
Brian
Brian-Smith please list all planner features delivered in 2021. I am really interested in that extensive list 🙂
- So far in 2021? Many additions to the Task in Teams capabilities that are driven by Planner. File recommendations for attachments (coming soon), Recommended Plans, additional labels, the message center sync capabilities added to our Government cloud, the new Task Publishing capabilities to support front line worker scenarios, smart backgrounds, move tasks from one plan to any another plan (this month), dark mode for Planner mobile, checklist progress bar... See the M365 Roadmap https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Planner#owRoadmapMainContent and follow the blog here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/planner-blog/bg-p/PlannerBlog for all updates to Planner.
Brian-Smith in the past I used to see a Planner button on Project to link some tasks and assign them to team members that do not have access to Project, but I don't any more. Was this taken away? The only difference I can think of on my side is that before I used an account that had a Project subscription along with O365. I have switched jobs since and my new employer has O365 subscription, but Project 2019 standalone, does this matter? It still asks me to sign in to my account so I don't see why it couldn't link the 2 programs together.
Hi Brian-Smith, thank you for that. What is the best way to follow the development of tools like Planner? I did not find anything other than the road map.
The article about Tasks integration into Teams looks very promising: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/tasks-in-microsoft-365-our-vision-for-a-unified-experience/bc-p/1163728. Do you happen to know when it's going to be deployed?
Hi Kiril - the team are working to supplement the Microsoft 365 Roadmap information with a new 'What's New' page at some point - similar to the one for Project . They also post to the Planner blog, and should have a couple of posts coming along soon - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/planner-blog/bg-p/PlannerBlog.
For the new Teams functionality I had the pleasure to show that off at Ignite and it does look pretty cool - expect that to land in the first half of this year.
Best regards,
Brian
- AFAIK, no and I don't thinkt that switch is going to happen...indeed what we can expect is a change for instance in how Planner Tasks are shown in Teams
- Thank you for clarifying. I just got a little sceptical, because there are so many great ideas and improvements with thousands of votes on Planner's uservoice and all of them seem to get little recognition.
