Forum Discussion
Public Plans are Not Appearing in Organization Users' Planner Hub
My organization recently started using Planner and are getting a lot of value from the product. We have created some public plans and want our organizational users to be able to browse to them...
Thank you Dan Reams! I promise I didn't forget about this!
This is a really interesting response and I appreciate you taking the time to help explain your thinking behind this. It is a difficult problem to solve entirely, especially since how we approach a search and even 'browsing' experience would be based on our hypothesis of what Planner users would be looking for, or how they could benefit from this.
From a perspective of Planner becoming a shared tool across your organization in which users can search for, browse, and share their own processes/plans, it makes a lot of sense to have a central repository of plans. Then of course the challenge would be around how to make that repository browse-able. Understanding how to make plans browse-able requires us to understand what users would be looking for. Would they be searching for a plan that's just interesting? One that's helpful to them? One that's related to what their work is? Each sub-scenario represents a different potential solution for how plans could be sorted and/or categorized among themselves. This approach as a whole is difficult because Planner isn't setup to be a social or shared platform for plans and processes across an entire organization - we've set it up to be a platform for you and the people you work with day-to-day. This isn't saying that we couldn't make improvements to change this, but I'm having a hard time grasping how it would be valuable for our users in the end if we invest in allowing Planner users to window-shop through other plans in their organization.
On the other hand, a scenario that I believe is more tangible (or perhaps just easier for me to grasp), is one where a user is trying to find a particular plan, and either their 'All plans' section is difficult to sort through OR they're not a member of the plan so it's not included in that section. From this scenario, we can start to understand the ways in which a user might search for a plan. They might know the exact name or a few keywords from the plan name? Or perhaps a couple people who are members of the plan? Or a couple task names from the plan?
We do have an item on our backlog to introduce a simple search in the Planner hub. We're still in the planning/design phase of this, but feel free to reach out again for an update on it's progress, or for feedback once it's released.
Thanks again for your thoughts and interest in Planner!
-Jo
Hi Joanna Parkhurst,
Do you have an update on this topic?
Recently I've been looking at how to leverage Planner to create a template (looks like a public plan is the best way) to share with others in my organization to use. The content of this thread is really interesting because there's value to both browsing and searching. For my specific case, I'm looking at creating a generic onboarding plan for other teams to copy as they hire new employees. So either a search or browse function would work for my needs.
My organization has just started using Planner. My frustration is the understanding of the meaning of "Public" when it is assigned to a Plan. It states " Anyone in my organization can see plan contents". That is not true until I add that member to the plan which in turn adds them to the group that Plan is part of. With that, "Public" is the same as "Private" which is "Only members I add can see plan contents". If a plan is "Public" then anybody in my company or organization should be able to open that plan.
With respect to the search feature it should be as simple as searching for the plan title. You would then be able to open it and join it, if it is Public. If it is Private then you wouldn't be able to find it or join it.
Pete_Vanfrachen great observation and I agree. I would assume that public would be visible to all users without the need to add them as a member.
Hopefully there are some changes made!
- This (public vs. private) is confusing for me too. Also I posted these questions (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/planner/how-to-access-to-a-public-group-public-planner/m-p/3130041) before I was able to find this one.
Any update on this? Thx!
