Planner App just appeared for us in Sharepoint

Brass Contributor

Hi all,

 

Was going through a design scope with a business user today and when adding an app into a page I spotted "planner" was there. Fantastic, assumed this was the long awaited integration piece allowing Planner pieces to be presented and interactive within a Sharepoint site.

 

When opening the app, it seemed to however only present an option for the plan, associated with the O365 group behind the Sharepoint site.

 

In terms of expectations on my end, I would have hoped to be able to either manually provide a link to a plan, or have availability to select from the plans I am apart off.

 

For my Release Management Sharepoint site, integrating planner "plans" straight in, was a hope I had in terms of showing latest tasks and timelines etc. At present I'd been using the Quick Links function, literally applying the planners URL. 

 

Is the newly available Planner App in Sharepoint, literally only to import/display a plan associated with that group?

 

Has there been some functionality introduced I missed to link multiple plans to a single group? 

10 Replies
You are correct, current Planner WebPart does not allow to pick a Planner that is not linked to the underlying Office 365 Group...I have not heard any plans in terms of providing the ability to choose what Plan show in the Planner WebPart
Daniel, I asked a question here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Planner-AMA/What-plans-do-you-have-for-the-Planner-web-part-i... during the recent AMA. Perhaps @Eray Chou can comment on your thoughts.
I guess when designs and development is done like this it typically reflects the majority use cases.

But doubt I'm alone in this regard. Linking multiple plans to the one O365 group, or just the ability to have multiple plans within the one O365 group, sounds like a fundamental.

Relating to my usecase should any of the Planner team come by the thread :

 

Release Planning

 

I currently use Planner to manage our Release Plans for updates and version upgrades we receive from vendors. While we have "plans" to integrate into a central tool, there is a period of easily the next 4-6 months where I want to continue using Planner for this.

 

I have a Release Sharepoint site that is basically the "hub" of all Release information, plans, projects and schedules. 

 

So I wouldn't want the messy overheard of tons of O365 groups and associated Sharepoints, when I just want the Planner use. Being able to embed multiple plans dashboards into a page, would be a huge win, for my userbase to see from a high level to see the status and schedules of Releases.

 

IT Team Based Agile Projects

 

Our Service Delivery team perform the large majority of projects within IT. We have a Team site in sharepoint we use for projects and collaboration, and again we would like to use Planner for each individual project as these are agile implementations and projects. We need lightweight planning, and we need to move fast for the business to get them in place. 

 

Being able to spin multiple planner plans of this single Team site would be ideal, again allowing transparency but also overview on the status of projects for the wider IT team, and our Dept Head, who might not necessarily be using Planner itself.

 

Currently the colleague who manages the "project plans" for these has one Planner Plan, with an almighty amount of buckets for each project and its basically a mess, and we lose the dashboard/reporting accuracy because of how it's dozens of lightweight projects bundled into one plan. 

This is something that will come for sure and that you already have in Teams...in Teams you can create as many plans as you need for a Team, so you will have the same for the underlying Group and you will be able to choose what Plan display in the Planner WebPart
Another thought Daniel is that Microsoft has Project as a major product. Keeping a balance between Planner and Project is a goal for them but I understand they are now a joint team. Perhaps they will consider introducing a Plan 2 with more features at a price of course. Just speculation though I have no knowledge of their future plans.
I'd have hoped the two are treated seperately and the audience is correctly identified for Planner.
MS Project is fine, but it's simply not suitable for lightweight planning and fast moving implementations. Requires more training and seminars explaining Project and the methodology for its use, as opposed to just "doing" stuff.

We use Project for large scale system projects, but really have no appetite introducing it into the day to day
You are spot on but I honestly feel the issue is monetisation. There are plenty of examples of where Microsoft can expand functionality but when it does so creates new tiers of the product. Microsoft Flow and Microsoft Stream are good examples. If Microsoft can see voting for more features it is a demand indicator. I’m sure quite some time is taken balancing trade-offs.
Hi - Is there a target release date for Planner in the Government Cloud?

Hey Daniel, 

 

Thanks for taking the time to detail your feedback in this post. You're correct in understanding that this isn't the final version of our integration with SharePoint. We'll be continuing to improve upon this integration based on usage and feedback from the Planner community (like yours)! 

 

Speaking to the 1:1 relationship between Groups and Plans, we're aware of this pain point and are actively working to resolve it. Here's a UserVoice thread for this suggestion if you'd like to follow along on it's progress: https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/11436501-in...

 

Thanks, 

Joanna Parkhurst

 

@Eray Chou