0365 Groups/Planner & email subscribing

[Kevin Egan]

We’ve got a bit of a tricky situation with a group on Office 365. We’ve allowed a directorate to be able to subscribe to the planner, in order that they can view a series of objectives that sit in buckets in there. However, this currently also allows them the option to subscribe to emails from the group as well. This is an issue due to the fact that this is a working group, that uses the email function as a space to discuss what we are working on, some of which can be seen as confidential. This was highlighted by a colleague who asked if he could be removed from receiving emails – we don’t think it is a widespread thing, but the option is there should people choose to use it currently. Is there a way to allow people to subscribe to the planner, without having the option to subscribe via email too?

[#2]

Unfortunately not, it's intended for group collaboration so that assumes everyone wants to (and should) see everything.
I'd suggest posting something to the UserVoice site and putting your suggestion in there.

[#3]

I suppose the only thing you can do is for the individual users in the group opting out of receiving email from the group settings?

[#4]

We've run into this need multiple times, so hopefully something is in the works.

Essentially it comes down to 2 things weve identified:

1) the ability to "sub-assign" a task to another person not in the group without adding that person to the group (example a senior executive planner where a task might be assigned to a VP, but then they can sub-assign it to an actual worker that would complete and update the task

2) view only capability based on workload (so give a non-group member view rights to planner, but not the conversations, calendar, etc (or any other workload))

[#5]

Well, if anything Planner seems to respect the "private" setting for Groups - one cannot browse "public" plans. Unlike browsing conversations/files stored in Public Groups.

[#6]

@Kevin Egan - apologies for the delay in reponding to your query.

Can you clarify who a "directorate" is? is this a user(s) external to your organization? Do you want them to have access to the planner but not this group's email conversations?