Planner has a new way to create multiple plans per group - MultiPlan!

[Howard Crow]

The new Planner Multiple Plans Per Group feature is a really nice way to make more plans for the same group of People. 

When you Create a Plan, there is a new option to add the plan an existing group:

Then a simple Group selector:

Everything else works the same as a normal plan.

Enjoy!

[Kevin Crossman]

This is a great new feature for Planner.

I'm not a fan of the delivery aesthetic for this, though. The video/demo is fine but the sunglasses thing is honestly a little weird.  I wouldn't mind that so much, if it was alongside a traditional how-to set of text/image instructions.

[Howard Crow]

@Kevin Crossman  Thanks for watching Kevin! We encourage you to make your own videos and post them to the tube! I am sure they will be much better than what a bunch of Plannerds can do. 

[Kevin Crossman]

You really didn't get my point.  I'd like to see some TEXT and IMAGES related to new features, not just a video.

[Howard Crow]

@Kevin Crossman sounds great, we can do that - but you should still feel free to post yourself and spread the love

[Oleg K]

I was expecting to see an option to make a few plans with one click :) At the end i have figured what it was about though :)

[Howard Crow]

@Oleg K yeah - I can see why you would go there. we could call it reduce, reuse, recycle groups in planner ;)

[Yannick Reekmans]

If it would include text and maybe an animated gif, we would have gotten the point quicker and without me needing to find headphones to listen to this in an open office space.

I’m with @Kevin Crossman on this, and it might be because of not having English as a native language but I’m not liking your reactions @Howard Crow . We do create our own content and share the love, do you expect us to write up an announcement text for your new feature?

[David Lozzi]

Not to pile on too much, but text and some images are worth a thousand times more than a video. Listening to video in an open office is tough.

Cute video by the way!

[Howard Crow]

@Yannick Reekmans as I said in my response above - text and images are reasonable feedback and I am certain that we will have plenty of that. This is, FWIW, not a feature announcement, we just made a video and decided to share. Kevin said he didn't like the video - which is fine - we can all make our own videos in many styles, that is the point of a community. So I am trying to encourage that - if you have videos - share them here! I would hope we can be constructive and supportive in our community. I fully support lots of kinds of content and videos - we are just trying to share ourselves and our product that we love. Some people will like some videos vs others - that's great. We are just a bunch of engineers making videos in our offices to share with people in our free time. 

[Kevin Crossman]

re: "This is not a feature announcement" - is there some place where this was actually announced?

Uservoice still has the status for this as "thinking about it".

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/15945187-microsoft-plann...

[Laurent Giret]

 This looks like a very useful addition :) I have a question though, is it possible to transfer plans across different Office 365 groups? I'm not seeing the option.

[Howard Crow]

@Laurent Giret we don't have a way to 're-group' a Plan today. You might vote for it on Planner.uservoice.com - we watch that pretty carefully.

[Howard Crow]

@Kevin Crossman I am not sure what channels the Marketing team has announced this through. Jo - who manages uservoice - will get that updated soon I am sure. 

[Laurent Giret]

All right, thanks :)

[Ed Hansberry]

How is this different from what we've been able to do in Teams now for months? We could create new Planners within a Team and it just created a planner inside the Team, which is part of an Office 365 group. Is this just putting the same functionality right in the Planner UI or is this something different? And it would be nice if there were 2 changes/modifications: 

1. Change the text from "Add to an existing Office 365 Group" to "Add to an existing Office 365 Group or Team". Only us nerds recognize it is really the same thing - at least from an end user perspective in Planner.
2. Make it easy to prohibit users from creating Groups.

[Christine Green]

I vote for Ed Hansberry suggestion to change the text to "Add to an existing Office 365 Group or Team." Thanks for these videos - they are quick and effective!

[Nigel Horncastle]

@Howard Crow where is the updated Planner section in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/? 

Think about the audience for your fun video. If you were announcing this feature 10 years ago what media formats would Microsoft have used? ;) Docs plus video is the best approach as it is more inclusive. 

[Oleg K]

I think you are bashing the wrong guys. I think Howard and his teammates are not the one responsible for new Planner feature announcements and documentation updates (they work at MS, but there are hundreds of different product teams there). They just noticed new feature, decided to make a video and share it in the Planner blog. Given the response they probably shouldn't have done that and leave it for proper Planner team to announce (which could have never happened). Sure, i prefer docs and pics also, but i work with what i have. I found more useful tips for Planner on this Youtube channel.

[Yannick Reekmans]

@Oleg K It was not intended as bashing, more as a suggestion or awareness. This video is the first announcement of the feature, it's posted on the Planner blog and it only contains a video. He takes this very personal with his response "please create something yourself", which I take personal because we just want to give feedback and do create our own content.

It was never intended to bash the video, I just think even/especially Engineers should be aware about the format they post stuff in when it is featured on the TechCommunity blog for their product.

Most important: the text and images are added now, so *jeej*. /me out.

[Harsh Damania]

This is really most awaited feature :-).....

[Ed Hansberry]

I think the video is fine. Docs can come later. I'm all for the method that is the least friction to the team publishing it to get it to us as fast as possible.

[jmarjano]

How can I see tasks assigned to a team member across MULTIPLE plans?  This is an essential requirement.

[Howard Crow]

@jmarjano Users can view their own tasks across plans in the My Tasks view. The best place to create and view feature requests is at planner.uservoice.com 

[Pete-Monk]

Thanks for this one.
Please note that we need one more functionality in order to manage multiple similar project per team, to be able to choose the existing group on copying a plan or a "global plan template" that we can "call" when adding Plans on either Planner or Team's Channel Tab.

Cheers

[Daniel Niccoli]

It would be great if you could see the parent group also in the "Recent plans" list in the side bar.

Otherwise, this is a great announcement.

[Toby_DFRG]

When will this option be added when copying a plan? You currently cannot select a group when creating a copy of an existing plan.

[Eric Deferm]

Question related to security and the option to create Office Groups. To avoid proliferation of O365 groups, we've limited the option to create new Office Groups to a small team of power users. We expected to option to link/connect a NEW plan with an existing Office Group to be available at all times, regardless whether you're entitled to create a new Office Group. It seems that the option "Add to existing Office 365 Group" is only available when you can also create Office 365 groups. A user that can NOT create Office 365 Group, simply can't proceed when clicking on '+ New Plan'.

- Is this standard behavior?

- Can we expect the option to create New Plans and 'Add them to an existing Office365 group' soon (w/o having access rights to create O365 Groups)?

• Dialog box when NOT having access rights to create O365 Groups:

• Dialog box when having access rights to create O365 Groups

[Martin Ballard]

Seconding Eric's input above.  

This is currently a blocker for adoption for several enterprise customers with more than 50k seats aggregated.

Easy oversight since Group creation privs as a control mechanism is an ad hoc approach to a different problem, so this would be an unintended consequence of that.  But I can see easily half the usefulness of this mechanism being to allow someone with Group create privs to set up the initial Group/Team framework and then to allow others the ability to create and work with Plans within that framework.  But this logic check for Group create privs for Multiplan creation needs to be removed to make that a reality.  

[MarcAtSORCE]

I really need the ability to copy a plan to an existing group...

[Christopher Gonzalez]

I am currently working with someone in our Marketing team and the ability to copy a plan to an existing group would have been extremely helpful. They have to start a task list all over again because an ability to copy over does not exist.

[Camille-SZYMANSKI]

Link multiple plan to a single group is a good idea and permit to manage the architecture of plans in planner.

It would be great if we can see the state of all plans/tasks when we click on the group from the planner hub (example)

In reality I don't find a way to view all task by groups or to view all the tasks from all the plans in the same time(not just my task but task for everyone) It could be very useful and permit to have an overview.

[DarrenLaMarr]

Thank you for this. Is there a way to do this so that you duplicate a template plan into a group rather than have it create a whole new team site on Sharepoint?