We are excited to announce that starting today and over the course of the coming weeks we are rolling out general availability of the new Planner in Microsoft Teams! We first announced the new Planner last November at Microsoft Ignite and the response was incredibly positive. Last month, we released the new Planner app in Teams as part of Microsoft Teams Public Preview. Many of you have already started exploring new capabilities of the new Planner in Teams and sharing your feedback, which has been incredibly helpful to getting ready for general availability – thank you!
We will start rolling out to a small percentage and expanding over the coming weeks until we reach 100%, so it is expected that not everyone will get this update immediately. We are excited for you to try out the new Planner and we will continue to learn and improve the product based on your feedback.
The new Microsoft Planner journey starts in Teams
The new Microsoft Planner – which brings together the simplicity of Microsoft To Do, the collaboration of Microsoft Planner, the power of Microsoft Project for the web into a simple, familiar experience – starts rolling out today in Microsoft Teams. The new Planner allows you to scale from simple work management for individuals to collaborative work management with your team, and all the way to enterprise scale project management, empowering everyone to manage their work in one place and accelerate business outcomes.
With this initial rollout, there is no change to the other To Do, Planner, and Project for the Web endpoints outside of Microsoft Teams. They will keep working as always. As announced at Ignite, the next set of endpoints that will receive the upgrade to the new Planner later this year will be Planner web and Project for the web.
Introducing a new Planner icon
As part of reimagining the new Planner app we are also introducing a new icon.
This exciting new look represents the expanded capabilities and vision of the new Microsoft Planner and represents both the evolution and heritage for the work management apps that it brings together. The new icon represents the concepts of collaboration, empowerment, workflow, goals, accomplishment, and simplicity. It has fluidity, movement, and activity supporting the idea of getting work done together. The colors themselves incorporate the Microsoft 365 palette, connecting Planner to the broader suite, and demonstrating how tasks and plans play a key role in many of our products. We hope you like it as much as we do!
Experiencing premium capabilities in the new Planner
Users with an M365 license will have access to a rich set of capabilities for individual and team work management. These include the ability to create and edit tasks and plans, see a full list of tasks assigned to you within My Tasks, various plan views (Grid, List, and Board), My Day, and more.
When you are ready to experience premium features within the new Planner, simply click on the diamond icon within the app where you can begin your free 30-day trial of these advanced capabilities or proceed with requesting a premium license. Some premium features include Timeline (Gantt) view, dependencies, sprints, custom fields, team workload, managing goals, and more!
If you already have a Project license you’re already equipped with access to the new Planner’s premium capabilities corresponding to the license you have.
In the next few days, we will also roll out a name change to the Project Plan 1 license to align with our rebrand of the new Planner app. This license will soon be listed as Planner Plan 1 and will continue to be the first of three primary licenses that provide users with premium features. There are no changes in pricing or features. The current Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 will not be renamed at this time.
How to know if you have the new Planner
Since we will be rolling this out in waves over the next few weeks, the way to know if you have gotten the new Microsoft Planner in Teams is to check the updated name and icon in top-left corner of the app.
This is what you will see if the new Microsoft Planner has been rolled out to you:
If the new Microsoft Planner has not been rolled out to you yet, you should see this:
Coming soon
We will be updating the new Planner frequently as we are rolling out to general availability, so you can expect fixes and features to light up in the next few days and weeks. Some notable ones that will be coming: