In which Office 365 Plans is Planner available?

[jcgonzalezmartin]

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This is a very common question I’m seeing frequently in different Office 365 forums. Fortunately, you can find the answer in the official announcement about Planner Preview published last year by Microsoft:

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/introducing-office-365-planner/

As you can see in the FAQs sections and also after some research:

• Planner should be available (bear in mind that Planner general availability was announced last June, so it’s still being rolled out WW…according to Microsoft, Planner roll out should finish in August) in the following Office 365 plans:

  • Office 365 Business Essentials.
  • Office 365 Business Premium.
  • Office 365 Enterprise E1.
  • Office 365 Enterprise E3.
  • Office 365 Enterprise E4 (this plan it’s not commercially available anymore, but it could happen there are still some customer using it).
  • Office 365 Enterprise E5.
  • Office 365 Education.
  • Office 365 Education E3 (this plan is not available anymore).
  • Office 365 Education E4 (this plan is not available anymore).
  • Office 365 Education E5.

• As it’s stated in the same blog, Microsoft will add Planner to additional Office 365 plans (Office 365 for Non-Profits and Office 365 for Government)

Some additional references:

• Planner FAQ by Tony Redmond:
  • http://windowsitpro.com/blog/office-365-planner-faq
• Office 365 Education plans comparison: https://products.office.com/en-us/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans

[#2]

EDIT 11/15/2016: Planner is now showing up for my non-profit E1 under the license and also in their app launcher.

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Should Planner be available for my Nonprofit E1 users? It's available for our Nonprofit E3 users, however it doesn't even show up as a feature in the Admin portal user license blade:

[#3]

Planner is still being rolled out so it could happen it's not rolled out for you...by the way, Planner was not available for not profits at GA and there is a promise from Microsoft to add Planner to Office 365 for non profits...no ETA defined yet

[#4]

Hmmm, I wonder if that would explain the situation we have in our Nonprofit E1.

We've been receiving emails about Planner PREVIEW expiring soon. PREVIEW is what we signed up for last year.

I ignored those messages, since I knew that PREVIEW had been superseded, and in fact, the admin portal no longer uses that word, merely "Office 365 Planner," except in one subsection of the Subscription page where it refers to PREVIEW as expired.

So imagine my surprise when I recieved a popup in the admin portal today about the Planner licenses (no mention of PREVIEW) having expired, exactly when the emails about PREVIEW said that it would expire.

What I had thought had been a seamless transition some time ago from the outgoing PREVIEW to the real thing apparently wasn't, and we were using the PREVIEW all along, I guess.

What now?  When I click on "Buy" in Licensing, which of course doesn't make sense in this context as Planner is included, there's no mention of Planner.

[#5]

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@jcgonzalezmartin wrote:
Planner is still being rolled out so it could happen it's not rolled out for you...by the way, Planner was not available for not profits at GA and there is a promise from Microsoft to add Planner to Office 365 for non profits...no ETA defined yet

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But it is available in my non-Profit, though only in the E3 or E5 plans. It's just weird that it isn't included in the E1 plan.

I'm going to try opening a support ticket. Maybe it was a simple oversight with it not getting 'turned on' for the NP E1 SKU.

[#6]

Please, let us know your findings!

[#7]

According to Support, Planner is not available for non-profit E1, only for the regular/commercial E1.

EDIT: Here's the email reply I got from support after talking with them on the phone. I find it incredibly frustrating that none of their written material (including this email) explicitly states that non-profit E1 is excluded from Planner. I wonder if it's because non-profit E1 is technically E2.

Thank you for taking my call today. As I have discussed, MS Planner will only be available for the following plans:  Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E4, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 Education, Office 365 Education E3, Office 365 Education E4, Office 365 Business Essentials and Office 365 Business Premium. When generally available, Planner will be included in several additional Office 365 plans. Stay tuned for more details. For more information please visit https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/introducing-office-365-planner/

[#8]

My Tenant was released as soon as I turned on First Release,

[#9]

Stephan, that's what my support guy thought too at first, pointing to the same article, and he was especially hung up on E2 (which doesn't really exist as a plan as far as I can tell, except in one or two places in the admin center for what's otherwise labeled as non-profit E1: do regular E1 people see that too?), but then he checked and came back and said that E2 and E1 were the same and that we should qualify, but that he thinks not all have been provisioned yet (agreeing with an earlier post). Haven't heard back from him though.

Update: We've been on First Release all along.

[#10]

Final word from support is that it'll happen when it happens, anytime between now and October.

Does anyone know if what was in the Preview version is purged, or does it carry over, particularly in the case of when the previous license has expired?  It's a bit shocking that given the extremely long lead time on this that MS wasn't able to flip the switch before a given tenant's previous plan expired.

[#11]

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@rpodric wrote:

...but that he thinks not all have been provisioned yet (agreeing with an earlier post). Haven't heard back from him though.

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I don't know if I buy the "it's not provisioned for your tenant yet" story. On my account I have a non-profit E5 license and I do have access to Planner, so obviously it's enabled for my tenant. For whatever reason, the on switch just isn't there on the NP-E1 licenses.

[#12]

I'd like to see some clarification around this as well for Non-profit E2 clients. They would happily buy the licenses for a few months instead of waiting for the free provisioning if that is the case.

Do we have anything more official than support on the October timeline?

[#13]

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Here's some clarification from the Planner team, via a Sep 14, 2016 post from a MS rep in this thread. Not good news.

In June, we released a roadmap for the rollout of Planner’s public release for Office 365 customers.  Since that release, overwhelming demand has caused us to push back our planned rollout in order to accommodate the capacity that we had previously not anticipated. Our initial estimate was that all Office 365 customers would have access to Planner within several weeks. We now expect all customers to have access to Planner by late Q4 CY2016. We will continue to roll Planner out to eligible tenants, and we will work to make sure we have adequate capacity to accommodate demand. Although we regret a delay in Planner’s rollout, we are driven to maintain the standard of quality and performance that Microsoft customers expect. We could not maintain our schedule without risking the quality of the user experience for existing users.

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[#14]

I'll mention this just in case this is wider-spread than just randomly us, but after 3-4 months of being without Planner (non-prof E1), I noticed today when provisioning a new user that they had the Planner tile, which was odd since I still didn't have it on mine. When visiting tasks.office.com a few days ago, I was still told that it was not ready yet.

However, something changed since then, since visiting tasks.office.com via any of our accounts now will actually get you to Planner, and a few minutes later the tile even shows up.

I don't know if all users will have to visit that URL to get the tile to show up or if the missing tile is just a temporary thing.

[#15]

It should not be in that way, the Tile should appear in the launcher for your tenant as soon as one of your users start using Planner

[#16]

You can also filter the Periodic Table of Office 365 to see which licenses provide Planner access.