Hello,
I had to change our Project management to MS Planner recently, and I have to say, that I am incredibly astonished about the poorness of the user interface and functionality. It seems, that the most basic functionality is not supported and makes working with MS Planner a real pain. Even worse: A lot of collaboration features are not working or missing, which leads to frequent misunderstandings in our project team and makes people miss our on important task updates and information.
I would really like to know, if others are experiencing the same issues, and if Microsoft is planning to resolve them anytime soon. Some of them have been around for more than 3 years now, as my research showed.
Here is my list:
Notifications:
Notifications are undoubted one of the most important features in a collaboration tool. They don't work in MS Teams:
- When writing a comment into a task, that is assigned to another person only, a notification is sent to me. Complete nonsense! In Addition, the assignee does NOT get a notification. This has been known for 3 years now and is known to MS. The official workaround is: In order to receive notification from a task, you have to write a comment. After that, you get notifications about other comment. Seriously? How do I stop receiving comments? Should we start writing comments like "Just activating comment-notifications for me" now? The original creator of the task would also receive this kind of comments.
- When assigning a task to another person, I would expect to NOT get any more notifications, until it is assigned back to me.
- there is no possibility for @-mentions in comments.
- there is no way to make a setting, if you want notifications via email, app, desktop etc. its always all of them.
- No Notifications at all when a subtask is marked as "done" or added
- No Notifications when an attachment is added
- No Notification when the description is changed, also no documentation of the changes in some kind of "history"
- No Notifications when other settings of a task are changed (for example the Priority or due date)
- when a task is completed, I get a notification with the subject "Comment on Task XX" and in the notification it says, it has been marked as done". Why cant the subject of the notification be precise?
Comments
Comments are a super important feature for any Task. They document the progress and are THE collaboration feature on tasks.
- can't be edited. Why?
- no attachments possible
- no Hyper Links or @-mentions
- no quotations / formatting
Batch Editing Tasks:
There is no way to move or edit multiple tasks at once / in batch, only in "List" view. Complete catastrophe for any efficient Task management. Why can this not be done in any view?
Tasks are always sorted alphabetically
The only place, where tasks can be sorted manually, is the "bucket". An alphabetic order does not make sense in a Task manager. I want to sort my tasks in a working order.
Attachments
- They are always stored in OneDrive Root folder. This messes up our Root folder constantly
- removing them from the root folder, removes them from the Task
- opening an attachment in the app redirects to the web-browser, very inefficient.
- no preview for image files?
Performance
- painfully slow. The Desktop-App inside MS Teams completely reloads every time I change a tab or team.
Very poor Mobile Experience in the App.
no widgets, ugly user interface, missing out on many features, unfit for on-the-go mobile usage.
Resumé:
I believe I am not the only one, being very unsatisfied with MS Planner. Especially Notifications should really be a complete standard nowadays, and are nothing that has to be "invented".
Please Microsoft: get the basics right! Currently planner is unusable for efficient collaboration in teams. I assume anyone using it, has been trapped in the same place as me: The organization is using MS teams, so the planner is now MS Planner. I am sorry, but I cannot imagine, that anyone decided for MS Planner when there was the option to chose any other P Tool freely. For me, MS Planner is obviously on the lower end of the ranking of available PM Tools.
Paul
