MS Planner is missing basic functionality and logic

[paulhoepner]

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

[#2]

^ This.

[#3]

@paulhoepnerAgreed with every word! Where are the updates? Also need "read-only" permissions.

[#4]

@paulhoepner I have to agree with everything you say!

Regrettably, Microsoft excel themselves when it comes to missing out on basic functions! 

[#5]

@paulhoepner 

Thank you Paul for the excellent summary.   IMO, after 3 years of Jira and 7 years of CA-Rally, Teams Planner so extremely unproductive due to the missing features, I'll have to move on to utilize other tools for Kanban task management. 

Very sad, Microsoft.........

[#6]

I agree with everything as well! My team has tried to use it for three years now. It has been very difficult to get the other team member even remotely excited to use it.

[#7]

Great write up. I agree! For me the biggest missing component in Tasks by Planner (accessed via Teams) is the lack of individual conversations tied to each task. If not, could you at least add the ability to tag in the task comment section? Also please add the ability to save your view/filters. I am in a position to utilize Teams for many interdepartmental processes. Can someone at MS please reply or let me know if any of these basic updates are on the horizon? Thank you!

[#8]

@Alex_Jones 

You could be waiting a long time to hear anything back from Microsoft……

Regrettably, customer centred development isn’t Microsoft’s forte!

I only have a small team with limited requirements but Planner singularly fails the task :)

[#9]

Like all of us, you will soon realize this app is almost abandoned by MS.
Development is so slow, you just can't wait for years for features to come.

Invest your time in other solutions, really.

[#10]

@paulhoepner 

Agree with you on all of this. At the very least, everyone assigned to a task should get email notifications when someone comments on that task.

[#11]

@paulhoepner 100% percent agreed. The pop-up notification that X items have changed (with absolutely no additional information) is also ludicrously useless.

The closest work-around I've found for the search function is to switch to grid view and scroll all the way down the list. Even there, the search function only appears to work for the items that have been loaded into cache. Once you (hopefully) find your tile there, select the small "i" to open the full tile.

It still only allows you to search on tile titles, but it's better than absolutely nothing at all.