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Not receiving Planner comments in Outlook inbox

Iron Contributor

I used to receive all task comments in my Outlook inbox but this functionality seems to be broken. Now I might receive 1 out of 10 comments in my inbox, or none at all some days. I would like to at least receive a desktop notification when a new message arrives in the Planner group.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thanks!

61 Replies
I would recommend to check if Planner notifications are properly set and also if something in regards of Groups notifications has been changed

@Juan Carlos González Martín 

In Outlook I am following the group and I don't see anything in group settings that could explain the issue (see screenshots).

 

 Following group.png

Group settings.png

Hi! I'd recommend checking your Planner notification settings as well. Here's more info on how to do this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/stay-on-top-of-tasks-and-plans-with-email-and-notifications... Does that help?
That’s a great summary page of notifications!! Haven’t come across that one before!

Adam

@Joanna Parkhurst 

 

Thanks for the link. Both these options are not working for our team: PLANNER EMAILS 1.pngPLANNER EMAILS 2.png

Basically I just want people to receive all comments in their inboxes for tasks that are assigned to them.

 

We are all following the group in Outlook.

best response confirmed by Jason Drew (Iron Contributor)
Solution

@Jason Drew 

 

Hope the below post will give more info if you have not already checked.

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Planner-Blog/New-updates-to-Planner-comment-notifications-and...

@kombaiah Murugan 

According to the article you linked "users will no longer receive comment notification emails in their inbox for tasks they have never commented on". This makes no sense to me. What if I ask a question in the comments such as "what is the status on this task?". The user will never receive the email because they haven't previously commented on the task.

 

By this logic, every person will need to add a comment as soon as I create a task just so they don't miss any comments that may be directed towards them.

 

Did I understand this correctly?

@Jason Drew 

 

Yes you are correct. Actually Planner team changed this behavior as feature request but the same thing is breaking your scenario.

Hope some other experts put their comments here...otherwise you can ask this request in user voice forum

This change is breaking my teams work flow - we had a great process and here we are following our established process but folks are receiving Planner task comments for new tasks (unlike before). I'm asking for statuses on tasks and no one is receiving them because they haven't previously commented.

 

Ugh - now I have to seperately IM, email, call and can no longer capture this in the Planner task comments!

 

Please revert this back and add a setting for users to toggle this if they don't like it instead of breaking it for everyone.

@Jason Drew I am having the same issue. It's crazy that the assigned to person has to comment in case to receive email notification. How do we find out if MS is working on this bug?

@prhora @HustleFlow @Jason Drew

 

Hi everyone - the article linked by @kombaiah Murugan is accurate in describing the expected behavior for comments. Every task comments always triggers a mail to the group mailbox, and one of the top complaints we received from customers was how Planner comment emails would also appear in their personal inboxes, creating unwanted clutter. This was because these users were following the group, using the group like a DG for team communications and task comments weren't relevant to them. Since unfollowing the group wasn't an option, the ask was to stop sending comment emails to users' inboxes. 

 

Our change prevents task comment emails from appearing in personal inboxes, even if you are following the group, however all task comments will continue to be sent to the group mailbox. 

 

@HustleFlow If you had the ability to @ mention someone in the comments (triggering a notification directly to the person) - would that solve your scenario around asking for updates?

 

For others on the thread, was there a specific use case you wanted to achieve by having all task comments going into every team member's personal inbox? We received a lot of feedback that most tasks were only relevant to 1 or 2 people and having the entire team get a comment email in their inbox was too broad an audience and intrusive for those who didn't care about the task.

 

It's unfortunate that our change impacted your scenarios, and I thank you for the feedback. Understanding how you used this feature with your team will help us figure out how to improve so we can enable your scenarios while ensuring we minimize the noise for those who didn't want comment emails in their inbox.

@chtran  Instead of sending all comments to every person in the team, why not only send comments to the personal inboxes of those who are assigned to a specific task?

 

The ability to @ mention someone would be nice too.

I agree! The combo of having those assigned to specific task and ability to @ mention someone would be so helpful!
PLEASE add ability to add @ mention and send comments to personal inboxes to those who are assigned to the task card!

@prhora This is THE single biggest gripe we have about planner.  If I assign a task to someone and then add a comment asking for an update, they do not get a prompt unless they have commented.  This means that if they have not realised that they need to do something yet then I will have to chase them by other means; thereby completely negating the benefit of using planner if I need to email them anyway. 

 

The other point is that why send email notifications?  Surely the aim of planner, teams etc is to reduce email traffic - why not get notifications in planner/teams/to do instead?

 

Asana uses a system whereby tasks have primary assignees and followers.  The former is the person who currently has something to do on the task.  The followers are just there to be cc'd in effectively to keep them in the loop.  This would be a useful tweak to planner too which would mean that individual task lists could be configured to show just tasks that they are the primary assignees to but they would continue to receive notifications of task updates on tasks where they are followers too.

@chtran 

 

Hello:

 

Are there any new updates on this? As a few people have said previously, it does not make sense that a person/people assigned to tasks need to first comment on the tasks before they will get notifications of comments in their inbox. I can understand applying that settings to members of the group who are not assigned to the task, but the task owner and assignee should get all notifications, unless they expressly turn them off.

 

Also are there any updates for using "@" mentions in tasks comments? This would be a very helpful feature. 

 

My company is in the process of adopting teams, and I know this comment issue is one of the things that's gonna make them question planner/teams again...

Hi there, 
would also be interested in that. Couldn't agree more with everyting that has been said so far. 
In my opinion the best solution would be to send those comments to the people assigned to a specific task. The "@mention" is also nice but secondary. 
Regards, 

@chtranPlease give serious considerationt to implementing @Jason Drew's suggestion!

 

Permalink

@chtran I chime in with others. We really need the owner/assignee to get all notifications.

 


@jackfight wrote:

Are there any new updates on this? As a few people have said previously, it does not make sense that a person/people assigned to tasks need to first comment on the tasks before they will get notifications of comments in their inbox. I can understand applying that settings to members of the group who are not assigned to the task, but the task owner and assignee should get all notifications, unless they expressly turn them off.

 

 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Jason Drew (Iron Contributor)