Planner Limitations

[Santhosh Balakrishnan]

Hi Planner Team,
 
We have noticed that the following are the known limitations in Planner.
- 250 assigned tasks per user irrespective of plans
- 1500 tasks can be created by an user irrespective of plans

- 250 Active tasks (Not Started, In Progress) per plan [Updated 18 Aug 2017]

If an user need to overcome 250 assigned tasks limitation he has to unassign the tasks assigned to him.  The worst part to overcome 1500 created tasks limitation is to delete the tasks created by him.
 
These limitations seems to limit the planner usage. For the long term plans, users will get 250 tasks assigned and 1500 tasks created in a short span of time. Also these limitations are not well documented and this made us to fear about the hidden unknown limitations.
 
So in order to ease the Planner adoption we request you to declare the limitations and see the possibility to increase these limits. This will only help the organizations to adopt for Planner easily.  We have two clients of us who are worst affected by these limitations and reconsidering the usage of planner now.

[#2]

Hi Tobias - we monitor usage and expand accordingly.  Limits are present to protect the service.  Right now as I write this a deployment is happening to further increase those limits.  I can't say what those limits are as the numbers will soon be wrong again - depending when this is read (like the rest of the thread).  As a support person it would be nice to point to an exact article, but I also understand why the team are choosing not to do that.  If you have a use case that you feel is hampered by your perceived current limits then please share.

Best regards,

Brian

[#3]

Brian,

We regularly have use cases where a single person will need to create many hundreds of work items and maintain them for the duration of the project as part of the project record; deleting old items is a non-starter from a metrics perspective.  

Please keep this in mind:  the more important / larger / complex the project, the closer we get to, or hit, these limits.  Without disclosure it is unlikely that we can recommend this product on a project of any significant impact.  Too risky.  

I hope this helps.

[#4]

Brian, i kind of understand your point, but you say that customers should expect Microsoft to expand limits in a timely manner when their usage reaches them. This is not encouraging. Also Planner is odd among other services that always had and have documented limits and they increase with the time (SharePoint file size, Exhange mailbox, etc.). This is just against regular MS practice.

[#5]

How can we plan a deployment and not know whether or not we'll have an issue with task limits?  Just hope for the best and then give Microsoft a ring when/if we hit them?  

I think most people on here are smart enough to realize that limits posted a year ago may not be accurate.  It would be helpful for many of us to just know the current limit with the understanding that things change.

[#6]

Sorry if it will sound kind of harsh, but  - @Brian-Smith - reading the whole thread long, it just seems to me, that it is a clear intention of MS to actually not provide such info publicly. Please don't hide it behind some collective team decisions - there's always one person responsible for the actual decision and this thread should provide enough of signal to any product manager about how the product is perceived. Ppl are simply feeling insecure. Ppl want to know the numbers for a reason - to plan ahead.

Why is not Planner team inspired by the MS Flow for e.g.? We know actual numbers, we can buy more advanced plans for particular users. Translating to Planner, if we have two assistants to putting-in all the company management tasks, we could buy the higher Plan limit for them. With Flow, you can even buy additional Flows for the whole tenant generally.

Of course the question is, what is the Planner's future in general - in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, I can't see any new features planned for 2019, most of the being just Q1-Q3/2018 ;)

[#7]

Hi @Brian-Smith,

We are aware of limits that are expanding and continuously changing.

That's why you need to continuously publish updates about the current limits as you go along.

A project, critical for the organisation, can't have a risk of failing due to an unknown tool limitation!

It makes me wonder how serious MS is about Planner.

[#8]

Seems to be a very awkward situation for Microsoft. The app has extremely high potential, but as it goes with apps like that, seems it has a limitation no one was officially aware of. Now that people raised it, we still don't have an answer. Is there a limit then? Is there not? Is it tenant dependant, license (E3/E5), do we need to pay extra when we hit the limit? What is the limit?

A message to you guys in the dev team, for some of your users knowing the use case is extremely important. You would not want someone use Planner for developing of a critical project, let's say in a Hospital, infrastructure rebuild - and then hit a roadblock of tasks limit. Nobody plans for the planner app to fail.

A lot of users do not use it only for 'Update X or Y' plans, but aim to build their work tracker through Planner. Without knowing when do we hit the limit, the stability of the app is put into question. With stability being unknown, people can't honestly recommend the use of Planner.

Planner is a really good addition to 365. Please rebuild the trust in it, then improve your presence on the Microsoft Roadmap. You are probably not the main revenue driver like SharePoint, Azure or Exchange, but you still should build a solid presence in the 365 Catalog and improve the application's potential.

[#9]

I agree with the frustrations here regarding not having the limits published. 

What I've done is used Flow to create tasks in Planner to a scale per the requirements we expect to need to meet. This has allowed us to test if we can use Planner for our scenarios. I think in one scenario I stopped after about 800 tasks in a single bucket.

I didn't hit any limits in the testing but this is purely anecdotal.

[#10]

The term "Delete" is not really acceptable for enterprise as you can imagine, audit paths are important from a legal perspective.

Can you please provide updates against the initial raised limitations.

Many thanks

[#11]

We just came across another limitation: It's not possible to assign more than 11 people to one planner task. (I know, it can be questioned if it makes sense to assign so many people to one task... but it makes sense in this case.) Has anybody else ever seen this limitation or does anybody know if this will be removed in the future?

[#12]

Hello Clemens,
Same story on my side ! My customer manage tasks for a group of ~17 persons.
Currently, he cannot get over 11 assigned peoples for a single task.
Use Case : A task like "Please review and validate the document blablabla" can be assigned to more than 11 reviewer.
... Please expand this limit too ...

Thibaud

[#13]

I found another limitation...

Checklist items cannot have more than 100 characters.

Coming from Trello to Planner, I can certainly understand the frustration in this thread.

[#14]

Yeah, i have found checklist limitation very fast when started using Planner. I guess it is designed for "Get milk" type of checklists..

[#15]

Any work being done to improve performance with respect to scrolling through a plan with 50+ buckets all of which have from 1 - 9 tasks and each task has an average of five checklist items each and each task has two labels assigned - this is using the latest chrome browser on a machine with 32GB ram and 8 core processor and high end video card and 1 GB connection our network, scrolling perf is abysmal at times as is opening tasks. I usually have to wait for things to load and it will appear at times as if data has gone missing from the bucket only to appear after a minute or two of it being open.

Anyone seeing this?

[#16]

That would be very annoying. Have you tried with other browsers? Edge or even IE. Maybe Firefox.

[#17]

There is a continued focus on performance @HustleFlow .  Just because you have a 1GB connection to the network doesn't mean that speed goes all the way to the Office 365 services.  Can you tell specifically what is slow to load?  F12 dev tools in any browser can show you what is coming over the network.  I'll check with the team on specific improvements coming for scrolling and task opening.

Best regards,

Brian

[#18]

Brian,

When I click on the plan with the 50+ buckets (and configuration I described), it takes a few minutes for everything to load in the plan and then a bit longer when I start clicking on tasks and then a bit longer to let the data in the task to load.

As I mentioned, scrolling left or right can bog down until I let everything completely load.

I don’t see these issues on any other sites and I’ve confirmed I have tasks.office.com whitelisted in my ad blocker. I should note this is easily reproducible across every machine in our environment.

[#19]

Did some additional tests with Planner from a 150mb cable connection (external to my company) on a workstation class machine with a beefy video card and connected to my Plans externally and the speed/behavior was near identical.

Also took a look at Chrome’s developer tools-> Network and can see it take several minutes for things to load and then a bit longer to open various buckets.

[#20]

I am using Planner to document the actions my team has taken on pieces of equipment, and I need to make sure that there is no limitation on task quantity or age.  I need completed tasks to be searchable (another thread - I know this is a work in progress) and be a PERMANENT archive.  Can I please get confirmation that complete tasks will never be auto-deleted by the system, regardless of age?

Thank you!

[#21]

With the way Planner is working, I'd rather use NOTEPAD!