SOLVED

Planner Limitations

Bronze Contributor

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.

115 Replies

@Brian-Smith 

 

it would be great if we could have some ideas on the limits. We have created a dashboard solution which creates planner tasks based on various ticketing systems, the system account which creates the tasks and modifies them will create more than the supposed 1500 task limit per user. How do we plan for this? We can use multiple accounts to create tasks but that is clumsy. We will test our solution on a large scale this week and see when it stops working, if it is not feesible to scale this solution so a single service account can create 10s of thousands of tasks then we will have to look elsewhere, which is less than ideal.

@David Bargna good to hear you are testing - and to be honest Planner limits were designed to support the expected use of the Planner applications - not necessarily custom applications with a single account creating all the tasks.  The limit is way beyond 1500, but may not be high enough for you unless you create with multiple accounts. 

Best regards,

Brian

@Brian-Smith 

 

here is some feedback from our tests

  • There is a limit of 2400 tasks per Plan (regardless of which user creates them).
  • The limit applies to tasks that exist concurrently, that is, if the user reaches 2400, and just after deletes 100, then the user has still the option to create 100 new tasks.
  • If the individual user has a global limit we don’t know, but it’s definitely more than 2400, since once we reached the limit in one plan, we could create more tasks with that user in a different plan.

these limits are fine for us as we will not create more than 2400 tasks per plan, but need to create them over multiple plans, so excellent news that we can rollout the dashboard with plenty of room to spare.

Hi @David Bargna, I neither confirm nor deny the current limit you have found ;).  You should also see that completing tasks will allow new ones to be created - so the key to successful use is good housekeeping and completing and deleting tasks as the plans progress.  I'm very pleased to hear that this should work with your scenario.

Best regards,

Brian 

@Brian-Smith 

 

If Microsoft would take a look at Trello, it wouldn't produce garbage like Planner.

The integration into O365 is great but what it helps with all those limitations. Why can't I have multiple checklists with more than 20 items? It's not enough for us. What about Trello style notifications?

 

In my company we use Trello. We are a small company, not a problem to register and setup for each user. As we are an IT system integrator, we wanted to bring Planner to a customer with close to 400 Users. They are in Oil- and Gas Industry. We setup some sample projects / workflows but no chance. People don't get notifications, 20 items and only one checklist is not enough for them. 

Long story short, we are rolling out Trello.

It's sad to see how Microsoft always brings out pre-Alpha releases and simply don't continue development unless for totally unimportant features.

 

It is clear to me, they don't use Planner. Otherwise they would have kicked it into the garbage can and purchased Trello. 

@Thomas Maiergibt es nach über einem Jahr angaben zu den neuen Grenzwerten. Wir merken bei volleren plänen Performance Probleme.

@Thomas Maier 

 

Thanks but not sure what that helps. If I have 250+ Tasks pending, I need to rethink my workflows and get some help (or a new job).

 

What I was referring to is simply checklists which can hold more than 20 task items. And also being able to have multiple checklists in the same card. Sometimes a work process has different teams involved so you need to have a checklist for Team A to process tasks 1-30 and then you have follow up Tasks for Team B with another 40 tasks in the checklist.

 

That being said it still leaves the issue with the notifications. Trello can show me a notification for any action on a card I follow. That's a must if you want to control smooth workflows.

Bernd, Thomas didn't reply directly to you. 250 tasks limit was mentioned in the first message by this post author. So it is important for some people and Thomas informed them about such limit lifting. And this is a good start on working on these limitations. Also, i thought you already rolled out Trello, so why do you even care replying here? :D

Looking forward to see official and professional up-to-date documentation/report with all limitations that Planner have. Documentation is a crucial part for Project Managers/Architects to check before making long term choices.

Like for e.g. SharePoint has https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/software-boundaries-and-limits-0

@wroot While having rolled out Trello for a particular customer (we are a System Integrator), I nevertheless keep looking at other solutions obviously. We have other customer's which are on Planner and fighting with all the limitations and of course I have hope, that Microsoft can sort it out.

Planner has the benefit of being a part of O365, hence much easier to roll out than a third party app.

Hope that makes sense.

The Planner limits document is now public. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/planner/planner-limits

@Santhosh Balakrishnan Agree with our friend here, I launched planner tasks at my company and now we have this huge milestone with the limits. Now my team members are unwilling to receive, review and complete the automated tasks assigned to them. All was good at the beginning, now we have this issue that has blocked the usage of this incredible Planner tool. We are going back to excel, thank you very much, even considering similar software without the limits.

@Luis_Garcia1977 I would recommend exporting the completed tasks to Excel and deleting them from the Planner app. By this way, you can overcome the limitations. We had many customers with the same limits issue and suggested this way to overcome. 

Hello my friend, fortunately my data comes from a form and have it sent to online excel. Then I automated the forms to send notifications and add to planner since we wanted the more team interaction instead of using the boring excel.