rss.livelink.threads-in-node

Is using Planner for tracking OKRs a good idea?

HarryP — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:39:19 GMT

So our team has been trying to use Planner to track OKRs. We set up buckets for each objective and tasks for key results. It kinda works for a small team but now that leadership wants to roll it out company wide, its getting messy. Theres no way to show progress rollups from team-level OKRs to company-level ones, no percentage tracking on key results, and managers cant see a consolidated view across teams.

Has anyone found a decent way to make Planner work for OKR tracking at scale?

Improve refresh fidelity in Planner Portfolios

davidmck_telstra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 02:48:58 GMT

Planner Portfolio currently appears to refresh new items from connected premium plans, but changes to existing items like renamed summary tasks / roadmap items do not reliably propagate into the portfolio after refresh.

This makes Portfolio difficult to use as a trusted roll-up view because the source plan and portfolio view can diverge. The issue is especially problematic during early planning, when workstreams and summary tasks are frequently renamed as the plan matures.

Requested improvement:

Refresh should update task, summary task and milestone names from the source plan.
Portfolio should offer a “full resync” option for a connected plan.
Portfolio should show last refresh time and any sync exceptions.
Users should be able to rebuild roadmap items from the source plan without removing and re-adding the plan.

Current behaviour makes Planner Portfolio feel more like a partial snapshot than a reliable portfolio view.

Cannot see Task Chat for Planner app on iPhone

CCS2026 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:53:04 GMT

Hi,

I am testing using the Planner app and have added a message in the Task Chat area via the web browser on a PC.

I cannot see the message on the Planner app on the iPhone. I cannot see Task Chat anywhere on the iPhone.

I can create a new message in the Comments section on the iPhone (in the Planner app), but cannot add comments using the web browser on a PC. The web browser wants me to use Task Chat, but cannot see that on the iPhone.

Am I missing something simple here?

Thanks

Matt

Notifications settings missing

mateuszit11111 — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:37:16 GMT

Hello,

M365 Business Standard, global admin

I've created a couple of plans in Planner for a couple of users, however we don't receive any notification when a new task is created or completed.

Let's say I create a task - I assign this task to another user - the users completes the task - I don't get any notification. How come? It's like basic functionality, so I assume there must be something wrong with the set up.

In the web I found a couple of screenshots of the setttings but they are not available in my view:

My view:

What am I missing ? Is it possible to check/change the setting via powershell ?

Planner Plan 3 Subscription Cancelation and refund.

Akhan84 — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:33:12 GMT

Hello.

I have Microsoft planner plan 3 subscription which expired and has been automatically renewed which is against my intention , I tried to communicate with Microsoft support through email , live chat , phone call but without any positive progress , on phone they have an AI agent which is wasting of time , in live chat they just pass you to another departments and share wrong email address .

I have been trying to fix this issue since the first day of subscription renewal but so far nothing .

The subscription is under a twin alias email which I don't have access to and there is no admin , the email is under onmicrosoft domain.

I need a urgent quick help for this issue so that I can get refund .

Updated 2026 Planner Issues

fincleanairworldit — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:53:23 GMT

The new Planner initially seemed really great and useful, but over the past month a series of problems have occurred that make it difficult to use. I have already reported everything to Microsoft, but so far no support agent has been able to help me.

The issues are as follows:

When I tag a colleague in the chat, they do not receive the email with the message content — this is a feature that is supposed to work by design and was working fine until last month.
Often when I try to type in the chat, it either doesn't type at all, or it types in a different task.
When I click in a chat, it automatically tags all the people previously mentioned, or if I want to tag just one person, it ends up tagging all the others as well.

Are you experiencing these issues too?

Improve readability of Task Chat in new Microsoft Planner (full-width option needed)

Jaio — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:35:23 GMT

Hello,

First of all, thank you for the new Planner experience and the introduction of Task Chat. I think it’s a very welcome improvement over the legacy comments system, because it allows to edit already posted comments.

However, there is a significant usability issue that is affecting our daily work:

👉 The Task Chat is displayed in a narrow side panel, which makes reading longer conversations difficult and inefficient.

In many real scenarios, task discussions are not just short comments. They often include detailed explanations, decisions, or back-and-forth exchanges between team members. The current layout forces users to read long messages in a very constrained width, which reduces readability and slows down collaboration.

Suggested improvement:

(preferred) Provide an option to expand Task Chat to full width -maybe another button like the one that already exists for 'Comments'- (or open it in a larger, dedicated view)
Alternatively, allow resizing of the chat panel
Even a “pop-out” experience (similar to Teams chat) would be helpful

This would significantly improve usability, especially for teams, like mine, that rely heavily on Planner for collaborative work and decision tracking.

Thanks for considering this feedback. I believe this change would greatly enhance the new Planner experience.

New Planner UI - What problem is actually being resolved?

supermankelly — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:27:00 GMT

This new UI is a step backwards. I get that people naturally resist change at first, but Microsoft keeps making interfaces more spaced out and less information-dense, which is frustrating in a business environment where efficiency matters.

I can now only see about half of what fit on screen before. Even my Planner board headers are cut off because the font sizes and spacing have been increased unnecessarily.

Microsoft has a bad habit of redesigning UIs without solving an actual problem. A lot of these changes feel like they’re being made by people who don’t actively use the tools day to day in real working environments.

Is there any way to connect Planner tasks to OKRs or company goals?

ElisaDelaney — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:57:35 GMT

We use Planner for task management, and there's no native way to tie a Planner task to a higher-level goal. I looked into Power Automate but the Planner connector doesnt have a field for "parent objective" or anything like that. Are other orgs just using spreadsheets for this? Feels like there should be a better way.

PLANNER WILL NOT PUBLISH THE SCHEDULES FOR MY PLANS, BY CREATING AN iCALENDAR LINK....HELP

MICHAELJOEHARRIS — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:17:44 GMT

🤙

users with office 365 E5 license can access the planner premium

johnjohn-Peter — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:41:22 GMT

I have a question if users with office 365 E5 license can access the planner premium but not all of its features? or they can not have any access at all? i read this documentation

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/planner/understand-planner-trial-and-license-assignments

but i felt a bit confused? if Office 365 E5 users can access some features of the Planner Premium? or they can only access the standard planner, can anyone explain this in more details? the license requirements for planner premium?

Thanks

How Microsoft Planner helped build the Maia 200 AI Accelerator

WendyHaddad — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:50:08 GMT

Maia 200 is Microsoft’s second-generation first-party AI accelerator built to support large-scale AI inference workloads in Azure. As Maia 200 moved from pre‑silicon design toward deployment, work across multiple engineering organizations was managed within a single program responsible for bringing the accelerator into Azure. At its peak, that effort tracked over 700 active tasks spanning silicon, software, and datacenters. To manage the intricacies of the effort at that scale, the program team turned to Microsoft Planner.

As the Maia 200 program was forming, much of the individual engineering organizations’ work was already in motion across different products including Planner, Excel, and Azure DevOps. Creating a shared view across multiple products proved challenging, as milestones that looked achievable to one team could quietly introduce risks for another, and executive discussions relied on manually assembled status updates rather than a live picture of where the program stood. Program leads needed a shared view of execution to manage dependencies across workstreams, align milestone progress, and identify risks that had the potential to impact delivery timelines.

Creating program-level visibility with Planner

With work already in motion across multiple organizations, the Maia 200 program maintained existing team workflows and tools, but selected Planner as the central coordination layer. As a collaborative work management solution, Planner provides a unified experience that spans individual task tracking through enterprise‑level project management, giving teams a single place to plan, manage, and complete task‑based initiatives. This allowed swim lanes, milestones, critical‑path tasks, and dependencies to be visible regardless of where the underlying work was managed.

Maia 200 program leads began setting up the plan by creating a series of visual swim lanes for each engineering organization. These were built in Planner as parent tasks and subtasks, covering areas like silicon feature readiness, networking enablement, and system validation. Each swim lane was color-coded to the product or engineering owner responsible for that area, and a custom field was added to track the directly responsible individual (DRI) for each task. This structure made ownership immediately clear throughout the plan. While the plan was originally designed for program-level visibility, it quickly became more than that, as some development leads began using these sections as their primary source of truth for day-to-day project execution.

Screenshots reflect the Planner configuration used throughout this program and have been anonymized for confidentiality.

Next, the Maia 200 program team created a structure for tracking overall program milestones. The use of a single parent task called "Top‑Level Program Milestones" visually distinguished milestones from swim lanes within the plan. Underneath, milestones were captured as individual subtasks and grouped by stages of the full program lifecycle, helping align work across phases and clarify what the program was working toward at each stage.

From the start, the same plan served both executive leadership and engineering team leads by providing a consistent view of program progress while still allowing milestone tracking to connect directly to the work‑level details required for execution.

Screenshots reflect the Planner configuration used throughout this program and have been anonymized for confidentiality.

Tracking the critical path and dependencies within Planner

With milestones and swim lanes in place, the next challenge was to track cross-organizational dependencies. The program leads used Planner's dependency feature to track blockers and reinforced a consistent rule in program meetings that any capability on the critical path needed to be represented in Planner. When one group's work depended on another's, both sides created dependency-linked tasks in their respective swim lanes to make the connection visible.

In practice, this meant that when multiple Azure DevOps items rolled up to a single critical-path capability, that capability was tracked in Planner as a task. Dependencies between teams were also represented within the plan, even when the underlying execution remained in other systems. As a result, if a team became blocked, that blocker was visible in the plan and acknowledged by both sides.

The Maia 200 program team also mapped milestones to related tasks within each swim lane setting each milestone as dependent on the final task (or tasks) required for completion. Planner's scheduling engine then automatically updated milestone dates as work within the swim lanes progressed.

To monitor progress over time, the team used Planner baselines to capture point-in-time snapshots of the plan, allowing them to export task data to Excel, compare multiple baselines, and identify delivery trends as needed.

Tracking risks within Planner

Risks were also tracked directly in Planner, giving program leaders a single view of the work underway and the factors that could impact it. Each risk was represented as a task in the plan and made dependent on the related tasks within each swim lane. Milestones were similarly linked to these risk tasks, keeping mitigation work directly connected to the execution required to reach each milestone.

Screenshots reflect the Planner configuration used throughout this program and have been anonymized for confidentiality.

With critical path work, cross-team dependencies, and associated risks visible in one place, program leads could anticipate risks earlier and respond before changes have a chance to ripple across the program.

Over time, this shifted the nature of program discussions. Instead of spending meeting time providing status updates, program and engineering leads were able to focus on the decisions that mattered, including which risks to prioritize, which tradeoffs to make, and where to act before a dependency became a blocker.

For program leadership, this meant schedule changes never arrived as a surprise, because blockers, dependencies, and risks were already visible and actively managed within the plan. For the engineering teams, it meant a dependency could not be claimed without being represented in the plan and acknowledged by the team responsible for driving the dependent work. By connecting milestones, critical path work, cross‑team dependencies, and risk tracking in a single coordination layer, Planner gave the Maia 200 program the shared operating picture it needed to keep execution aligned across organizations, systems, and every stage of delivery.

Planner Agent brings work management directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot

MarsGu — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:26:59 GMT

Work rarely lives in one place. Your priorities may be spread across personal tasks, shared plans, email follow-ups, meeting notes, and chats. Planner Agent can help bring that work together, delivering intelligent work and task management right within Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now you can see what needs attention, take action, and keep projects moving all in one place. Planner Agent is currently available in Microsoft 365 Copilot through Frontier and can be added from the All agents menu once enabled by your admin.

If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video

Focus on what matters

A common challenge at the start of the day or week is not a lack of tasks. It's a lack of clarity. Work often spans Planner, To Do, email, and chat, and pulling that into one clear picture takes time. Planner Agent is designed to solve exactly that. Start with a simple question such as, “What should I focus on today?” and Planner Agent will return a prioritized, interactive view so users can quickly understand what is urgent and act right away.

With Planner Agent, you can get oriented, review what matters, make edits inline, and keep going. Planner Agent can help unify commitments across Microsoft 365, capture follow-ups from the flow of work, and keep plans current without breaking momentum. Whether you're reviewing a Word document, in the middle of a standup, or catching up on your latest emails, you can open Microsoft 365 Copilot and engage Planner Agent. This makes it easy to review your priorities and turn context into action without breaking your flow.

Ask questions across your work

With capabilities such as Q&A across multiple task sources, you can ask the agent about private tasks, tasks assigned to you, flagged emails, and unified plans. The broader capability set also supports grounding across enterprise sources during Q&A, task creation, and task editing, which makes it possible to ask questions that reflect how work actually happens, not just how it is stored.

For example, you can ask:

“Show me my tasks due this week and help me prioritize what I need to work on.”
“What is the list of plans that need my attention right now and what actions should I take?”
“Help me summarize the urgent tasks in the Marketing launch plan and highlight the biggest risks.”

Planner Agent does not just fetch items. It can help you understand urgency, risk, and next steps more intelligently, so you can move from scattered information to clear action without having to piece everything together.

A screenshot of Microsoft 365 Copilot demonstrates an AI-generated response with prioritized task cards and a summary of urgent work.

Turn follow-ups into tasks in the right place

Planner Agent can also create new tasks directly in Copilot Chat. Users can create a single task, draft multiple tasks, or ground task creation in enterprise content such as email, chats, files, or meeting content. This helps turn work that is still in conversations into clear, actionable tasks.

For example, a user can review an email thread about a launch, ask Planner Agent to turn follow-ups into tasks, review the suggested titles and due dates in a preview card, remove anything unnecessary, and then confirm the final set before tasks are added to the plan.

You can ask Planner Agent to:

“Create a task for me to draft the user study by Friday.”
“Review my emails from today and draft private tasks for the most urgent follow-ups.”
“Turn follow-ups from this meeting into tasks in the Marketing plan.”

A screenshot of Microsoft 365 Copilot shows an AI-generated draft of a task preview card created from an email thread, with editable task rows.

Update existing tasks without leaving the conversation

Planner Agent also lets you edit existing tasks in both private tasks and unified plans. You can make updates in natural language or directly in the interactive task card such as changing the task name, status, date, priority, or plan without leaving Copilot.

For example:

“Help me adjust the deadline of my task to this Friday and change its priority to Important.”
“Mark ‘Q4 launch brief review’ as complete.”
“For tasks assigned to me across shared plans, push anything due next week by one week.”

Updating work is often where momentum stalls. Planner Agent makes it easy for users to keep current work inline, without breaking focus.

You can review, refine, and confirm task and plan updates before committing them, keeping work efficient, accurate, and in your control. Once confirmed, these changes are reflected directly in Planner. You can move into the Planner app at any time to review the same updates, continue editing, and keep working with your team. This makes Planner Agent feel less like a separate assistant and more like a natural extension of Planner inside Copilot.

A screenshot of Microsoft 365 Copilot demonstrates in-line task editing with before-and-after changes.

Create a structured plan from scratch

Beyond individual tasks, Planner Agent can help generate a comprehensive plan with structure. You can ask for a plan based on a request or a grounded source, and the agent drafts a structured plan for review before saving.

Planner Agent finds the right reference document, confirms it with the user, and drafts a plan based closely on that source. The plan goes beyond a simple task list. It includes hierarchy and organization, with goals to group related work and additional details like buckets and notes to make the plan easier to understand and manage.

This is especially helpful when you are starting a new project or turning a large set of information into an actionable plan. Instead of starting from scratch, you can begin with a goal, deadline, or source document. Planner Agent then provides a structured draft with milestones and tasks that can be quickly refined and saved to Planner.

For example: “Help create a new Planner plan for an upcoming conference based on the ‘AI Initiatives Launch Summit 2026.’ Break it down into goals and buckets and include the appropriate task details.”

A screenshot of Microsoft 365 Copilot shows an AI-generated plan with goals, grouped tasks, and plan details.

Getting started

Getting started is simple:

Open Microsoft 365 Copilot for Work on the web or in Teams.
Navigate to All agents.
Search for Planner (Frontier).
Add it, then start with a natural prompt like, “Show me my recent high-priority tasks and what’s due this week.” You can also pin it for quicker access or call it directly in Copilot Chat with @ Planner (Frontier).

Availability

Planner Agent is available now in Microsoft 365 Copilot through Frontier for eligible Microsoft 365 tenants. Users need an active Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and access depends on admin enrollment and assignment for Frontier experiences.

Planner Agent is designed for a very practical outcome: less time hunting for work, less time copying action items between tools, and more time moving tasks and plans forward in the flow of work. By making it easier to capture new tasks and update existing ones in the same Copilot conversation where work is already happening, it helps prevent important follow-ups from getting lost in the friction of switching between tools. From answering questions across your private tasks, shared plans, and enterprise sources, to drafting new tasks, updating existing ones, and generating structured plans from scratch, Planner Agent brings work management into the flow of work itself.

Planner Agent is available now in Microsoft 365 Copilot through Frontier, and this is only the beginning. As these experiences continue to evolve, the goal remains the same: help users understand their work faster, take action more easily, and keep work moving with less friction.

Providing feedback

Your feedback is important! While using Planner Agent, use the thumbs up/down option in Copilot to share feedback. We also encourage you to share any feature requests by adding your ideas to the Planner Feedback Portal. Your comments help inform our product roadmap, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Learn more

Read the following support articles to learn more: What is Planner Agent in Copilot? What can you do with Planner Agent in Copilot?
Visit planner.cloud.microsoft to access Planner directly from your browser.
Sign up to receive future communication about Planner.
Check out the Planner adoption page and Planner help & learning page to learn more about Planner.
Visit the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates for Planner.

Project desktop vs Planner + project Plan 3

ItecMuttenz — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:54:34 GMT

We are trying to plan our projects using ms Planner Premium (Plan 3). However, I get very confused because of the so many product names, subscription name, soon ending products, etc. my questions are:

Which desktop tool of microsoft for project planning is running currently. If it's "Microsoft Project Online Desktop Client MSO" can this be synced with the planner premium (Plan 3)?, if yes how?
I have an excel list of a Project plan with the columns below: can i manage my project in planner premium? if yes, are all this custom fields deployed in dataverse, so that I can access them from power bi?
i have a project plan in an excel file with this columns. now i want to create this project plan in project plan 3, how to do it?
Company
Cost Center Name
Company Number
Account Number
Cost Center Number
Accounting Project Number
Project Number
Sub- Project number
Project Leader
Concept
Vendor (provider)
Total Cost (in contract
currency)
Contract Currency
Project Initiated/Not Initiated
Committed/Not committed
Priority
January, 2026
February, 2026
March, 2026
April, 2026
May, 2026
June, 2026
July, 2026
August, 2026
September, 2026
October, 2026
November, 2026
December, 2026
Q1/27
Q2/27
Q3/27
Q4/27
2028
2029
2030
What is the best practice project planning approach when i have complex projects that I have to manage, with resources, costs, projects, sub projects, sub sub projects. How do this on desktop and online? And also colaborative?
when project managers have to input thier budgets, how can I create a mapping where they can input thier budgets and project related facts.

Thank you in advance for you inputs and help

F.A

Can't see timeline in Microsoft Planner Plan 1

samuelebrtls — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:20:10 GMT

Hi,

I would like to find a solution because I can't see the "timeline" menu when I create a premium plan, even if I have a Planner Plan 1:

It happens both with Web app and Local app

Best regards

Planner - Plan 1 - Welcome message

jakudo — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:22:54 GMT

Hi,

we're using Teams for managing our projects. We have Team "Projects" and there are many channels inside this Team. Each channel represent our project (we are HVAC company). With the basic Planner, I used to create channel "Mr. Newman" - inside that channel we have all files related to that project, we have discussions about that project and we also have Planner assigned to that project. Which works well.

Since we are growing, I wanted to test the Planner Plan 1 (I like the Goals, timelines etc), however, there is a huge problem that when I create the Planner now (the premium one), it sends an E-mail to everyone. I don't want that. All of the employees are getting emails that they have been added to the planner "Mr. Newman" etc. and they are asking what should they do with that?

How do I turn that off?

Thanks,

Jakub

Creating groups in Planner

AV3 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:45:14 GMT

I lead a team of 20 who each partner with 5 other people on external teams (to us but still internal to the company). I have been using the planner to give each 1:5 ratio group a single place to track status on tasks. However, every time I want to make a new group to add to the planner, I have to request it via microsoft. Our IT can't get around that. It takes weeks for my group requests to be approved and really ties up onboarding. Is there a way around this? Or any other way that I could get the same result minus the hectic waiting for groups to be granted access?

Connecting Planner tasks to employee goals/OKRs - anyone figured this out?

MeggyB360 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:49:01 GMT

My manager wants us to tie our daily Planner tasks back to our quarterly OKRs but theres no native way to do this. I spent a couple hours trying to set up a Power Automate flow that updates an Excel tracker whenever a Planner task gets completed but it feels hacky. Is there a cleaner way to connect what people are actually doing in Planner to higher level goals?

Timeline zoom

JGobel — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:06:06 GMT

Hello,

Is there a way to lower the zoom level in the Timeline view to less than 1 week? I have a couple projects with multiple dependent task per day but if I use the maximum zoom level in the Timeline view I don’t get a good overview of the different task in for example a 4 day period. I was expecting a Gantt chart like view, like what you have in Microsoft Project, in where you can zoom to a minute level granularity even.

[BUG] msdyn_project silently renamed from "Plan/Plans" to "Project/Projects" in new environments

Woody — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:56:15 GMT

We need clarification from Microsoft on whether this is a bug or an intentional breaking change.

Overnight and without any announcement, the msdyn_project table now ships with display name Project / Projects in newly provisioned environments. Dev and UAT environments provisioned a few months ago have Plan / Plans out of the box. All environments are running the exact same PSCore version: 1.0.163.730.

The entity is as expected, marked non-renameable — read-only in the maker portal — so there is no way to align environments manually.

Solution import from an existing environment (where msdyn_project = "Plan") into a newly provisioned Production environment fails with:

0x8004023B: Entity 44286cce-2389-4532-ac04-7a18a2818e9a is not a renamable entity. Hence Entity Display Name cannot be modified

The only workaround — and why it is not acceptable

It is technically possible to manually edit customizations.xml inside the solution ZIP before importing, removing the <DisplayName> node for msdyn_project. The import will then succeed, but Production will permanently show "Project" while Dev and UAT show "Plan" — a broken inconsistency across environments.

More importantly, this is not how ALM is supposed to work. Developers should never have to manually patch solution artifacts to work around a platform-level inconsistency introduced silently by Microsoft. This is incompatible with automated CI/CD pipelines and unsustainable for any team managing multiple environments.

The question for Microsoft

Is this a bug or a planned change?

If it is a bug: when will it be fixed, and is there a supported workaround in the meantime?
If it is a planned change: why was it not communicated, and what is the supported migration path for teams with existing environments and solutions?

[UPDATE]:

After 3 attempts of resetting and reprovisioning the Production environment, msdyn_project finally came up with Plan / Plans — same process, same PSCore version each time. The behavior is non-deterministic. The only workaround currently available is to keep resetting your environment until you get lucky, which is not an acceptable answer for any type of deployment.