Planner Is Getting the Updates We've Been Waiting Years For

Summary

After about two and a half years without a major Planner update, the Bulb Digital presenters say Microsoft’s recent roadmap gives them cautious optimism. They compare new and upcoming features with earlier shortcomings, including limited reporting, Copilot being restricted to premium plans, and task comments that were easy to miss in a group mailbox.

Features Available or Demonstrated

• Planner in Teams shared and private channels: Boards can now be added to shared or private channels, not just standard channels, giving teams more flexibility in how they organize their channels.
• Planner in Outlook: Planner is accessible from an app tab in Outlook, providing another entry point to the same tool.
• Custom plan templates: Users can publish a plan as a reusable template and create new plans from it. The presenters demonstrate this and suggest it could help with repeatable processes such as employee onboarding.
• Task chat and notifications: Task conversations now use Teams infrastructure, with notifications the presenters found more reliable than the former group-mailbox comments. They would still like task discussions to connect more naturally with related Teams conversations.
• Copilot in Planner: The presenters say Copilot can now help with basic plans as well as premium ones. They report using it successfully to move tasks between buckets.

Roadmap Features Discussed

• Conditional task coloring: Tasks could be highlighted based on conditions, such as how soon they are due. The presenters say the details are not yet clear.
• Percentage completion: A progress value could provide more information than the existing not-started, in-progress, and completed statuses.
• Capacity views: Workload information could help managers compare assigned work with people’s available capacity.
• Linking Teams meetings to existing plans: Tasks created during a meeting could be added to an established Planner board, rather than generating a separate plan for each meeting.
• Related plans: Plans could be linked so users can move between them and see how they relate. The presenters are unsure whether this will support dependencies between individual tasks or enable broader reporting across plans.
• Integration with “Cowork”: The presenters describe a planned integration that could help organize Planner tasks, while noting that Cowork is now a paid offering.
• AI-generated status reports: Copilot could turn plan information into more polished reports for stakeholders, rather than relying on Planner’s more internally focused charts.
• Planner through Copilot chat: Users could ask Copilot questions such as what to work on this week and get help drawing tasks from multiple Planner boards. The presenters note that availability may vary because Microsoft is rolling out the feature gradually.

Overall, the presenters see a clearer direction for Planner than in the past, but stress that they are reserving judgment until the roadmap features are available and proven in practice.

Review and Demonstration

The video reviews Planner’s recent changes and roadmap, demonstrates creating and reusing a custom template, and discusses the presenters’ experience with task-chat notifications and Copilot.

Main Speakers and Sources

• Bulb Digital presenters: Review Planner and demonstrate its features.
• Microsoft Planner roadmap and product features: The main sources of the updates discussed.