Why Microsoft has Project and Planner and how they converge

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Picture: Microsoft. Project will have the same option to start a Teams chat on a specific task that Planner already has.

Managing tasks and projects with a group of people? Microsoft offers many task management tools (including Tasks, Outlook Tasks, Azure Boards for Developers, or creating your own with lists), but there are two overlapping offerings for team projects.

Microsoft Project and Planner come from the same team, share many technologies, and have increasingly similar interface designs, with Planner getting more powerful tools as Planner features appear in Project. This isn’t because Microsoft plans to turn them into a single app or service, but to make it easier to use them together if your needs get more complicated as a project grows.

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Planner is designed for people without project management expertise who still need to manage projects, or at least tasks done by groups of people, although you might not call it anything as formal as a project.

Project is an online service with web and mobile applications aimed at the occasional and professional project manager. Microsoft refers to it as an “advancement” over Planner, and it has a scheduling engine, so if you mark a task as dependent on something else that needs to be completed before you can start it, the Schedules will automatically update as you mark the first task completed or delayed.

There is also the desktop version of Project which has the full set of professional project management features. It is included in Project Online Premium and Professional subscriptions as a Project Online desktop client, using the cloud service instead of Project Server. Project on the web doesn’t have all of these features, but it does have some new ones, like understanding time zones. So if you’re working with someone in another office or working remotely, the two eight-hour days you allocate to a task will correctly show up as three or even four days in the schedule if their timezone means their hours. Tuesday and Wednesday office hours. correspond to your Tuesday evening to Thursday morning.

Planner gets more powerful features – you’ll soon be able to create recurring tasks in Planner and use text formatting and insert images in task notes – but it’s not intended to be as powerful or as complex as Project. As Brian Smith, senior escalation engineer on the Project Support team, explained in an online discussion, Microsoft doesn’t want to “charge Planner users for project licenses when they don’t have need only some of the basic functions”.

Including Project in the base Microsoft 365 subscription wouldn’t make sense either, he suggested, because “for some users the feature set will be more than necessary (and getting bigger and bigger) so that they will then find it too heavy”. Instead, Microsoft is looking to offer parity so that Planner users who switch to Project don’t lose any of the functionality they’re used to, and so that people who are assigned tasks through Planner and Project “don’t have not think about these tasks differently or go to different places to update their progress.

There is always high demand for Project, with many requests for feedback on the desktop app’s advanced features like a consolidated planner and project task view, resource scheduling, project baselines ( to know if a project stayed on target or was delayed) or be able to choose different options for dependencies between tasks. There is also some frustration with the speed of development, which has prompted some organizations to migrate to Project Online still using the desktop app.

With so many years of features for project professionals in the desktop Project app, it’s understandable that it takes time to bring them to Project on the web (and it recently got a much-requested critical path view as well as custom fields). But Planner and Project cater to a much wider range of users, including “accidental” project managers who might otherwise keep lists of dates and deliverables in Excel or a Word document (or competitors like Trello) – and the focus is on features that will help a wider audience and make it easier for Planner users if they need to use Project for a casual, more complex project by making it familiar.

That’s why Project now offers planner-style sub-task checklists as well as more formal dependencies, so you can have a quick list of things to check off as you work, along with labels for tasks. color coding. There’s also a new priority field coming, where the person actually doing the task can assign a priority to organize the various things they need to do (rather than the project manager marking the importance of a task for the entire project).

Later this year, Project will have a graphical view similar to Planner, so a manager used to working in Planner won’t get lost when using Project, and templates to help them start new projects.

Keep the project and planner informed

Several of the new features aim to help users keep track of tasks and action items that might get lost in the flood of virtual meetings, emails and chats.

Planner has some of the AI-based features that appear in many Microsoft 365 tools (Microsoft sometimes calls them Context AI). It will prompt you to look at plans where you’ve been assigned a task you haven’t opened yet by putting them in a Recommended section and suggest what it thinks is the right file to attach to a task by looking at who is supposed to be working on a task, the description of what they are doing and the files that have been shared with you and the documents that you have created.

The Teams integration pins Planner boards in Teams channels so users can update tasks there rather than just posting that something needs to be done (or has been done). You can even click on a message in the Teams chat and use More Actions, Create Task to put a new task on a Planner board with a priority and date (and a link to the original chat), or you can start a Teams conversation when watching a task in Planner. There’s also a Microsoft Loop to-do list component for tasks, which means people you @mention can update the task in Teams (and possibly Outlook and other apps) and the progress flows in Planner.

Project also appears in Teams, albeit with more views – a structure list (Project calls it a grid) or a timeline with dependencies – as well as the board view, which you can customize with a lot more information , as which a task needs to be reviewed by. The project is built on Dynamics and Microsoft Power Platform, so there are integrations with Power BI and PowerApps, like dashboards that show the status of multiple projects for portfolio management.

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Over time (the word Microsoft uses is “eventually”), Project will allow you to create or update tasks from within Teams and through Loop; although Project tasks are generally more structured and planned, you can easily imagine a discussion in Teams helping someone figure out how to split a task and who to assign subtasks to and want to send it to Project from Teams, rather than pulling the task into Project and modifying it there without the context of the discussion. You’ll also be able to start a conversation about a specific task and @mention the people involved from the Project app in Teams (similar to how you can now for Planner).

Using Project with Teams requires having the correct license. Users with a subscription to Project Plan 1, Project Plan 3, or Project Plan 5 can create and edit projects in the Project tab in Teams: If you want to create and edit roadmaps, you must have a subscription to Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5.

Anyone with an Office 365 subscription can view but not edit projects and roadmaps. But this year (probably May if the feature isn’t delayed), if you’ve been assigned a task in Project, you’ll only need a Microsoft 365 license to access the Project web app and mark it. as partially completed or completely. Done, and we expect this to work if you’re also using Project in Teams.

Also planned for this year is the ability to add guest users who don’t have a Project license, which you can already do in Planner. It’s not just for a manager who needs to keep an eye on progress but won’t actively manage the work; you can also assign tasks to guest users if you have an external contractor or vendor, and they can both view the project and update the status of those tasks.

And while it still hasn’t made it into the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the long-awaited consolidated view of tasks from Project and Planner is coming to Teams and To Do at some point this year.

Cathy Harley, Senior Program Manager for Planner and Project, described it this way at the Ignite conference last year: “Soon Project Tasks will be integrated into the Assigned to You list in the Teams Tasks app and the To Do app alongside the Planner tasks that appear there, so there’s only one place to manage all the tasks assigned to you in Microsoft 365.” Project and Planner users are looking forward to this one- ci and resort to workarounds such as verifying project tasks in Power Platform Project Accelerator in the meantime.

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