#Microsoft to do planner how to#
Here’s everything you need to know about how to use Microsoft Planner effectively. Employees are able to track and organize their tasks, create new plans with each other, and see what they’re working on at a glance. It’s designed to help employees collaborate together. Microsoft Planner isn’t your typical project management platform. Learn how your comment data is processed.Manage your tasks in Teams with Microsoft Planner – a fully integrated, robust Microsoft solution. Our monthly updates keep subscribers informed about what’s important across the Office 365 ecosystem. Learn more about how the Microsoft 365 applications really work on an ongoing basis by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. However, given the pace at which things happen inside Planner (like creating the ability to move tasks between plans in other groups or creating a way to block users from deleting tasks, I won’t hold my breath. It would be even better if they documented what each limit meant in a practical sense. Helpfully, Microsoft closes the page by telling us that the Planner limits can be raised or lower at any time, which is nice to know. Practically SpeakingĪpart from Microsoft wanting to keep the Planner limits low enough to be useful but not high enough to threaten Microsoft Project, I can’t understand why some of these limits are not higher, especially considering that a team can have multiple plans attached to channel tabs. References on a task is a mystery and so is “ maximum user data count in user details.” Although I have no idea what this limit is, there can be up to ten of whatever they are for a task. The limit doesn’t refer to comments: I know of tasks with more than 20 comments, each of which is transmitted by email to plan members. This might refer to the number of attachments that users can add to tasks, but the Planner UI restricts this to nine. Then we come to some oddities that Microsoft doesn’t explain. They can be assigned a maximum of 3,000 tasks, but there’s no clarification whether this number includes completed tasks or just active tasks. There can be up to 20 checklist items in a task.Īn individual user can create up to 20,000 tasks spread across all the plans they are a member of. A task can include a set of checklist items used to describe individual elements which are part of the task. Most tasks are assigned to one or two team members, so eleven seems sufficient, even if the limit seems a tad arbitrary. Moving on to the Planner limits for tasks, the fundamental building blocks of plans, we find that a task can be assigned to a maximum of eleven people. Thankfully, I don’t seem to have encountered either limit in the six years that I’ve used Planner. I have no idea what either limit refers to. But then Microsoft documents that up to 100 users can be shared with a plan? And there can be up to 10 contexts on a plan.
Perhaps it’s where an account is a member of a plan. Up to 300 plans can be shared with a user. Although 200 seems a lot, I could see how the limit might be reached if an account is used to create a lot of groups or teams. By owner, I assume that Microsoft means that the user is the owner of the group which owns the plans (a group used by a team can have multiple plans). We also learn that an individual user can own up to 200 plans. Usually, the columns on the board represent a workflow stage, but Planner buckets can be used for anything, and 200 appears to be more than sufficient. The layout used by Planner resembles a Kanban format where the cards on the board help people to visualize work. The maximum number of buckets in a plan is 200. Fortunately, we close tasks as their subject matter appears in a book update, so the current overall total of 2,077 (Figure 1) still has room to grow. Indeed, the first time I looked at the documented Planner limits, I was worried that the plan the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team use to synchronize and track notifications from the Microsoft 365 message center was getting close. It might seem that 9,000 tasks is more than sufficient for even the most comprehensive plan, but some plans do span large numbers of tasks. Indeed, 2,400 and 9,000 both seem arbitrary limits in a suite where it’s common to store hundreds of thousands of messages or documents. Twenty-four hundred active tasks is not a very large number.
I infer this meaning by reference to the limit for tasks in a plan, 9,000, meaning that 6,600 tasks can be closed to allow room for the 2,400 active tasks. Presumably, these are tasks in the not started and in progress status, but Microsoft doesn’t make this clear. The problem is with the words used to describe limits.įor example, we learn that a plan can have up to 2,400 active tasks. On the surface, the limits are precise and cover both plans and tasks. A browse of Microsoft’s documentation for Planner limits caused my brow to furrow.