In February 2023, Project Manager published a blog post about the status of Project for the Web from a project management perspective.
This article focuses on a blog post and related material published by Microsoft, in which Microsoft announces that in 2024, the current ToDo, Planner and Project for the Web applications will merge their functionality and move under the same brand name. The new product will be called Microsoft Planner. But before drilling deeper into the new product, a little background.
Background
Microsoft Planner is a simple team planning tool available in the Microsoft cloud. It has had many good features, including sharing work between team members who can see their own work across different plans, work has also been manageable in the ToDo app, where it has been possible to manage tasks created in Outlook. On the downside, however, Planner did not support Microsoft’s Dataverse data management platform, for example, at all, making it difficult, if not impossible, to extend its functionality.
Project for the Web is Microsoft’s new generation of project management software. It is built on a cloud platform, the Dataverse data management platform, and uses the Power Apps application architecture. It is therefore architecturally flexible, as its data model and functionalities can be extended by modifying the Power Apps application and extending the Dataverse data model. The biggest shortcoming customers have seen is the inability of Project for the web to present team members across projects with their tasks or through the ToDo application.
What does the future hold?
Now, the two apps mentioned above and the ToDo app will be merged to create a new Microsoft Planner, which will be further enriched with the AI features of Copilot.
The new Planner will first be released as a Teams version in early 2024, where not all features will yet be available in a single package. An extended and browser-only version is expected by the end of 2024.
According to Microsoft’s announcement, two different versions of the new Planner will be available. These are Basic and Premium. A few words about these now.
Basic or Premium – therein lies the dilemma?
Planner Basic
Based on the available Microsoft material, the Basic version will be very similar to the current Planner, with the addition of ToDo’s task list functionality in the My Tasks view. However, it will still be the simple project planning and team work planning tool that can be used to smoothly assign tasks to team members and collect task progress information from them in a distributed way.
My tasks from different projects – view
Planner Premium
Planner Premium is clearly the big brother, responsible for the scheduling, Gantt charts, objectives, logic between tasks and links to objectives, resource allocations and project loads of large projects.
What’s new in Planner Premium is that Microsoft’s artificial intelligence Copilot has been harnessed to support project plan creation. In addition to setting up a task list using a project template, Copilot can be used to create or complete task lists for different needs according to user-defined instructions.
Creating tasks with Copilot
To make the transition from Basic to Premium as easy as possible, the Premium functions can be launched from within Basic. The Premium functionality covers the Gantt view of Project for the Web and critical path computation, including dependencies of different types and delays between tasks.
With the migration of ToDo’s functionality to Planner, the new Planner Premium finally has the functionality requested by many customers, where each person’s tasks from different projects are collected. In fact, the My Tasks view also collects tasks from other sources than the new Planner.
How the new Planner will support portfolio management is still a mystery, as the available material does not describe this in any way, and the old Project for the Web required a Power App for portfolio management.
The new Microsoft Planner will definitely grow and evolve in the future. It already includes features to help you centrally manage projects, their objectives, schedules and work plans. The Power Platform platform allows you to build additional functionality so that there are virtually no limits to the system’s scalability.
The Project Manager is looking forward to the announcements in 2024 and getting to know the new product. More on this topic in next year’s Project Manager blogs, when the first versions will be available.
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