For those people using Microsoft Planner you will have noticed some Premium options available. Microsoft Planner has several licensing options available from the basic Microsoft Planner included with any Microsoft 365 subscription, to Microsoft Planner Plan 1, Planner and Project Plan 3 or Planner and Project Plan 5. So for those who have been upgraded from basic Planner to the next level, you’ll want to know how to upgrade your existing basic Plans to allow access to these new premium features. You may also wonder what some of the differences are?
In this post I am going to discuss the differences and the process of upgrading from the basic Microsoft Planner to Microsoft Planner Plan 1 version.
Let’s first get a good understanding of these two Planner versions:
Microsoft Planner (Basic)
- This is included with all Microsoft 365 subscriptions
- Provides great task management capability including some basic templates to start with,
- has the option to set start and due dates,
- easily add labels to tasks to categorise,
- assign to team members,
- set priority levels,
- create recurring tasks,
- add notes,
- include checklist items,
- include attachments and
- use comments.
- Includes Grid, Board, Schedule and Chart views.
Microsoft Planner Plan 1
- An additional user licence is required,
- Provides the first level of Premium features which includes premium template options,
- Switch to Start & Finish dates (rather than start & due date),
- work with task duration and % complete,
- use of Sprints,
- assign tasks,
- add labels,
- use checklist items,
- PLUS you have automatic calculation of work Effort (completed hours + remaining hours = total hours),
- basic task dependency options (finish-to-start only), and
- use of attachments.
- One big difference here is that Comments are dropped as a feature from the Planner Plan 1 version and instead you have the ability to hold Conversations in a channel.
- Good to note that Recurring tasks are not available in this plan level, neither is the “Show on card” feature that basic Planner has.
- Add in Timeline (Gantt), People and Goals views.
Now that you understand these two versions, what do you do if you’ve been working with the basic Planner and now have been provided with the upgraded licence to use Planner Plan 1. What happens to your existing plans? Thankfully Planner Plan 1 allows you to convert a basic plan to the Premium version to unlock the additional features without having to create the plans again from scratch.
Convert a Basic Plan to Planner Plan 1
To convert an existing basic Planner plan to use the premium features:
- Open the Plan you wish to convert.
- Click on the Timeline view from the menu bar, which is a Premium feature.
- A window will appear asking if you wish to convert the plan:
- Click Yes, convert now.
- A message will appear to advise the conversion is taking place:
- Once completed, a Success message will appear:
- Click Close.
- The Plan will appear now with all premium features available.
What is different after upgrading?
Let’s say you are upgrading a Plan that you’ve been using for 12 months. Many users are nervous, wondering if they will loose any of the data from their Plan. Well the good news is that no, you shouldn’t loose any data. But that doesn’t mean that things won’t change.
One very big change is the way that Planner deals with comments. In basic Planner you have the ability to comment on a task which can be a very useful way to communicate with others in your Team regarding the status of the task. Planner Plan 1 does not use Comments, so what happens to them and do they just disappear?
Thankfully no they do not disappear. They will still be accessible to view, but the Comments feature does change to use Conversations in a channel so it does use a different approach.
- When you open a task in the basic Planner, you will see any Comments at the bottom of the screen:
- Now let’s upgrade the Plan and see what we get afterwards and how to still access these Comments.
- From the view options, click Timeline and go through the process to upgrade the Plan, if not already done.
- By default, the upgraded Plan will now display in Grid view, rather than Board view.
- In Grid view, hover over the task name and click the information icon:
- The task details will appear on the right side of the screen.
- In the bottom right corner you should see Comment History:
- The comments will now be displayed:
Using Task Conversations
Task conversations provide the premium alternative to Comments. I have found many users don’t initially like this change so let’s explore how this works.
If you are accessing Planner via a Microsoft Teams channel:
- Open the Team and channel via Microsoft Teams.
- Access Planner via the channel tabs.
- Open the Task card.
- In the bottom left corner, click Task conversation:
- A panel will open on the right side of the screen and display the Task name at the top, along with a Message in channel prompt at the bottom:
- Click in the Message in channel prompt and enter your comment.
- Press Enter to send.
- The message will now be visible in the Task conversation panel for the task, but a notication of this message will also appear in the Posts tab of the current channel you are working in within Microsoft Teams:
Cannot add Planner to a Team
If your Planner is not yet part of a Team/channel in Microsoft Teams, you will need to assign it to one in order to use Task conversations. It’s important to understand that not all plans can be added to any Team in your organisation. The underlining security for Planner comes from a Microsoft 365 group and if the group does not match the group used for a Microsoft Team, you cannot incorporate them together.
For any Plan that you wish to use as part of a larger Team, it is always easier to create the plan from within Microsoft Teams to ensure it uses the same Microsoft 365 Group. I discuss creating a Plan here and outline Microsoft 365 groups. To learn more about how to add or remove members from a Plan in Microsoft Planner, check out my post.
As an example below I am trying to add an existing Plan to one of my Microsoft Teams channels. When I add Planner as a Tab to the channel, I choose Add an existing plan but the plan I want to add does not appear and so I cannot add it. That’s because when I created the Plan, it automatically created a Microsoft 365 Group, and it is a different group to the one used in the Microsoft Team I am in.
Unfortunately the only real workaround here is to create a new Plan in the Team you want it to be part of, so that the Microsoft 365 Groups match up. You cannot change the group associated with a Planner plan.
An alternative that works quite well is to export your Planner tasks to Excel and you can then use Power Automate to import them back into a new Plan. Stay tuned as I will be adding this post to my website shortly!
Switch back from Premium to Basic Plan
What if you have upgraded a Plan to the Premium version and you want to revert it back to Basic? No problems, we can do that. This only works on a plan that has been upgraded from Basic to Premium. You cannot convert a Premium plan back to basic if it was created as a Premium plan from the start.
- Open the Plan that has been upgraded.
- Click the drop-down next to the Plan name and choose Plan details:
- In the bottom of the panel you will see it stats that the “basic plan” was converted to premium and it will even let you know when:
- Click Switch back to basic.
- A message will appear asking “Are you sure you want to downgrade?“:
- Read through the information and if you wish to proceed, click Yes, downgrade plan.
- The process will now complete and your basic plan will be available again.
I hope this has helped to understand the process for upgrading a Microsoft Planner Plan from basic to Premium, identify some of the changes you might notice and how to work around them, and also how to downgrade a plan. Feel free to leave any comments below.