The new Microsoft Planner: A unified experience bringing together to-dos, tasks, plans and projects

We’re heading into a new era, where AI is an integral part of the workday. The tools you’re using for work management should be intelligent and help keep you focused and productive. However, even the most innovative solutions for getting work done can slow you down when they don’t work together. In fact, the average employee spends the bulk of their time—more than 57%—communicating, when they could be focused on driving outcomes. And 59% of employees say their collaboration tools are not aligned with how their teams prefer to work. Employees are also eager for AI to help lift the burden of mundane daily tasks, with 70% saying they would delegate as much work as possible to AI. Customers have been asking for the ability to drive more momentum and efficiency in their day. They want a single, intelligent app to track all their work and projects. That’s why Microsoft is leveraging our experience in collaborative work management (CWM), enterprise work management (EWM) and frontline task management to deliver a new modern work management solution assisted by next-generation AI.

Meet the new Microsoft Planner: Manage all your tasks and plans in one simple, familiar experience

We’re bringing together the simplicity of Microsoft To Do, the collaboration of Microsoft Planner, the power of Microsoft Project for the web and the intelligence of Microsoft Copilot into a simple, familiar experience. Discover a new way to manage tasks for individual plans and team initiatives, as well as larger scale project management, aligned to goals and key strategic objectives. The new Planner will easily scale from simple task management to enterprise project management, empowering everyone to manage their work in one place and accelerate business outcomes. Starting in Spring 2024, the new Planner app will be available in Microsoft Teams, followed by a web experience later in 2024.

See what you can do with the new Planner

The new Planner is simple: Find the tasks you need, right when you need them. Manage all your tasks, to-do lists, plans, and projects across Microsoft 365 applications in one simple, familiar experience.

The new Planner is flexible: Work the way you and your teams want, from individual task management to large team initiatives. Choose from an array of templates, views, and approaches including lists, boards, timelines, and sprints to personalize your plan. Features such as agile sprint planning, team workload, goals alignment, custom fields, and task history that you use and love today in Project for the web will be available in the new Planner experience.

The new Planner is scalable: Get big picture views across initiatives. You can configure, extend, and automate the new Planner (with or without code) to meet your organization’s changing needs. Built on Microsoft Power Platform, the new Planner will enable customized reporting through Microsoft Power BI and configurable workflows through Microsoft Power Automate. It also integrates with Microsoft Viva Goals, connecting to your objectives and key results (OKR) to inform plans and provide high-level visibility.

The new Planner is intelligent: Accelerate outcomes with AI. Through simple, natural-language prompts, Copilot in Planner (coming in Spring 2024) will help you generate new plans, set goals, track status, and react to changes as projects evolve. Copilot will provide support for you and your team, making work and project management faster and easier than ever.

Integrations with Microsoft 365 experiences

The new Planner enables you to stay in the flow of work with integrations across other Microsoft 365 experiences such as Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Outlook, Viva Goals, and Teams. You can bring existing Planner plans into a Loop workspace and track your team plan alongside other project content in one place. Emails you flag in Outlook, or action items assigned to you from Teams meetings are also visible in Planner.

Task management in Planner for frontline teams

The new Planner will continue to include task management features for frontline organizations. With features such as task publishing, leaders can define the work to be done across their frontline locations and monitor completion. These features have been part of what was previously the Tasks app in Teams, and we’re carrying them forward into the new Planner.

The new Microsoft Planner: A unified experience bringing together to-dos, tasks, plans and projects