Office 365 – Cannot add Plan to your favorites – Planner

For anyone that is new to Office 365 and not know what Planner is then you should spend time understanding MS Planner service. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress.

In this blog post, I am not going to talk about Planner much but I am going to talk about potential issue that you may face depending on your tenant configuration.

When you are on the Planner Hub you see various options to visualize your plans. One of the feature is to add plan to your favorites.

When you add planner to your favorites you may receive the following error. As I said earlier this is not going to be the case for the most part but as far as I know in one specific scenario you may receive the following error when adding plans to your favorites.

Upon researching I found the following very useful blog post.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2017/07/14/microsoft-planner-why-cant-i-add-favorites-or-comment/

With all credits to Brian (author of the blog post) I am posting scenario that I ran into where I go the above error.

In hybrid scenarios we do not support comments or favorites for users with their mailboxes on-premises as the users needs to have an Exchange Online mailbox to engage with these features.  EXCEPT – if the user does have an external email address configured and is configured as a MailUser in Exchange AD.  In this scenario the user will be able to use these features even though they have no EXO mailbox.  If the user is configured as a User rather than MailUser – and has no external email address then things won’t work.  This has explained the situations where some users work and some don’t in a hybrid environment.  Also of course some users may be fully in EXO and others in on-premises mailboxes.

So, if you run into the above error make sure to read the above blog post.

I hope this helps someone who is currently using Exchange in Hybrid scenario and running into this planner error.

 

Adding Planner to your Existing MS Teams

Microsoft Planner is a task management tool that your team can use to manage task and view the status of each task visually. It helps teams to create new plans, assign task and share files around projects or any other work that is going on. You can read more about it HERE.

In this blog post I am going to talk about how to add existing Plan to Teams. This is straight forward process but I still wanted to talk about some gotchas when adding Planner to the Team.

To add a Planner to the team you will go to any existing channel or create a new channel. Then you will click + sign to add a new tab. When you add a new tab you will have bunch of options to select type of tab. Here you will select Planner. Once you click Planner new dialog will open.

As you can see from the screen shot above I have a option to Create a new plan or Use and existing Plan. Now let me take a step back and explain what happens behind the scene. When you create a new Team or add Team to existing Office 365 Group you will have few things provisioned for you i.e. Office 365 Group, SharePoint Site and a Planner. Currently when writing this blog post there is one to one relationship between Planner and MS Groups. At the same time Teams have one to many relationship with Planner i.e. One team can have more than one Planner.

This is why you are seeing an option to either create a new Plan or use the existing Plan. If you select existing plan then you will have option to select your Plan from the dropdown and then you can access that Plan either from your Teams tab or from Planner Hub. When you create a new Plan then that Plan is not accessible from your Planner Hub and can only be visible from the Teams tab but tasks assigned to you are visible on the Planner Hub.

So it is bit confusing and I hope Planner and Teams team will work together to sort this out.

One last thing is that you will only see an option to select existing plan if you are an Owner on that Office 365 group. If you are member of a team and are allowed to add new tabs to the teams then you will only see Create new Plan option. So if you do not see option to select existing plan it might already be added to your team or you are not the owner on that Office 365 Group.

I hope this helps some of you.