Why was Microsoft Planner Changed?

Subject: Critical Feedback on Microsoft Planner Premium Upgrade

Dear Microsoft Planner Team,

I’m writing to express my deep frustration and concern regarding the recent "upgrade" to Planner Premium. As someone who relies on Planner daily to manage a critical workflow for a large organization, I find the new version not only ineffective, but actively detrimental to productivity.

We are a company with over 3,000 employees, many of whom utilize Planner across various departments. My specific team, which manages over 160 active agreements and 460 completed documents for our renewables division, was recently transitioned to Planner Premium with integration into Microsoft Teams. Since this change, my ability to perform my job has been significantly compromised, and if rolled out more broadly, this update could severely disrupt the operations of other teams as well.

Key Issues and Impacts:

• Loss of Task-Specific Communication: Previously, comments on tasks generated email notifications to assignees and to me. This ensured accountability and clear tracking of actions. Now, conversations are moved into Teams channels, resulting in irrelevant notifications to all 50 members of our plan. Comments are no longer tied to tasks and are virtually untraceable. This drastically reduces visibility, efficiency, and accountability.
• Approval Tracking Broken: Before, each approver could check off a checklist item and comment “approved” directly within the task. This served as a permanent record. Now, approvals get buried in Teams conversations, with no clear link to the relevant task. This undermines compliance and auditability.
• Loss of Functionality in Browser Version: I primarily use Planner in Chrome, where I can no longer view or create task conversations. Even when I @mention someone in the Teams-integrated version, they don’t receive an email — just another Teams notification likely to be lost in the noise.
• No Admin Notifications: As the Plan admin, I used to rely on email alerts to track tasks. Now I receive no such updates unless I manually search through Teams — a poor use of time for anyone managing high volumes of tasks.
• Excessive Team Notifications: Weekly meetings involve moving tasks across buckets and adding comments. In the new setup, all 50 members are notified about changes to 160+ tasks. This is overwhelming, unmanageable, and entirely counterproductive.
• Templates and Task Creation: In the old Planner, I created reusable task templates with notes, checklists, and terms pre-filled. Copying a task was quick and seamless. Now, creating and editing tasks involves multiple additional steps — from navigating lists, opening drop-downs, to manually editing details. This adds unnecessary complexity and slows down our process.
• Basic Features Removed:
  • List view is no longer sortable.
  • Filters require multiple clicks to reset.
  • Not all users appear in the assignee dropdown list.
  • The browser version frequently requires manual refreshes to reflect updates.

Final Thoughts:

I’ve advocated to our IT team to allow us to use a different task management platform, but due to our commitment to the Microsoft 365 suite, we’re expected to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem. This new Planner experience, however, makes that extremely difficult.

Frankly, it appears the people who designed this version do not use it in a real-world, high-volume, business-critical setting. I urge your team to seriously reconsider this rollout and either restore the original version or offer a viable, functional alternative for enterprise users.

I hope you receive this feedback in the spirit it’s intended — with the hope of helping improve a product many of us rely on. At present, the Premium Planner is not a professional tool. I respectfully ask you to revisit the fundamentals that made Planner so useful and reliable before this change.

Sincerely,
Kelly Evans
A Very Disappointed Customer