Working on a Teams Planner Plan with both basic and premium users

Hello De Paul,

I am also struggling with this topics.

I’ve noticed the following behaviour:

1. Basic Plans and Premium Features:
   • When a premium user opens a basic plan, premium functionalities are indeed unavailable unless the plan is converted to a premium plan.
   • Converting to a premium plan is only possible if every member of the group has a premium license. Otherways it will only create a "private copy" of the plan which is useless for cooperating with team members.
   • Creating a private plan in the planner section and sharing it with Microsoft 365 licensed users seems to work (they only have access to basic features but that is fine). But I am not able to use such a task board in a teams channel.

Is there a possibility I can work in a teams channel in a planner task board, when I am having a planner 3 license and all the other members have a basic planner license (Microsoft 365). It would be great if I would have access to the premium features and they have Access to the basic features.

Thank you very much!

Best regards

Anton

Hi Chen

I only found this article for a possible solution. Plan Downgrade - Microsoft Planner | Microsoft Learn

I didn't test the downgrade process so far. All as I know there are some limitations with downgrading a premium plan. But all is written in the article above.

Have you found the solution for converting the Premium plan back to basic? I have this problem at the moment. The premium plan hides all the checklists in Board view which is so inconvenient and makes things inefficient. I want my basic planner back.

Hi De Paul

Thank you for your answer and for forwarding the points to the product team.

Concerning the downgrade of a premium plan I found out, that, of course, only converted plans can be downgraded to the point when the upgrade happened. This is fine for me.

I created a post in the feedback community. Hopefully this helps.

Have a nice weekend.

Br, Fabio

Dear Schuppli Fabio,

Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response. I truly appreciate the time and effort you’ve taken to share your observations and findings. Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and I’m glad my earlier comment brought a smile to your day!

I’ve reviewed the points you raised and conducted some tests on my end. I can confirm that I was able to reproduce the phenomena you described:

1. Basic Plans and Premium Features:
   • When a premium user opens a basic plan, premium functionalities are indeed unavailable unless the plan is converted to a premium plan.
   • Once converted, basic users lose access to the plan entirely, receiving the "no project-sub found" message.
2. Task Assignment from Premium to Basic Users:
   • Assigning tasks from a premium plan to a basic user does allow the task to appear in the "My Tasks" section of Planner. However, as you noted, the merging of premium attributes into the notes field and the limitations in the comment section persist.
3. External Guest Collaboration on Premium Plans:
   • I also tested this scenario and observed similar behavior. External guests can access the plan, view and edit tasks, and even add new tasks. However, premium attributes like Dependencies, Expenditure, and advanced views (e.g., People, Goals, Timeline) remain unavailable and are greyed out.

Regarding your additional point about the lack of a downgrade option for accidentally upgraded plans, I understand how this could be frustrating. I’ve flagged this as a potential area for improvement and shared it with the relevant team.

Additionally, I noticed an issue when adding the Planner tab to Teams: the search functionality seems to be missing. Based on my research, this appears to be a problem introduced in the latest update. We’ve reported this to the developers and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

To further support your feedback, I encourage you to share your observations inthe feedback community. This platform is actively monitored by Microsoft developers, and your insights could help drive improvements in how mixed licenses and collaboration workflows are handled.

Thank you once again for your detailed testing and for sharing your findings. Your input not only helps us understand the challenges better but also contributes to improving the overall experience for all users.

If you have any further questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Wishing you a wonderful day!