Major Updates Coming to Microsoft Planner in second half of 2025

Microsoft is accelerating the transformation of its project management offerings with a significant evolution of Planner set to take place between late April and early September 2025. For organizations invested in Microsoft’s project management ecosystem, understanding these updates is crucial for a smooth transition and to take advantage of new capabilities.

In this article, I will look closer at each of the upcoming enhancements to Microsoft Planner, highlight key migration changes, and clarify which features will not carry over from Project for the web.

What’s Coming to Planner Between April and September 2025

1. Planner Coming to Government Cloud Community (GCC) High

Now this might be only relevant for a select few reading this. But for the first time, Microsoft Planner will be officially available to GCC High tenants.

This is a critical step in bringing modern work management tools to public sector organizations with stringent compliance and security requirements. These users can expect parity with commercial Planner capabilities, including robust task management, integration with Teams and, hopefully, to an evolving portfolio solution.

2. Access to Non-Default Environment Plans

A notable enhancement is the ability to view and manage plans in non-default environments—also referred to as named organizations. Previously, users were restricted to the default Dataverse environment, which posed challenges for organizations utilizing multiple environments for departmental or geographic segmentation. With this update, project managers and users will have centralized visibility into all plans, regardless of their original environment.

This brings us one step closer to a “all encompassing my tasks overview”!

3. Rebranding of Project Power App to Planner Power App

I’ve mentioned this previously as well, but it bares repeating: Microsoft will rename the “Project” Power App to the “Planner Power App” to reflect the new unified vision under the Planner brand. This change will also be reflected in button labels and UI elements, ensuring consistent terminology across the ecosystem.

This rebranding signals a larger shift—Planner is no longer just a lightweight task management tool but is evolving into the central hub for project and portfolio management within Microsoft 365… With a big help from Power Platform that is. Using model driven power apps such as the Projectum xPM solution.

4. Planner Settings Moving to Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Administrative configurations for Planner will now be housed directly within the Planner section of the Microsoft 365 admin center. This migration from the legacy Project admin space simplifies governance and centralizes management for IT admins. Expect an improved interface and deeper integration with Microsoft 365 Groups, permissions, and licensing settings.

5. Access for Premium Planner Tenants Without Microsoft 365 Licenses In a move to widen adoption, tenants with premium Planner licenses—even if they don’t hold a Microsoft 365 license—will be granted access to basic Planner features. This provides flexibility for customers who might be licensing Planner through alternate means (e.g., standalone SKUs or embedded in Dynamics or other solutions) and opens the door for broader user enablement across enterprise departments.Title

What’s Not Making the Transition from Project for the Web?

While the majority of Project for the web’s capabilities are migrating to Planner (Premium), some features are intentionally being excluded to streamline the solution and avoid complexity.

1. No Roadmaps in Planner—Use Portfolios Instead

One of the biggest omissions is Roadmaps. Planner will not include the ability to open or edit existing Project Roadmaps. Instead, users are encouraged to adopt Portfolios within Planner, which offer an alternative for strategic oversight across multiple projects.

However, it’s important to note that:

• Planner Portfolios do not support rows linked to Azure DevOps or Project Online. But then again, neighter did the roadmap feature…
• Existing Roadmap data will remain available in Dataverse, allowing for reporting or data migration via Power BI or Power Apps if needed.

Organizations that relied heavily on Roadmaps for cross-platform visibility should begin assessing how Portfolios can be configured to replicate those views—or explore complementary tools like Power BI dashboards.

2. No Native .MPP File Import

Planner does not support importing .mpp files (Microsoft Project Project files) directly. If you need to bring in work from the desktop version of Project, you must do so using the Planner Power App (formerly Project Accelerator) or through a custom accelerator.

This is a clear signal that Microsoft is emphasizing a cloud-native project management strategy and expects customers to phase out reliance on legacy desktop file formats. Which is a shame, because we currently don’t have full parity with the desktop client, which will leave some expert users behind.

3. No Support for Portfolio Tabs in Teams

Lastly, unlike Roadmaps, Portfolios in Planner cannot be pinned as a tab in Microsoft Teams. This removes a popular integration point that many teams used to maintain visibility into strategic initiatives within their collaboration spaces.

While individual plans can still be surfaced in Teams tabs, portfolio-level oversight will need to be accessed through the Planner web app or Power Apps interface. This change emphasizes separating day-to-day team task management from executive-level oversight.

Final notes

I hope you enjoyed reading this article on the “big” changes ahead. If you’d like to get more, you could also subscribe to my newsletter or even book a meeting for a 1 on 1 to discuss a topic in detail.