In the slow vacation weeks, Planner updates keep piling up! In this blog I’m digging into their latest and greatest: The Microsoft Planner Template! That’s right, Planner finally has custom templates!
Why custom Planner templates?
I’ve been advocating for custom planner templates for ages. And even though the “copy project” was a nice and sometimes useful option, it’s no replacement for real templates.
Every organization has its own unique ways of planning. And they need an easy way to communicate this method of planning with their PMO.
With templates, centrally stored, this can be achieved without much difficulty. And if the templates are managed by the PMO we are sure that the quality is put to the test of what the organisation considers good planning.
Copy Project is a single person’s game. You need access to the plan you want to copy, and you need to jump additional hoops before the plan is copied and cleaned to your liking. With a real custom Planner Template, the search for a good plan is taken out of your hands. The PMO has got you covered!
How Custom Templates?
As I described in the video in the beginning of this post. Creating custom templates is really easy. Any Basic plan can not be turned into a template.
As far as I can tell there’s no license restriction to who can create templates so both Planner licenses should be fine.
Search for the purple share button on the top right of the page, once you are inside one of the plans you want to turn into a template. When you press that button you should see this screen, which includes the “Publish as a template” option:
This is followed with a menu that let’s you decide…
Where Templates?
Templates are stored in SharePoint, as *.plat files (probably Planner Template). This made me think if there’s anywhere on the system that we can find *.pla files as well? But that is a no apparently, because plans are stored a bit differently.
The where question is a bit up to you really. Planner does not currently provide a tenant-wide template gallery. But I would argue that templates should be created and shared centrally non the less. A place where most/all planners are able to access them. Which makes the location of PMO documentation an ideal candidate.
Publishing a first template to a location creates a folder and the file *.plat file which will then be available to users that have access to that location/group. You will find these shared templates in the second tab in the create menu:
When?
Microsoft is releasing the Custom Templates to the public as we speak. On the official roadmap website, you can find the Planner Template topic by searching for Roadmap ID 512431. And the good thing is, the roll out is global and this is the “General Available” version.
I believe we should take the mention of “Desktop, Mac” and Web, with a bit of a grain of salt. There is no desktop application, but Planner is available through the Teams desktop application on Windows and Mac, in addition to the browser. Microsoft’s own instructions regularly distinguish Planner in Teams from Planner on the web.
The roadmap entry lists worldwide standard multi-tenant availability. I have not yet found confirmation that the feature is available in GCC, GCC High or DoD tenants.
Can an existing template be altered/versioned?
I did not find an Edit template button inside Planner. Microsoft’s recommended approach is to update the original plan and publish it as a new version of the template. Plans that have already been created from the old template will not be affected.
However, because templates are stored as .plat files in SharePoint, Microsoft also states that these files can be edited outside Planner. That opens up some very interesting possibilities, including Cowork / Planner MCP.
This will be a topic for a dedicated blog/video though, so stay tuned.
Final notes
As mentioned in the last section, I’m looking forward to some more Template explorations in the near future. For one, I had the idea to dissect the .PLAT file and see what I can do without even stepping inside Planner itself. I think I can alter the plat files using Cowork, but that’s a future video/blog for sure.
Let me know if you tried out the templates, and what your experiences have been so far. Anything on the wish list? For me it would be the custom fields we create, or nicer interfaces once the template has been created. You can’t comment on this post directly, but feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.
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