Who is Erik van Hurck?

This blog is dead…?

“Dearly beloved, we gather here to remember The Project Corner — a blog that bravely stood between confused PMO managers and Microsoft’s own documentation. It served faithfully as a middleman between people who couldn’t figure out Microsoft Project and a company that couldn’t be bothered to write clear docs. It is survived by approximately 14,000 unread Microsoft Learn articles that said the same thing.”

LAST WORDS “But… but I had REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE configuring Project Server 2016… you can’t just KNOW that…”

That’s what I got when entering the blog’s URL into a lovely (and frightening) website called: Deathbyclawd.com. I was just scrolling on my phone, so the images are “phone sized”.

Brutal response from the website about my blog. — This really got me thinking, so I’m actually happy about this.

Exploring the Planner (Frontier) Agent – first look

What if you could update 50 tasks across multiple plans… without opening Planner once? I tested Microsoft’s new Planner (Frontier) agent, and the results were both impressive… and frustrating.

In March 2026 we were treated with 2 major updates to Planner. The first was a new UI that looked crisp and which I will feature in another article. The second update was much more than “just visuals”. This second update made the Project Manager Agent much more accessible, and closer to where the users are. In this article I’ll dig into the renamed Project Manager Agent: Planner (Frontier).

Note the (Frontier) here, it refers to early access versions of the M365 Copilot license. More on Frontier agents here.

An image showing the first chat window of the Planner (Frontier) agent. — The newly released Planner (Frontier) agent.

What are Workback Plans in Planner and Teams?

Wedged between other new features on the planner blog, we read about “Workback Plans” in public preview. But not much more is shared, which is odd because it can be a cool feature. Well, there is an image, and a one liner with another link:

Workback Plan generation is now available in channels, helping teams quickly create reverse timelines based on a target deadline.

On the second page we get:

Workback Plans in Teams channels: Project Manager Agent and the Channel Agent together now support the creation of AI-powered Workback Plans, automatically generating a reverse timeline of tasks and milestones based on the target deadline and goal provided.

Asking the Channel Agent what it can do. Note: the channel is called Planner

Last post of the year, looking ahead

Yeah… this will never rank high in Google 😉. But let’s wrap-up 2025 and look forward to another year together.

That's a wrap for another year of blogging, vlogging, podcasting etc. Hope you enjoyed 2025 together with me. — Cartoon style image of a male blogger who’s celebrating a year worth of articles.

The end of Project Online

30 September 2026, that is the day that all Project Online Services stop working. Microsoft anounced this date today in their official blog article. Let’s take a moment and discuss what this means for organizations that work with the product today.

Project Online retires on the 30th of September 2026. — The Project Online, PWA homepage. In case you didn’t change it.

How to report on Planner Portfolios

In my last article I build a resource focussed report for both Planner, and Planner Premium “plans”. In that article I removed the Roadmap tables, because they didn’t work anymore. But what if you want to report on the new portfolio feature, which is similar in so many ways? Let’s find out together!

Roadmap and portfolio tables in power bi. — Would you look at that… roadmaps uhm Portfolios.

Resource assignment report on Planner and Planner Premium

I was recently asked how to report on resources in Planner Premium. And this got me thinking, could I do reporting on both planner (only cards and no hours/capacity) and Premium in one go?

Turns out you can, but… it takes some work to get there. Let me show you what to do, and at the end I’ll tell you where to get the template file.