Microsoft Planner June 2018 Updates Now Available!

Microsoft have just released the June 2018 updates for planner!

The first change in the June updates is improvements  on who receives task comment email notifications. Previously when  user posted a test comment a notification was sent to the inbox of all the members that were a part of that plan’s group. This would mean that users would receive unnecessary notifications on tasks that aren’t relevant to them. Due to this Microsoft have rolled out a fix to address this. The update makes it so unless a user has commented on a certain task then they wont receive notification emails for it. However when a user does post a comment on a task they will receive a notification for each other comment that appears on that task. Its important to note however that this behaviour only applies to tasks that are within the Planner apps. If a user choses the ‘reply all’ option in the comment notification then all plan members will receive a comment notification email.

Another change is adding more context to the comment notifications. The email subject line for comment notifications now includes the task name and clearly notes the contents. Within the email notification itself Microsoft have included the task and plan associated to the comment, as well as deep links for users to directly open the task in Planner to reply. These links are located at the end of the email.

One more feature is the improved plan notification settings. For each plan opening the ‘plan settings’ under the three dot menu will show the group email settings for the plan. A group owner can control whether group email notifications are sent when a task is completed or assigned. Some additional information to help guide users to their ‘group settings’ if they want to stop all the group messages from reaching their inbox. Because the options under ‘group email settings’ apply on only a per plan basis, a user must first visit Plan settings for each plan they are a member of to adjust them.

A link has also been added to ‘planner notification settings’ inside the Plan settings. The link can direct users to where they can adjust preferences for different types of notifications which are sent to them over all of their plans.

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