In an email sent out to Microsoft 365 Subscribers, Microsoft has announced a major rebrand of the Planner experience on Microsoft Teams. The Planner app in Teams will soon be renamed to Tasks with an updated experience powered by Planner and Microsoft To Do. All other Planner and To Do clients are not impacted by the change.
Expected to roll out in May or June, and complete by mid-July, the change means that Teams users will soon be able to see their individual tasks and team tasks in a single app from across Teams channels, Planner and Outlook. For mobile users, the change also means that both a list view and a new mobile tasks experience will soon be available in within the Teams app. Microsoft also notes that the Planner app will be renamed to Tasks. The company explains:
We’re planning to rename the Planner app to Tasks. The new Tasks experience will contain individual tasks and team and channel tasks, similar to how Files encompasses a user’s personal files in their own OneDrive for Business as well as their team and channel files. We’ll make this adjustment in two steps.
As part of the two-step change, once this new tasks experience becomes available broadly for all public cloud organizations, Microsoft will enable the Tasks in Teams mobile experience and “complete a logo update and an interim rename of the Planner app.” This means that at first, users will see the interim name of Tasks by Planner and To Do. Later, Microsoft will then change the name on the desktop to just Tasks.
To prepare for this change, Microsoft is recommending that organizations update international training or documentation. More information on the change is also available here.