0

I have a template for a plan that my team uses for new events all year around. I need a way to duplicate this Planner plan as a new Planner tab in Teams.

Using Planner's own Copy/Duplicate feature will create a NEW group and a new Team.

Looking at Microsoft Teams and Planners UserVoice I can see that it is currently not possible:

Peter
  • 745
  • 6
  • 17

2 Answers2

1

Using Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) we can create a listener for a new message in a team channel that checks for a specific message. If this message contains a notification about the creation of a new tab, and use a prefix for this new tab to designate the planner template we can automatically fill a new empty planner tab with the contents of a template plan.

Usage:

  • Create a Planner template plan directly in Planner
  • Import the Power Automate script in your Power Automate (this works with free Power Automations)
  • Set the Power Automate Script first variable to the prefix of your tabs (i.e. "Event:")
  • Make sure all the correct variables in the Power Automate script reference the correct Teams channel, and the correct reference for the Planner Template plan.
  • Goto the teams channel that you want to work with and create a new tab with a new Planner Plan, make sure
    1. That you start the tab/plan name with your selected prefix ("Event:")
    2. That you select "Post to channel about the creation of this Tab"

Notice how the plan is automatically populated with the tasks and buckets from the template plan after a few moments.

The PowerAutomate script can be downloaded here: https://content.zeal.global/shared/AutomaticCopyTeamsPlanner_20200215111249.zip

Peter
  • 745
  • 6
  • 17
  • Thanks for this script @Peter, I was looking for a workaround for quite some time, and yours works perfectly well ! Once I understood how to fill in the flow, it just took few minutes to update the new plan and add all the buckets and tasks. – Vincent Mar 09 '20 at 14:03
  • This no longer works as the necessary information from the Teams Trigger no longer includes "attachments" which carried the new tab information. I have reached out to Microsoft in order to hopefully get the information back. I have been personally contacted, by email, by several IT people from Forbes 100 companies and can you please use your support agreements to either a) get the proper original functionality into Teams/Planner, or b) get MS to fix the immediate issue on Power Automate? – Peter Jun 09 '20 at 15:43
  • Fyi Microsoft is looking into the issue, and in the meantime perhaps it is possible to workaround the issue by getting messages from a channel in teams? – Peter Jun 11 '20 at 11:22
  • Microsoft has solved the Power Automate issue so this script now runs again. I have also verified that the new "Copy plan" functionality within Planner actually allows to copy plans to the same group so that should be the preferred method now. – Peter Jul 22 '20 at 22:04
0

The online planner website now has the option to select the group to copy plans to. That also allows to select which parts of the plan you want to carry over.

Simply go to https://tasks.office.com/ click the three little dots on the "template plan" and select copy plan.

The script above is still (as far as I know) the only way to copy a plan within the same team directly from Microsoft Teams.

Planner native copy dialog

Peter
  • 745
  • 6
  • 17