Microsoft Office 365 Planner and Project Online Integration Scenario

Anna Shalomova

PPM Consultant

Being an extensible Microsoft Azure SaaS platform, FluentPro Integration Hub supports connectors to multiple platforms. In this post, we’ll cover the integration scenario between Microsoft Office 365 Planner and Project Online.

Project Online + Planner

This integration scenario enables publishing projects from Microsoft Project Online to Microsoft Planner, so that team members can work on the assigned tasks, report their progress, and make updates. All the changes to tasks (e.g., completion percentage, dates, assignments) flow back to Project Online and update related project schedules.

During the synchronization process, Project Online and Planner fields are mapped in the following way:

The current scenario comes in handy when the project work breakdown structure is created using Microsoft Project Online. At the same time, the team prefers Office 365 Planner, a more straightforward tool for project and task management. Therefore, there comes a need for a way to report task progress from Planner to Project Online, as well as make it possible for the team to create their tasks in Planner and sync them to Project Online.

How to start using the Integration Hub

Step 1 – Install the “Integration Hub” app from the SharePoint Store.
Step 2 –Configure Project Online to work with Integration Hub.
Step 3 – Use Integration Hub for scheduled synchronizations between your environments.

Integration Prerequisites

For successful integration, the below-listed Enterprise Custom Fields must exist in your Project Online configuration. The fields can be created manually or by Integration Hub during the scenario creation.

• “Sync Project with Planner” field – A project-level Flag custom field name that identifies if Project should be synchronized with a plan in Planner.
• “Sync Task with Planner” field – A task-level Flag custom field name that identifies if a Task should be synchronized with a plan task in Planner.
• “Planner Bucket” field – A task-level Text custom field name that defines the name of the Planner bucket the task should belong to.
• Default Bucket – The name of the bucket in Planner that will be used if the value in the “Planner Bucket” task field is not specified.
• “Planner Plan ID” field – A project-level Text custom field name that identifies the ID of a related Plan in Planner.
• “Planner Group Email” field – A project-level text custom field name that identifies the email of the Planner Group that the connected plan belongs.

Benefits

Integrating Microsoft Project Online with Planner empowers managers with more accurate information on the project execution progress. With a close-to-real-time view of tasks and statuses accessible to the organization, managerial functions are more quickly and efficiently performed. And at the same time, both project managers and the development team can keep working on the applications they prefer as the most efficient ones.