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M365 Changelog: Planner’s New Roster Containers

MC242586 – Updated April 06, 2021: Microsoft updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

This release of a new type of container in Planner will allow plans to be created independent of an M365 group. This will be enabled by Roster containers, which is a simple list of members stored in Planner that can contain any user with a valid AAD ID in that tenant. Microsoft is calling plans contained by Rosters “Roster plans”.

Upcoming follow-on features, taking advantage of this new Plan type, will be released on the Roadmap.

When this will happen

The APIs for Roster plans will be enabled on Graph for all tenants starting in early May (previously early April) and expect to be complete by mid-May.

How this will affect your organization

When this feature is released, plans for collaboration can be created outside of M365 groups. Roster plans are not subject to existing M365 group controls.

The basic functionality of Roster plans is:

There is currently no UI in Planner to create a Roster plan, but Roster plans can be created and membership managed via Graph APIs. Anyone in a tenant can create these plans using those APIs. Microsoft is also working on building end user experiences that will provide UI for users to create Roster plans. These plans will live alongside existing M365 group plans.
All members have equivalent permissions: Via the Plan UI, any existing member can add / remove other members to the Roster as well as create / edit / delete tasks
Plan collateral associated with an M365 group is disabled in these plans, incl. links to the group OneNote / SP Site, comments on tasks, and uploaded attachments
The Roster and the plan contained by the Roster automatically self-delete when the last member is removed from the Roster
There are no other changes to Plan functionality for Roster Plans

What you need to do to prepare

Disabling the creation of Roster containers means that your tenant will not be able to take advantage of some upcoming Planner features. Updates will be shared as those features prepare to roll out.

However, Microsoft understands that some tenants may not want this functionality. As such, Microsoft is providing tenant admin controls over this feature. Review and manage the tenant admin settings that can disable the creation of Roster containers in a tenant, as described here: Disable the creation of Roster containers in your organization’s Planner tenant – Microsoft Planner | Microsoft Docs.

In addition, see this updated data export documentation that covers the new Roster-related information.Additional information