Migrate Microsoft Planner: Comparing Microsoft’s migration features to ShareGate

You want to migrate Microsoft Planner to another tenant, group, or team – but is Microsoft capable of helping you with your Planner migration? Explore the key differences between Microsoft’s Planner migration features and ShareGate’s migration tool.

Fully integrated with Microsoft Teams, companies are increasingly adopting Planner daily to organize their work. This makes the ability to move and organize Planner plans to support how users use them even more important.

It’s a no-brainer to bring along Planner data when migrating Teams or Planner plans across groups and teams. That’s why we spend a lot of time improving ShareGate’s migration tool ​​to cover every possible use case that you might have. 

Case in point? In developing ShareGate’s migration tool 17.0, we included the ability to move standalone Planner plans from a team or group to another existing one–whether you’re migrating tenant to tenant or within the same tenant. No need to start a Teams migration or use PowerShell!

A big part of that process was looking at Microsoft’s out-of-the-box solution to understand the capabilities and limitations of the tool.

To help you assess whether the features are enough to help you with your Planner migration, we decided to share what we learned and highlight some key differences between Microsoft’s Planner migration features and ShareGate’s migration tool.

Also, when considering a migration project, it’s crucial to understand the SharePoint Migration Tool limitations that might impact your process. That’s why ShareGate is the go-to tool for migration projects.

Microsoft vs. ShareGate Planner migration comparison table

Microsoft Planner gives a great visual way to organize teamwork, delegate tasks, manage deadlines, and follow up on projects more efficiently. 

If you need to migrate or copy Microsoft Planner between groups or teams, here’s a list of Planner migration capabilities using Microsoft’s available features vs. ShareGate’s migration tool. 

ShareGate supports more use cases for Planner migrations than Microsoft, plus we always have more features coming out regularly (driven by customer feedback).

Migrating Planner plans using Microsoft’s out-of-the-box solution

Microsoft Planner’s built-in migration features are designed to copy a whole Microsoft Planner plan as-is to another existing group or Microsoft Teams team, within the same tenant. Available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers for free, the features provide a quick solution for IT admins to bring their user’s plans over to a new group or team.  

To migrate your existing Planner to a new group or team using available Planner features:

Open the plan and select plan options ***  and select Copy plan.

Enter a title for the plan you’re migrating, then select the targeted group you want to copy your plan over and the fields you would like to migrate. Select Copy plan.

But Microsoft’s functionality can’t help you migrate Planner plans from one tenant to another. And it doesn’t allow you to exclude certain object types, whether that’s comments, tasks, or buckets.

To get around this, you’ll need a custom PowerShell script. The caveat here is that many use cases require modification to meet unique needs, which call for scripting expertise, not to mention additional time and effort.

ShareGate’s migration tool: Migrate Planner plans

Here at ShareGate, we’ve developed easy solutions that make your Planner migrations flexible.

ShareGate’s migration tool supports Planner as part of your Teams migration AND your standalone Planner migration, enabling you to move the exact plans you want, right where your users need them:

• Migrate Planner plans from one tenant to another or within the same tenant  
• Move the specific Planner object types you need  
• Adjust the membership of the team at the destination 
• Migrate Planner plans as part of your Teams move

Migrate Planner plans from one tenant to another or within the same tenant

The release of ShareGate 17.0 introduced dedicated Planner migration features to our popular migration tool. Migrate Planner plans from a team or a group to an existing one, whether within the same tenant or to another tenant.

No need to start a Teams migration or use PowerShell to copy a plan from one team to another!

Once you’ve selected your source, you’ll see all your teams and groups and their respective Planner plans for you to choose from, including how many buckets, tasks, and files each plan has.

Move the specific Planner object types you need

ShareGate also has copy options that let you choose to move the specific Planner object types that you need.

With ShareGate, you can choose to copy:

• Everything (buckets, tasks, task attachments, and comments) 
• Everything except comments
• Buckets only 
• None of the items

Adjust the membership of the team at the destination

Before you schedule or start your migration, the ShareGate migration tool allows you to customize how you want to treat team membership at the destination. That applies to copying a Planner plan into a public or private team/group.

You have the option to either always or never add group/teams members to the team or group the plan is being copied into. That way, you avoid automatically giving people access to sensitive information they shouldn’t have. 

We leave it up to you to decide how you want to handle it! The option you choose will be applied to current and future copies; previously scheduled copies won’t be affected.

Migrate Planner plans as part of your Teams move

ShareGate’s migration tool supports plans as part of your Teams migrations.

When you migrate teams and channels, you have two choices for how you want to copy them at the destination. This will have an impact on which Planner plans will be copied.

1. If you’re copying a team as a new team at the destination, every single plan attached to that Microsoft 365 group will be migrated. So, if you’re migrating the Marketing team from tenant A to tenant B as a new team, all of Marketing’s plans will be copied into the new tenant. 
2. If you’re copying a team’s channels into an existing team, only the plans that have been added as a tab in one of those channels will be migrated over. So, if you’re migrating the Product team’s “Feature launch” channel into the Marketing team, only the plans used in a tab in that channel will be brought over to the existing team. 

If you’re ever worried about missing a step or leaving elements out of your migration plan, check out our curated Office 365 migration checklist to ensure you have what you need.

When you copy over a Planner plan, ShareGate copies its buckets and its tasks, along with the order in which they’re presented. It copies updates on tasks along with assignees and timestamps.

Comments are also copied, but to speed up migrations and to avoid a large number of notifications going out to users as we copy plans, all comments will be aggregated under a single one.

Here’s an example of what a copied plan will look like at the destination:

For more details: Read our Teams Planner migration documentation and our standalone Planner migration documentation to understand exactly how they work and grasp their limitations. 

And don’t forget to head to ShareGate to learn more about what our migration tool can help you do.