Plans deletion/archive
As I saw that when you delete a Plan all conversations, Groups etc are deleted could be useful to have another Status for that Plans, maybe an "Archived" status, maybe visible in another dashboard or something similar.

We’d love to hear more about the following:
1. When would you delete or archive a plan?
2. How long would you like it to be accessible?
Feel free to include any specific scenarios where archiving a plan would be useful.
We appreciate your feedback and look forward to reading through your comments!
Cheers,
The Planner Team
288 comments
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Sarah Craig commented
We often start plans but then have to focus on other plans due to changing priorities. However, we don't want to delete the plans we are not currently working on entirely, as we will likely come back to it in the future. Keeping it in the Plan Hub gets way to cluttered, so we would like to an option that archives or saves the plan for later.
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Hazzel commented
We would love to use plans for long-term projects that occur across departments. Right now we use it per-department.
Once we complete the project, we would like to be able to archive it so it isn't clogging up our dashboards. But also, it would be nice to be able to export the whole plan somehow to see all the data such as comments, deadlines, files, due dates (and actual completed dates). Perhaps a way to export and see it all, even if you weren't assigned to the plan/team originally. -
Anonymous commented
We would like to use Planner to manage projects in our small in-house marketing team but the inability to archive completed plans is a major issue for us. We would make a plan for each job that comes in and would archive the plan when the job is complete. Our team averages around 150 projects per year. Often these are for annual events or updating a previous job so being able to access archived plans is essential.
Ideally, archived plans would be available indefinitely. It would also be helpful to link to a previous plan ie a manager referencing an archived plan could include a link to it as part of an initial brief.
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Anonymous commented
+1 for feature delete or archive.
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Thomas Curtis commented
1. Deletion would only occur if the project was not officially sanctioned or was tied to a non-business essential activity, i.e., holiday party plan. We would archive all planners related to projects or mandatory business activities.
2. Ideally, planners would be converted to a read-only file and stored within a sharepoint so they are out of the way of the execution teams but are available in the event of questions or issues at a later time. Once converted to a document type file they would fall into our standard document retention process.
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Jonda Shay commented
1. Delete as needed. Archive within 4 months or less of plan completion.
2. Available 1-2 years from close archive date. -
Alexander Nuutinen commented
Although the 'Tell Us More' was way back in March 2018, here's my 2c:
1) I'd archive a plan after it's been completed, at the start of the month/at a set review period, so that it could be added to the list of success shares for my team, for reporting up the chain to senior management. This would allow us to show what work we've completed and also keep what's displayed to us in Planner relevant to the current time period; it would also help sorting through the list of cards from 'last month' to 'last year', for example. Any rolling up/reporting of these numbers would be great.
2) Ideally I'd think 1 year, or just over 1 year, so that at some point we can look back and create a tally of just how much we've accomplished. There'd be no need to keep it for legal purposes, but we do get requests from time to time by senior and executive management on how busy we've been and to prove it (how many things have you done/how many features have you implemented/etc. etc.)
This would be great to have, and might actually be the (or close to the) tipping point for Planner to start outweighing Trello for usefulness, particularly for its availability within O365.
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Alesha Bergeron commented
Any options available would be acceptable. I just began using Planner one month ago. I would like to delete 4-5 plans right now. I hold back on creating plans just because I'll never be able to archive them. Maybe one year of accessibility
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Sam commented
Perhaps having a date range on completed tasks in the filter could be useful. Eg. you could say i want to see all completed tasks between 1 July and 31 Dec 18 and that way you can see how much work in a particular project was done in that time more easily.
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CT commented
You (Planner Project Manager) wrote:
"We’d love to hear more about the following:
1. When would you delete or archive a plan?
2. How long would you like it to be accessible?"We already have MANY plans in our Planner instance and the presence of inactive campaigns causes some of us "pain". We've only been using the app for about six months. Can't imagine who it will feel for our "power users" in another year. So... yeah... your app needs a workflow for an "Archive" action or some type of active/inactive metaphor. Would recommend you also consider a max number of active "Plans" per user or aggregate max across each tenant simply for your road map. Just a thought.
Your questions:
1. When would you delete or archive a plan?
We would like to archive/deactivate/hide a plan from our users once the "plan is complete". To clarify, we currently use Plans for both individual projects (with end dates) and as "Boards" to track things (Orders, department backlogs, etc. without end dates). All the Plans we currently wish we could archive are completed projects. We have not yet had a need to "archive" a plan used for a purpose without an end date. hope this makes sense.... trying to be brief.
We would like to Delete a plan once we decide there is no business value in retaining the archived plan data. As you would surmise this is highly subjective. Hence my reference earlier to the need for a max storage limit or max number of Plans. It's fair to say that a max limit would force our employees to make decisions about what to archive vs delete.
Final comment, on a long enough timeline (i.e. use of Planner) clearly there would one day be a need (assuming a Plan count-limit were enforced) for users to have the ability to automate the deletion of plans. I'd prefer to have some manner of automation (as opposed to the system simply destroying old plans "older than x"... "archived and now exceeding retention policy"... etc. Better to allow us (the tenants) to decide how the automation would work. I could get onboard with something like:
- automatically export/copy the plan data to OneNote
- automatically export/copy the plan data to a OneDrive directory (would be super epic bazinga if each archived plan could be stored in OneDrive as a file (or files contextually similar to a ZIP archive file). That could allow a user to restore an exported/archived Plan when necessary.2. How long would you like it to be accessible?
In an attempt to help... we offer this feedback... perhaps your long term road map could deliver two conceptual ideas to address this "archive vs delete a plan" request:- "Archive" might be defined as the user action performed to essentially export a plan (i.e. the OneDrive storage automation cold storage idea) so the Plan is no longer available in the Planner UI
- Active / Deactivated. Perhaps there's a need to allow a user to "deactivate" a Plan in order to hide it completely from the Planner Hub UI. Ultimately this is what annoys our users... old plans are piling up alphabetically in the Hub list (i.e. non-favorite plans). If you were to add an active vs. non-active metaphor to the Plan entity you could then add a filter to the Planner Hub to allow the user to view active Plans by default and to filter the list to view his/her "inactive" plans. This is complicated, but not rocket science.
Hope this all helps. We would very much like the ability to identify discrete plans as "active" vs "inactive" to clean up the Planner Hub list UI and to make the left-hand nav bar (Favorites and Recent Plans lists) easier to use.
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Laura commented
1. We would like to use different plans for different projects. If one project is closed, we still have to keep all the information but some employees have many projects within one year. Therefore by keeping every plan in the Planner Hub, one might loose the overview. It would b much better to be able to archive the plans of closed projects to also remove the group in outlook from the top of the list.
2. we're talking about several years here, maybe law determines even 10 years.Thank you for regarding this idea. I think the amount of comments on this idea already show the necessity of this improvement.
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Anonymous commented
I see it no different than how you archive Teams.
Good idea. Keeps your notes and documentation on hand for later use. Always a good idea.
1. Delete a plan if it was created in error or if it contains no useful documentation
1A. Archive a plan if it was used to build a project or to create something. Always good having a copy of the process on hand.
2. I would say indefinitely like Teams.If it makes sense to archive a teams chat, why does it not make sense to archive their planner boards?
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Hermes Uribe commented
1.- I will archive a Plan if I need to show my job in my anual feedback in the company.
2.- I would like plan to be accesible at least one year, because of my feedback
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Monica commented
1. I would only delete a plan if I created it by mistake. I would archive the plan whenever a project was completed.
2. Indefinitely - we would need to be able to access this archived plan for reference if questions come up so we should always have access, unless we choose to delete it. Giving an option for the length of time to keep the plan would be good. If we had a way to print the entire planner board, that would be great. -
John Kennedy commented
This feature is most needed in my org as we have started using Planner more and more. But it seems Microsoft will not provide this feature now. When researched online, found this tool
https://www.jijitechnologies.com/blogs/how-to-archive-plans-in-microsoft-planner
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Justin Griep commented
We just lost a customer to Jira because of this limitation specifically and it has been out there for a long time.
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Kent Berk commented
I would want the Plan accessible indefinitely after archiving.
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Kent Berk commented
We are using a new plan for each major client/project, including to share tasks and OneNote notebooks. When the client/project is complete, we don't want to delete the Plan (and all of the Notes etc.), we want to archive it so it is accessible through another view, rather than the main Planner Hub.
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Mat Wraith commented
1. When archive or delete?
Option to a.Manual archive and b.Auto-archive x days after all tasks are completed
Delete: Only delete after export
2. How long archive?
Option to keep archived between; 1 month - indefinitely, and include export and import feature -
Chana Wolfson commented
1. I would archive a plan when a project (e.g. grant proposal or exhibit or workshop) is complete.
2. The projects are recurring. I would like to retain access indefinitely because we rotate our exhibit themes and want to have access to previous exhibits on the topic.