If you ever need to work with people outside your organisation on a shared activity that you're managing in Microsoft Planner, you need to be able to share that plan with them so that they can collaborate with you.
Guest access in Microsoft Planner lets you and your team collaborate and participate with people from outside of your organisation by granting them access to view and interact with your plan. Guest users can create and delete buckets and tasks, edit task fields, and edit the plan name. If you grant the guest user additional permissions, they can also attach a file or link to a task. Guest users will also receive some of the notifications associated with your plan.
How it works
Planner builds on the Microsoft 365 groups guest access feature. If Microsoft 365 Groups guest access is turned off, you won't be able to add guest users to plans. For more information, see Guest access in Microsoft 365 groups.
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Step 1: A group owner adds a guest to the group.
Note: To find the group associated with a plan, go to outlook.com, and in the Folders pane scroll down to the Groups folder and find your plan name. -
Step 2: The invited guest gets a welcome email from the group. If they do not already have a guest account with the organisation, they need to accept this invitation to create one. In the welcome email, under Read group files, select the Access files link and following the instructions to create a guest account.
Note: When they receive the invitation, there will not be a specific place in the invitation that says "Open the Planner Board Here..." or anything like that. The links there will typically just take you do the SharePoint site created for the group behind the planner. If they open this it might still be unclear how they need to get to the Planner Board unless you've added the Planner web part into that SharePoint site. -
Step 3 : To access a plan, guests either need to use a specific plan URL or go to https://tasks.office.com/[organizationdomainname]. You can find the organisation's domain name in any non-guest user's email address; for example: nonguestuser@organizationdomainname.com. The general Planner URL, https://tasks.office.com/, takes non-guest Microsoft 365 users to Planner, but won't know from the guest user name which organisation they want to sign in to.
Note: A quick way to do this is to go to the Plan you're sharing, click the 3 dots to the right of the Schedule in the top menu and select "Copy link to Plan" and email that link to the guest you've invited. Alternatively, they can open https://tasks.office.com/ and it will take them to the landing page for any Planner Boards they have been given access to.
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Step 4 The guest can leave the plan at any time using a link at the bottom of each email and calendar invitations.
Permissions
The following table summarises what group owners, plan members, and guests can and can't do.
|
Task |
Non-guest owners and members |
Guest user members |
|---|---|---|
|
Create tasks and buckets |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Edit task fields |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Attach a file or link to tasks |
Yes |
Yes. However, an admin must allow it through the Microsoft 365 Groups settings. For more information, see Allow guests to be added to all Microsoft 365 groups. |
|
Invite guest users |
Yes |
No |
|
Comment on a task |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Create a plan |
Yes |
No |
|
Delete a public plan |
Yes |
No |
|
Delete a private plan |
Yes. Group owners only. |
No |
|
Add members to a public plan |
Yes |
No |
|
Add members to a private plan |
Yes. Group owners only. |
No |
|
Edit plan name |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Edit public plan settings |
Yes |
No |
|
Edit private plan settings |
Yes. Group owners only. |
No |
|
View public plans |
Yes |
No |
|
Join public plans |
Yes |
No |