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Synchronization Gives Planner Tasks HTML Formatted Task Descriptions
As any Microsoft 365 administrator can attest, Microsoft publishes a huge number of notifications in the message center. The exact number depends on the license subscriptions held by the tenant, but any tenant is likely to see between 450 and 700 notifications annually. Keeping track of so many changes is hard, which is why we recommend that tenants use the feature to synchronize message center posts to Planner. It is so much easier to manage tasks in Planner than it is to manage message center posts in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
The Office 365 for IT Pros team uses the synchronization capability to help us to track change within Microsoft 365. Planner has proven to be a valuable tool for us over the last seven years. Between the basic technology and the possibilities liberated by the Graph APIs (like creating a weekly open tasks report and emailing the report to each author), maintaining chapter files isn’t as hard as it could be.
Not Complex Synchronization
The synchronization technology used between the Microsoft 365 admin center and Planner isn’t very complex and can be replicated using PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph APIs. Part of the synchronization is to take the description of a change included in a message center notification and insert it into a task. In the past, the synchronization hasn’t done a great job here, taking the carefully formatted text published by Microsoft (Figure 1) and turning it into plain text (Figure 2).
The Change in MC1307883
Appropriately, the news of the change comes in message center notification MC1307883 (11 May 2026), which announces that the synchronization to Planner will preserve the HTML-formatted descriptions from May 13, 2026. As Microsoft notes, the change will make “it easier to review updates, understand impact, and follow links without losing context.” Figure 3 shows what the new HTML-formatted text looks like in a Planner task description.
I couldn’t agree more. Most of the time it is reasonably easy to interpret the task descriptions synchronized from the Microsoft 365 admin center to Planner, but the lack of some formatting like hyperlinks and the poor formatting like spaces and new line markers being inserted in arbitrary places can be off-putting.
Even better than simply making sure that new tasks synchronized to Planner are formatted correctly, Microsoft will go back and update previous tasks to replace plain text descriptions with the HTML content. This process will happen over time. You can’t expect perfection overnight.
Awash with New Development
Waiting for change in Planner is a bit like waiting for a bus: nothing happens for a long time and then lots happens rapidly. Microsoft recently launched a new Planner UI and tenants with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses can use the Planner agent to get some advice about the actions required to accomplish tasks. Meantime, work to prepare for the retirement of Project Online on September 30, 2026 and the consolidation into Planner continues.
In Closing
As we head into the weekend, I wanted to highlight message center notification MC1304289 (8 May 2026). Like Planner, the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team depends on Word. All our content is created in Word, and we use co-authoring at times to enable reviews by editors and technical editors.
Which is why we like the news that Word will support editing by multiple users simultaneously in the same paragraph. Microsoft says that “this enhancement reduces edit conflicts and interruptions, helping teams collaborate more efficiently.” We think it just makes life a little easier.
Learn how to use Planner and to exploit the data available to Microsoft 365 tenant administrators through the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We love figuring out how things work.