You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned wanting to test a few new retention policy capabilities, including Planner-related options.
I started with Planner for one reason: I was intrigued by the fact that there were two different options, one for group plans and the other for what Microsoft refers to as “Roster” plans. These plans aren’t shared with a group, but with individual users. Years ago, you needed a group to use Planner, but Microsoft has since relaxed that requirement.
My question wasn’t about the group plans; those seemed pretty straightforward to me, but it was the roster plans. How does Microsoft define those for the purpose of applying this policy, especially given the ability to scope it to individual users rather than everyone?
Also, are tasks created in the To-Do interface treated differently than tasks created in Planner?
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I created a bunch of tasks using the Adele Vance persona in my test tenant:
A simple task using To-Do
A task in a private plan
A task in a group plan assigned to Adele
Another task in a group plan not assigned to Adele
A task in a Loop task list owned by a different user, with a task assigned to Adele.
My retention policy was set to delete three days after creation. It included all group-backed plans, and only Adele for roster plans.
The results were a little different from what I expected, but according to Microsoft, it can take up to seven days for a new retention policy to take effect. Once it does, we also know from years of experience that the deletion process doesn’t run every day. I waited 10 days before finalizing this report, but one of these items may simply be hanging around, waiting to be deleted. So the results for one of these might change. I’ll let you know if it does.
The results:
The To-Do task was not removed
The task from the private plan was not removed
The group task assigned to Adele was removed
The unassigned group task was removed
The task from the other user’s Loop page assigned to Adele was removed.
Assuming these results don’t change, a couple of interesting things stand out.
To-Do and Planner are still different apps. For some reason.
Is it possible that a private plan isn't considered a roster plan for retention purposes? If so, is there no way to set retention for private tasks, either using a private plan in Planner or To-Do?
I was a little surprised to see the task assigned to Adele from someone else’s plan was removed. The logic makes sense, but so would the policy not applying to a roster plan owned by a user not subject to the policy, not removing just one user’s tasks. I could go either way; how would you feel if a retention policy was set on one or more of your coworkers and tasks from your plan were deleted?
Unfortunately, the documentation for setting a retention policy doesn’t mention Planner as an available option, so I couldn’t find anything to tell me what to expect.
I also started to wonder about storage, because we know tasks can be iffy when it comes to collecting them. What did that show me?
