Display Planner, on a SharePoint site, to regular SharePoint site members that are not members in Office 365 Group

Question

In our tenant, group-connected SharePoint sites are disabled. If we want to use group-connected tools in our SharePoint sites, we need to create a Team from the beginning. Then we need to activate a lot of features to be able to use that Team as a SharePoint site.

But since we are a large company we are using AD groups to control permissions to SharePoint sites and other assets. When people join the company or department they get listed in an AD group and automatically they are granted access to the information they need. When they leave the department, they get removed from the AD group.

For Teams, Microsoft is recommending using Office 365 Groups instead of regular AD groups... The way I have understood this, is that it is possible to add an AD group to an Office 365 Groups, but any changes done to the AD groups afterwards are not reflected in the Office 365 Group. So the result with Office 365 Groups will be that new employees will not automatically get access to the correct information and people leaving the department will continue to have access to information they should not have.

Since we are not able to handle that extra administration, it feels better to just stick to the old AD groups. But it seems like membership to an Office 365 Groups is required to be able to use group-connected tools.

In our situation, for instance for a project site, we usually have a lot of readers and also a lot of members. But usually these people are not project members, instead they are stakeholders in other ways. Today, on a classic project site we are using the project summary webpart to display a timeline. In a SharePoint Online modern site maybe the group-connected tool Planner could be a replacement for the timeline?

But what is really required in terms of permissions to be able to display Planner information on a SharePoint project site? Can we have just the project manager and perhaps just some few more persons managing the Planner in an Office 365 Group and display the Planner webpart on the project site and have it viewable by readers and members managed in regular SharePoint groups? Or will the stakeholders not see any Planner since they are not in an Office 365 Group?

I am confused, but maybe this setup is not a problem at all? Please shed some light!

Answer 1

To answer your questions about Planner:

1. The Planner web part is available only on group-connected Team sites.

2. Every plan member or team site member will have Edit permission in the specific plan directly via the web part on the SharePoint page, as long as they have access to the site.

3. Those who are not in the Microsoft 365 group (O365 Group) will be able to see the Planner web part as well as the plan in the dashboard, regardless of the user type or source.