In case you are not familiar or using Planner at the moment, I highly encourage you to get to learn and use the tool. As a project manager in my past career, I used MS Project extensively. But MS Project is a serious tool, built for project managers and large, lengthy projects. Planner, on the other hand, provides a light-weight alternative for regular team members. It is simple, fun to use, and very useful. With this post, I would like to give a bit more insight into the Planner and explain its main components.
Get your group tasks done alongside your individual tasks, right from where you're working in Microsoft Teams, using the Tasks app (initially still called the Planner app).
- Get your group tasks done alongside your individual tasks, right from where you're working in Microsoft Teams, using the Tasks app (initially still called the Planner app).
- Microsoft makes planning for and tracking your success simple. Choose from over a hundred different planner templates and tracking templates for Microsoft Excel. A day planner template helps you efficiently plan, organize, and schedule important tasks to maximize productivity.
- A few weeks ago, we announced several features to help get organized around a schedule in Planner. Today, I'm happy to announce that we've completed roll out of the feature: view Planner tasks on your Outlook calendar. This feature allows you to import Planner tasks into Outlook via an iCa.
What is Planner?
Planner is a light-weight task management tool that allows project managers and team members to build and maintain task plans for various projects. At one point, I provided a brief overview of the tool in this post.
How does Planner compare to MS Project?
It is like apples and oranges. Here are key attributes of Planner in comparison to MS Project.
- It is 100% web-based
- It is less formal – it does not have an ability to set dependencies, manage resources, etc. like MS Project
- It is social – unlike MS Project which is usually maintained by the project manager, Planner is built for the teams – any team member can create/edit tasks and comment on them
Planner is part of Office 365 Groups
What makes Planner unique, compared to other tools out there, is that being part of an Office 365 eco-system it is also part of an Office 365 Group. It is not just a task management list that floats in space. It is part of the Office 365 Group membership group, which means that it is members of the security group enjoy equal access to Planner, Outlook, SharePoint Site, and Teams.
How to create new plans in Planner
There are two ways to create a Plan in Planner, and I documented them all in this post.
What are Planner’s major features?
OK, so now that we got the intro out of the way, let’s review the major features that make this tool unique and powerful!
Ms Planner Templates
Tasks
Well, this is self-explanatory, I hope. The task panel in Planner allows you to enter typical attributes of a task like a task name, due dates, assigned to, description, status, priority.
Buckets
As you create your tasks, you can organize them into buckets (board categories). A bucket could be anything – phase of the project, a sprint in a Scrum project, category, etc. – however you want to organize your tasks in a project.
Planner Hub
The Planner Hub allows you to have a 10,000-foot view over your projects. It is very high-level, do not expect detailed reporting here, but still quite useful.
Comments
This is a feature I like most. The ability to provide comments on a task. With MS Project and even with a SharePoint Task List, this was somewhat hidden and not obvious. With Planner – it is front and center and allows users to see the comments and activity on a given task in chronological order. Powerful stuff!
Checklist
Another cool feature. Sometimes a task, no matter how small it is, requires a few subtasks to be completed first. Instead of creating separate tasks in Plans, you can create subtasks (called Checklist) within a task panel. By the way, if you are looking for alternate ways to maintain checklists in Office 365, please reference this post.
My Tasks View
As you participate in various Office 365 Groups and have multiple plans with tasks, it is always useful to see all the tasks from all plans in a single view.
Integration with To Do
This is a feature of Microsoft To Do, that I blogged about previously. Planner now integrates with a personal Task Management tool and allows a user to see personal as well as team-related tasks all in one place!
A screenshot of To Do showing Planner Tasks
Integration with Outlook Calendar
Thanks to the recent improvement, we can now integrate Plan with Outlook.
Once you set it up using the steps above, team tasks will now appear in a calendar format in Outlook.
Integration with SharePoint
You can also embed your plan or plan’s charts into your SharePoint page using the Planner web part
Mobile App
Lastly, there is a Mobile App available for you to access and complete tasks on the go!
-->Planner provides a simple and visual way for teams to organize their work. Customers can use Planner to create plans, organize and assign tasks, share progress, and collaborate on content. Planner provides several interactive experiences including a task board, a charts page, and a schedule view, as well as integrations throughout Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 Planner task board
Ms Planner Delete Plan
Why integrate with Planner tasks?
Planner provides task tracking capabilities for collaboration experiences in Microsoft 365. If your scenarios require tracking tasks and organizing work for a team or group of end users, Planner is the right service for you. Planner integration can help you reach the millions of users collaborating on Microsoft 365.
Organize your team’s work
Planner provides a shared space where you can build a team, create tasks, and assign them to others on the team. Planner makes it easy for everyone to know who’s doing what and if things are on track. You can update tasks with additional information like due dates, progress, and descriptions, and then further organize tasks with customizable buckets and category labels.
Collaborate across Microsoft 365
Planner integrates into collaboration experiences across Microsoft 365. In addition to Planner web and mobile clients, users can view and update Planner plans and tasks from within SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
Planner itself is also powered by the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 group service. Files that you upload and attach to Planner tasks are stored in SharePoint. Planner comments are based on Outlook group conversations.
Automate the creation of plans and tasks
Are you working on repeated process or project type? You can use the Planner API to automate the creation of a plan and a list of tasks.
Top Planner API tasks
| Operation | URL |
|---|---|
| See all the plans for a group | GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/{id}/planner/plans |
| See tasks in a plan | GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/plans/{id}/tasks |
| See all my tasks assigned to me across plans | GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/planner/tasks/ |
| Create a new task | POST https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks |
| Update a task | PATCH https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks/{task-id} |
| Delete a task | DELETE https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/planner/tasks/{id} |
API reference
Looking for the API reference for this service?
Next steps