02 Oct Microsoft Announces the new Office 365 Planner
Wow. Microsoft is really stepping up their game and staying true to their “productivity mantra”. This week, Microsoft announced a new Office 365 experience they are releasing with the Office 365 Planner. I’ve been working with Microsoft PPM solutions for over 12 years (ugh, dating myself yes) – and I’m truly impressed with their new wave of cloud based collaborative productivity solutions.
The new Office 365 Planner provides a fresh perspective with a much more visual approach to managing projects and tasks. The planner consists of boards and cards – similar to Delve if you are familiar with that search & discover Office 365 experience. Each board consists of many cards for a “project” or “plan” and each card represents a task or work item. For each card, you can associate due dates, attachments, categories and conversations.
The “My tasks” view shows everything associated to you, so you can see what you need to do across every plan. There is also a “Hub” that will give you insights into all of the projects / plans and their status.
Staying true to the Office 365 integrated experience that Microsoft has been touting, the Planner leverages Groups for conversations so that users can stay connected while in Outlook. The documents attached to a Card are stored in a SharePoint Online document library, allowing you to take advantage of the SharePoint Online document management capabilities.
I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the new experience! Keep it up Microsoft!
“Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation.” Satya Nadella
