People want to be able to scale what they’re doing. In the “ How Can We Improve Planner” section of Microsoft’s feedback forum, the most up-voted suggestions are about multiple users and templates. Unfortunately, it isn’t yet possible to assign a task to multiple team members, so you will need a point person to lead each task, at least nominally. Use the comments section at the bottom of each task card to talk to your team as you work together. Open up a task card to assign the task to a team member. Once you’ve added your team members, you can go back to Planner and click on “Members” to add them to a particular plan. Here you’ll see the option to “Add a user.” Just enter your teammate’s name and your company name and they’ll receive a email. If you’re the administrator, you can add members by visiting the Office 365 admin center located in that Rubik’s cube menu. To start talking, add members to your team in Microsoft Planner.

If a collaborator isn’t on Office 365, they can’t see your plan. Planner supports internal teamwork well, but at the moment it isn’t set up well for customer sharing. While it’s clear so far that Microsoft Planner is a pretty functional organizer, collaboration is the real test. And for those who want to be beyond organized, there’s a handy checklist within each task card. Use labels to color-code your tasks according to themes, priority level, or make up your own code.Ĭhecklists within checklists. You can also see that I’ve put a red label on the card. For example, see how I’ve added a link to the color I want for the restaurant in my “Paint walls” card. Add a link inside a task to give your team members all the info and resources they need to get the job done. I’ve put my “Fliers” task in the “Launch Event” bucket. Move a task card along from bucket to bucket to organize it. Your buckets in Planner are your columns. On this card you can add a title for your task, a due date, and you can assign it to a member of your team.Ĭlick on a task card to open it up so you can see all its intimate details.īucket. Each task is an item on your to-do list and resides in a neat little card. As you can see, you can also choose to view by “Charts” or you can transition to “Notebook” and other tools via the ellipses symbol. This is the main “Board” view in Microsoft Planner. Once you’re in your new plan, you’ll see a view like this. When you choose “New Plan” from the side menu, you’ll have the chance to title your new plan, describe it, decide whether it’ll be private or public, and give it an email address. These are the three main units you’re working with in Microsoft Planner: It’s just “plans” and “tasks” and “buckets” And there are some nice bells and whistles that might give it the edge for your team. Is Planner any more refined than those tools? No, not really, but it does the job. Microsoft Planner has learned how to make a very intuitive kanban board from competitors who’ve already done it. A digital organizer your grandma could use Here’s our take on Microsoft Planner, including some tips and tricks for becoming a super user, and our take on how it differs from the other tools out there:ġ.

There you’ll see this friendly Planner logo: Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school email, and go to the app launcher by clicking on the Rubik’s cube menu in the top left corner. It’s called Microsoft Planner and claims to “take the chaos out of teamwork.” Let’s see. But if you’re the owner of an Office 365 subscription, Microsoft has rolled out its own project management tool with kanban cards into your account for free.

People tell us that having this Project Summary on their site makes them look and feel organized and keeps the team in sync.Earlier this year we compared planner sisters Trello and Asana. We have a lot of new sites cropping up within Office with the Project Summary on the home page. At Microsoft, we love using our own tools – we call it dogfooding (or eating our own dogfood). So anyone who goes to the site will have a good high level picture of how things are going and what people should be working on. The second is a list of upcoming task deadlines and calendar events, which gives folks who need specific details a good picture of next steps. The first is the timeline (from the Tasks list), which gives casual stakeholders a high level overview of where things are heading. For this, we have the Project Summary on the home page of the site which makes it easy to communicate how the project is going, calls out the next upcoming milestone, and shows a couple of display modes. The Tasks list is great for the person driving the project but everyone else that visits the site (team members, stakeholders) need an at-a-glance view of the project status.

Microsoft office task planner 2012