Last year most of us missed the TimeLine feature in Office 365 with its sudden disappearance. we Office 365 user and even SharePoint On-Premise users supposed to love this for managing our tasks in an effective and meaningful way. Especially the way it presents tasks and information is wonderful and just makes user adoption easy.
Good Bye Old Friend !
Many of us disappointed with the discontinuation of this but it surely showed a sign of a smile too. In the 1st quarter of 2016, Planner was introduced to Office 365 and that made a huge leap. Business users are significantly attached to individual and group tasks management and now with the planner it seems to become more easy.
Unlike the previous timeline feature supposed to stick under your Personal Site, Planner is an independent App just like Email, Sites or Delve yet interacts with your entire O365 platform.
The all new user interface is just looks amazing with simple accessibility and amount of important data shown in a handy way. This makes anyone love their dashboard and keep it up to date which is ultimately a huge part of the success of an Intranet.
Planner Hub
This is where you get the full overview of your Plans. A plan can be a “Project” or any higher level entity which will have multiple tasks within. In this scenario below, a plan is a project which I am currently working on or even upcoming. Four colors are defined to indicate the statuses such as Not Started, Late, In progress and Completed.
By going inside each plan, tasks are selectable and can be marked as Incomplete so it will appear back in the plan.
Navigating Inside each Plan allows you to manage the plan with many useful features specifically attached to each plan.
Conversations: Directs you to the all related email conversations on this plan. The navigator on the top makes it even easier to go back to other tabs such as Files and Notebook. This is incredibly effective.
Files: Every plan will have its own library to store documents and collaborate. Uploading, Syncing and Sharing can be done in the same interface.
Calendar opens up the calendar attached to this project/plan.
Notes Directs you to the OneNote Notebook dedicated for this plan.
Creating a New Plan. A simple and yet nice interface given to create a new plan and you can define Plan Name.
Adding New task in an existing Plan. Simple as defining Due date, People who responsible for the task and task Name.
Classify Tasks with Buckets
We can have multiple Buckets to classify tasks for easy identification and manageability. This makes Planner much more broader than previous Timeline feature.
All in all, Planner has finally brought the simplicity and yet solid set of capabilities to manage your projects and activities. Not just limiting to tasks but also broader set of functionalities allows you and your team to manage day to day projects and activities effectively.
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p align=”justify”>Finally a Centralized Team and Activity management Space for Office 365 provides you better experience.
Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure Technical Journal 