Paul's Project Server and Project Online Blog

#Microsoft #Office365 #Planner goes GA #taskmanagement /#workmanagement /#teamwork part 2

This is part 2 for the Microsoft Planner overview, for those of you that missed the first part a link can be seen below:

https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/office365-planner-goes-ga-taskmanagement-workmanagement-teamwork/

In this post we will look at creating a new plan in Planner with some tasks and assignments. From the Planner hub, click New Plan from the left navigation pane:

Complete the new plan form as below:

The form will validate the plan name, email address (used for conversations / discussions), enable the plan to be visible to all the members of the organisation or private – private means only members added to the plan can see it and finally give the plan a description. Click Create Plan and Planner will go off and create your plan:

Once completed you will see your plan:

At this point the plan can be updated with tasks and team members but other options such as conversations and calendars will take a bit longer to be available as this is waiting for the Office 365 group to be created:

Whilst that is provisioning I will create 5 tasks for my plan using the add task option:

I will also set a Due Date:

Then click Add Task. Repeat this process for the required tasks or activities:

Now I will switch to the Buckets view:

Here I will create some new Buckets to group my tasks:

Now I will move all of my tasks into the buckets by dragging the task cards to the correct bucket:

Now I need to add the team members to my plan using the Add Members functionality in the top right corner:

Type the name of the user then you can select the correct user to add:

The team members are now added:

I can now assign the tasks to the team members, to do this click on the task card to load the task detail pop up:

Click the Assign button and select the team member:

At this point I’ve also added a description to the task so the user CPS knows what is required and also as the Office 365 group is now set up I have started a conversation about an issue I have with the current app:

Notice the email notification too for the new comment. Repeat this for all tasks as required:

Switching to the Assigned To view you can easily see who has what assigned:

The next thing to do would be to set start dates for the tasks if needed, this is done on the task details popup:

Repeat this for all tasks as required. I also set some labels for keys tasks:

These are then visible to the right of the task card:

You can also add attachments to the tasks, when you first try to do this the storage might not yet be available as seen below:

Once this is available you can attached a file already in the OneDrive site for this plan or upload a file:

As this is a new plan I need to upload a file:

This uploads the file to the OneDrive storage that is created as part of the Office 365 group for this plan. I’ve set the document to be the preview on the task card to get a nice visual on the card:

I’ve done this for a few tasks:

Planner will take one image / the first page from the uploaded document and use that as a preview.

Also I want to set a new logo for my plan to replace the red square with PM. To do this I navigate to the Group page for my plan by clicking the Conversations link:

This loads:

From here I can edit the Group settings including the logo, just click the current logo and the group properties pane will appear:

Change the logo as required. This might take a while to sync with Planner but once it has completed you will see the updated logo:

That is the basic plan set up and ready for the team members to start work on the tasks and join in any conversations for the tasks. On the planner hub page the project can be added as a favourite to get quick visibility of the plan status:

Planner data can be accessed and edited programmatically using the Graph API, this is currently only in Beta, see the reference link below for details:

https://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs/api-reference/beta/resources/task

That’s it for the Microsoft Planner overview, look out for more posts on Planner in the future.

#Office365 #Planner goes GA #taskmanagement /#workmanagement /#teamwork

This week marked the start of Office 365 Planner being generally available, the official post can be see here: https://blogs.office.com/2016/06/06/microsoft-planner-ready-for-showtime/

In this post I will give a quick overview of Planner then in the second post I will cover using planner with creating new plans, tasks and assignments.

Firstly, what is Planner. Microsoft Office 365 Planner is Microsoft’s new task or work management tool for managing plans and tasks with task boards using drag and drop in an intuitive, modern interface. This tool is great for managing teams with tasks or buckets of work using a simple but effective interface. For this post we will look at Planner on my Microsoft Office Demo tenant as this contains some example plans already. When accessing Planner the users see the Planner Hub:

This view shows all of the plans available in Planner. The user has the ability to tag plans as favourites to move them to the favourites section. This is done by hovering over a plan and clicking the ellipsis then clicking “Add to favorites”:

That project will then move to the favourites section, to remove a project from favourites click “Remove from favorites”:

When plans are added to the favourites section the task status is visible in a doughnut chart and a legend with a count of tasks in each status.

Clicking anywhere on the Online Marketing plan card will take you to the plan’s board:

There are different views available on the board that group the tasks differently, this can be changed in the top right corner:

The different views or groupings display the tasks either by Buckets:

Buckets are away of tagging or grouping tasks that are related in some way for example an event or work package.

Assigned to:

This view shows tasks grouped by assigned to, a useful view to see which tasks are not assigned to a team member.

Progress:

The progress grouping is useful for seeing the status of the tasks.

Back on the Buckets view it is easy to create a new bucket by clicking “Add new bucket” and type a name:

Tasks can then be added to that bucket by drag and drop or clicking the task and opening the task details view then using the bucket dropdown menu in the top left corner:

Tasks can have labels set such as the red urgent label on the Media Outlets task, this is very useful for flagging / highlighting tasks:

As well as the board views there is a Chart view, click Charts next to Boards and the chart page will load for that plan:

Notice the Task pane on the right, by default there is No grouping set, clicking on the doughnut or legend on the Status card will update the Task pane view:

In this example I clicked the Late segment on the doughnut, the Tasks pane then set a group by of Due Date and scrolls to bring the late tasks in view.

Clicking a team member in the Members views will then add a filter to the Tasks pane to show only that team members tasks:

Each Plan that gets created creates a group in Office 365, this is used for the plans collaboration. The plan can have documents that can be attached to tasks, team members can comment on tasks, the plan can have a calendar and also a OneNote notebook, this is provided by the Office 365 Groups functionality and accessible using the ellipsis menu:

To navigate back to the planner hub use the left navigation pane. You will also see a useful view here called My tasks, that will show a view for all of your own tasks:

This defaults to a progress grouping but can be grouped by plan too:

Planner also provide full notifications via emails to the team members.

There are some great features in development on the roadmap for Planner:

That’s it for this post, in the next post we will look at creating a new plan with a team and tasks. Some additional links for Planner can be seen below:

Microsoft Planner for Admins: https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Microsoft-Planner-for-admins-9652e4c7-48e3-4dad-9e71-0c783ec3d0f8

Common Support Issues for Planner: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2016/06/06/microsoft-plannera-few-common-support-answers/ & https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2016/06/07/microsoft-planner-another-look-as-msolsettingsand-a-couple-more-answers/