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Hello, it's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This time I'm going to talk about the future of tasks in Microsoft 365.
Microsoft now have many apps and services that include task management as a feature
and we've reviewed many of them on this channel.
Some of them have overlapping features and some even seem to compete with each other.
From the comments and questions I've had, I can see there's a lot of confusion around this subject.
After Ignite earlier this year, Microsoft published a video...
...outlining their strategy for task management in Microsoft 365.
I'll leave a link to that video in the description,
but in this video I'm going to summarise what I think the strategy is
and we'll also get a first look at some of the new task-related features coming into Teams, Outlook and Word.
First of all, it's good to know that Microsoft does have a strategy
and they talk about it in the context of an ecosystem.
They see their task related apps and services in three different categories:
Task engines, task hubs and then first party apps.
So I'm going to talk about each of those three, and hopefully try to make sense of the direction we're headed in.
Task engines are where tasks are stored and Microsoft say these engines are Planner and To Do.
They're the back end of the task management system if you like.
Next are the task hubs, and they are apps like Teams and Outlook.
This is where you do other work like reading email for example,
but you want to capture tasks while you're doing it.
So task hubs allow you to save tasks back to the task engines like Planner and To Do.
And lastly, first party apps are ones that allow you to save tasks while you're working.
One example is Word, where you may be working on a document
and that work creates a task which you then want to save back to Planner or To Do.
So this isn't possible today, but it is something that Microsoft's working on
and we'll have a look at that later in this video.
So let's talk about the task engines in some more detail.
These are the apps dedicated to task management - Planner and To Do.
So first of all Planner.
Planner, as you know, is for your teamwork.
It allows you to manage your tasks and assign them to people in your team.
Planner arranges tasks in a kanban board style
and each task is a card that everyone has access to and can make changes to.
Tasks are stored in buckets
and there are charts to show progress and a calendar view
and you do need an Office 365 account to use it.
To Do on the other hand is for your personal tasks.
It's optimised to help you prioritise your work and stay focused,
and you can choose what you're going to do each day using the "My Day" feature,
and tasks are stored in lists and you can share your list between your work and your personal accounts.
Planner and To Do are in the centre of the task ecosystem
and that's significant because I've had some questions about whether Planner and To-Do would actually stick around at all
and apparently they will. They'll continue to be a key part of managing tasks in Microsoft 365.
Next let's look at task hubs.
Task hubs are apps that are not dedicated to task management but will often create work that requires a task.
Outlook is a good example of a task hub.
In Outlook you receive emails that you want to turn into tasks.
That feature is available today. You can flag an email and it will show up in your To Do list.
You'll also notice now in Outlook on the web,
you can highlight text within the body of an email and turn that into a task.
So Microsoft is going to continue to create new ways for you to turn information you find in Outlook into tasks
and those tasks will be stored in the task engines: To Do and Planner.
Another example of a task hub is Teams.
We already have the Tasks in Teams app and this is being rolled out and updated as we speak.
and this allows us to manage our Planner and To Do tasks in one place - inside of the Teams app.
What's coming next will be the ability to turn a Teams chat into a task without having to switch windows
or go out to another app altogether.
Presumably new apps like Project Moca or whatever it ends up being called,
will be in the same category.
Moca is a personal productivity app that we'll use to get stuff done
and that also uses To Do to store its tasks.
And finally, let's talk about the first-party apps
which are apps built by Microsoft, but also integrate with the task engines Planner and To Do.
Microsoft are currently building in task-creation to their productivity apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
You'll be able to create tasks inside of a Word document and those tasks will show up in Planner.
You'll be able to @mention people in the comments of a Word document while you're reviewing it
and then you'll be able to turn that comment into a task.
So that is my view on the future of tasks in Microsoft 365.
If you want to watch the longer version of the video from the Microsoft programme manager then I'll put the link in the description.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
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