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Hello and welcome to Microsoft Mechanics Live! Coming up we're gonna take a look
at recent updates to Microsoft Planner including updates to the core Planner
experience deeper integrations in Office 365 app experiences like Microsoft
team's SharePoint and outlook the new schedule view in the web app and how you
can automate your plans with Microsoft Flow and to join me today I've got my
partner in crime Dave Heller and he's got a plan from the Planner team. welcome
thank you for having me give a warm round of applause all right so Planner
is one of my favorite newer apps from Office 365 and one of the more popular
apps that we see in terms of just it's simple and visual way to organize team
work last time you were on the show a few months ago we've made a bit of
progress since then but what's the team been working on now in those last couple
of months since our last show you know it has only been two months since we
last spoke but there has been a ton of innovation in planner okay right and
every time we publish a show on planner there's a ton of organic interest I mean
just the even the original show has been really good so we've we've we've done a
lot in terms of Planner on the Mechanics but what what else has been what else
adds a team in working on yeah so firstly I mean we're really pleased with
the uptake we've seen four planner I mean there are millions of users
worldwide with just continual growth so thinking about what we've updated for
this go-around you know the main focus has been on enhancing the core planner
experience to include new features such as the schedule view iCal integration
the ability to copy a task and updates to the notification strategy we've also
developed new ways to extend planner throughout Office 365 we have a new web
part to include the planner board and SharePoint team sites and updates to
Microsoft Flow connectors for example within the applications that use daily
such as Outlook SharePoint Dynamics any number of SaaS applications you can
trigger a task in Planner using Microsoft Flow cool but before we take a
look at all the updates why don't we take a step back for the folks that
maybe are new to Planner and give them a or of what Planner can do yeah
absolutely so I'm gonna access Planner here through the app launcher experience
and we're going to what's called the Planner Hub so what we're looking at
here on the bottom we see these tiles that represent not only my plans but
also my Office 365 groups and as you may know for every Office 365 group you have
you also have a plan and likewise so in the plans below there may not be any
tasks at all because the group wasn't created to work together yet but for the
for the groups that we are working together I favorited those so you can
see I can click down here add to favorites and then it'll give me a
high-level view of the work that's happening within these plans so I'm
gonna go in this pre-populated plan for the product launch and that opens the
Planner board this is the heart and soul of Planner and what we see is a complete
plan with tasks and buckets configured the way that fits my business so I
remember who joins the plan can update create edit any of the tasks and the
idea is that we want to wait for teams to organize the work and tasks quickly
and easily so let me jump into some task details to show you the kind of depth
that we can provide here ok so within this task branding guidelines I've
designated the bucket what that means that's how I'm categorizing the work
again this is all completely configurable buckets were those vertical
columns that we saw exactly and we'll go back there and I'll dive right in we can
list the progress between not started and progress and complete have a start
date a due date type of description down here we can have checklist items and if
we want we can show that on the card instead I have the attachment of the
card as well but just as easily I can have the checklist and you can check
that off from the Planner board interface which is super cool and then
down here we have attachments and you think you upload to this to this task
will go straight to SharePoint online as part of the groups framework and then
below we have the comments section which goes right to Outlook so you can have
this conversation and the tasks it'll go to Outlook you can continue it there and
will populate right back into the tasks on the right you'll notice that we have
these color-coded tabs these are again are completely configurable they start
blank you just give a visual way to have people understand if they should be
looking at a task even if they're not assigned to it right see on the right we
have examples of like at risk or blocker on track but on the bottom we have blue
which is like what does that mean I don't know but the point is that we can
configure it anywhere we want you know so going back to the board we can also
change the task views as you notice we have these columns that are buckets and
we can we can adjust as any way we want but we can also change the visual to
assignment so we click on this and we see the work that we all have assigned
to each other and we can drag and drop to actually assign work across we have
updating messaging framework I'll take that one and now that's assigned to me
we can do the exact same thing with status and work in the progress view so
here we see figure out Western Region launch plans maybe I'm in a team meeting
and we're doing status updates I say hey how's this going and they said well West
Region north is done and I can drag this over to in progress
and now I've status it just that easily if you want an even faster way to be
able to sort of status and see what's going we have the charts for you okay
and where the charts do does is it shows you all of your task owners and I can
drill down very quickly to see who's doing what so here we see my name Dave
Heller and so now it's filtered by my name and then I can group that by due
date so very quickly I go to seeing like what's due today what's due this week
what's due in the future very cool and you can flip between the other favorites
there as well yeah so one thing customers asked me pretty frequently is
you know I really like planner but I want to be able to go through my plans
to see what's late because you know I don't have all the time in the day and
so what's cool is it'll save the charts view and you'll see my other favorites
at night 2017 I can go there very quickly and it automatically loads all
that data and you can see that it's been quite delinquent with the two tasks to
have assigned to me right I can literally gonna read it is say that
that's really the core Planner experience very cool so it's a really
simple way to be able to build team plans and if you want to understand core
concepts of Planner and how to build a plan check out the show that we had a
few months back of the kind of the one on 101 of Planner can you walk us
through those some of the some of the brand new updates that we've been
working on the last couple of months for sure so there's a really important one
and you may have noticed this it's the new schedule view we had a tremendous
amount of feedback for a calendar type view so we've built this into that core
planner experience in addition to an iCal integration
and what's nice is you can take tasks and you can drag them directly onto the
calendar and it all signed them and as a temp attach a start date and a due date
very quickly so I dragged Instagram strategy to Tuesday I know it's gonna
take longer I drag it out and then it automatically adjusts the the due date
and with the iCal integration you can see up here that my Planner product
launch has already been included as an additional calendar overlay to my
Outlook calendar so we've also done work with task assignment notifications where
now you will get individual emails for assignments so let's say I assign you a
task you'll receive an email from me to you so the whole team doesn't get one
and the whole team doesn't send one much more granular very cool so you don't get
notifications for everybody on the team who's getting any random tasks assigned
so it's very personalized to you yeah we're trying to make that experience a
lot more personal right so we've also previously had limits to the number of
tasks you could have assigned to you now you can have any number of tasks
assigned to you and will only affect recent tasks on that initial load so for
all intents and purposes we are entirely removing limits so what are some of the
other additions that we've made to planner yeah so in mobile users can now
create view and edit plans on iPhone and Android phones very conditionally we've
on-boarded Planner into intern for mobile application
management and we've created deep link between planner mobile app and other
Microsoft mobile apps like teams so when you click on a Planner tab and team on
teams it will quickly and seamlessly transfer you across to the planner app
very nice so we are we're both working on a launch event actually as part of as
part of the show and once you assign me a task the nice thing is I can I can
actually see it on my mobile phone if that if that happens right yeah
absolutely so that's the so here I've got this task and I can I can go ahead
and actually start to click into the task and give it some some status maybe
I'll say it's in progress I'll add a comment that says I'm working
on it there we go and when I send that out then that will update your planner
board and you'll be able to see anything that I've done so is there anything else
then coming for the phone yeah so we're looking to build push notifications and
also an iPad to my's that as well so you've also
mentioned that the team's been deepening planner integration across other op
experiences what's new there we have so you'll notice here I'm in my SharePoint
team site we have created a planner web part that you can you can include in
your SharePoint team site to view your Planner board or the charts page
directly from SharePoint and as you'll notice I'll click on the tasks that you
filled out and it's right there within SharePoint it's completely mirrored
across the team's experience mobile and the web client that's one of the great
things is we can have the whole plan for example exposed through teams we can
have it exposed right here in the SharePoint site and that way you're
actually interacting with the underlying plan directly even though you're in
those other experiences yep and the SharePoint site feature will go live in
the Neff coming months so why don't we why don't we dig in a bit more in terms
of the the Team's integration for sure so as you noted you can have the full
Planner experience from within teams again we have that same task that you
filled out on your mobile device mm-hmm but also there's an interesting extra
tip that we've added for teams where you can just add additional plans that don't
spin up additional groups so you can plan and create sort of a whole new kind
of hygiene on how you plan so you can create project specific plans but also
in terms of how teams works we have different channels here and so here we
have the design brainstorm and that channel from within the product launch
group has its own Planner board that just lives right in teams and anytime I
assign people tasks in it it will go to their mobile device and the my tasks
page they'll be able to see that as well very cool so a lot of people here are
probably I T pros writing scripts wanting to do automation so we've built
some automation frameworks into into plan or using things like Microsoft Flow
what are some of the practical uses that we can do when we combine and flow with
planner yeah so I'll go back and show you first from my flow that I've created
three flows let me walk you through kind of the story of each of them again this
is it's very easy and visual to create on the top we have a link from Project
online into planner and what I've told project or what I field flow is that
whatever in a designated project and project online that there's a task that
has to do with workflows I want that sent a Planner and replicated in my
Planner below that we see that whatever a new
document is added to a specific folder in SharePoint I want to have a
notification and Planner to review that so it creates a task that signifies that
and then lastly in Outlook a very simple whenever I flag an email I want to get
at a corresponding Planner task that has the name of that email and then also the
body of the text within the description and so I'll switch over to the planner
board that I have here that just has flows to Planner and those are the three
tasks that I've sent in from those three separate workloads very cool so the
sky's the limit here in terms of what you can do with flow so for example and
kind of an area that I'm interested in like maybe new user provisioning you can
have it then kick off workflows the new user comes into the environment
maybe procures hardware gets there it's their desk and everything already kind
of builds a plan around the various stakeholders that have to do that so
lots of stuff that we can do we saw some great integration between SharePoint and
planner we've seen all the different mobile mobile additions we can create
plans now right from the phone and there's even more coming but if you're
not already using Planner right now where can we go in terms of or where can
people go to learn more and to start trying it and checking it out for sure
if you're not currently in Office 365 enterprise user you can learn more at
the link shown on the screen and keep helping us shape Planner with what you'd
like to see by giving us your feedback via the tech community so thanks Dave
for joining us today of course keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the
latest updates to planner and across Microsoft that's all the time we have
for this show thanks for watching we'll see you next time
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