a new experience in Office 365
to organize work, manage and assign tasks and collaborate within your teams.
We're going to go hands-on and show you how to use Planner
including integrated experiences across Office 365.
And we'll take a look at what's in store in the coming months.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by Sajan from the Office 365 team, welcome.
Sajan, Planner is the newest addition to Office 365
but what can people expect from this experience?
Thank You, Jeremy.
Planner offers you a simple and visual way to organize teamwork.
There are different ways we all get work done.
And they're like, until recently we have solutions on the two apposing ends of the spectrum.
On one hand we have individual work.
And we have tools like Wunderlist that you can use to manage your task list.
And, on the other hand
we have project and portfolio management solution
like a product is called project online
that you can use to manage projects that require scheduling,
priortization, resource management, timesheet,
and even integration with line of business system.
Ok.
And now Planner is something that we always felt there was a gap in the middle.
And that's where Planner fits in.
So you can use it to work with your ad hoc team.
Or let's say you work in IT.
You can use it to manage events, user training
I like that folks in different parts of the company
can use it for a variety of projects.
Right, so this is really how work gets done,
but can you give us a look and show so that looks like?
Sure, so first of all once you come to Office 365
you can go to the app launcher.
And you can see the Planner icon here.
You click on that.
And we'll launch right into the planner experience.
What I'm going to do generally right now
first let me start and show you how you can create a new plan.
So I'm going to click on New Plan.
And let's say you
we work in IT.
And we are in the process of rolling out Office 365
to one of the branch offices.
so i'm going to create a plan called Office 365 rollout.
In this case, I want to make sure that only folks in my team can see this.
Ok.
You can add a description and then you can click on create plan.
So now my plan is created
and first of all you can see that we are in this what we call as a Board view.
And here you can start by creating different buckets.
And the buckets are the groupings of tasks, right?
Yes exactly.
So let's say in this case we want to have a set of task
which are related to communications.
So we can create that.
Second, you can think if we have to find some champions.
Are early adopters? Exactly.
So which can help you to drive success.
Third, it will also have a set of tasks related to governance of the rollout.
Right so we can report against how we're doing. Exactly.
Ok I can also go ahead and create some To do's.
Like in this case, actually I'll just first create a task called Assign Licenses.
And I can add the task.
You can click on that and you can go into more details for the task.
Ok.
To start, you can have a start date and due date.
Let's say we want this thing to be done by June 24th.
Okay.
I can assign this task to somebody.
In this case, I'm going to pick you Jeremy.
Let me look for you.
And here you are.
So now I picked you as a person who will work on this.
You can enter a description.
So I'll say assign licenses to all users.
Okay.
If you have a document, you can attach that.
You can also put a link.
What I really like here is that
not only can you create a task.
You can also create a checklist.
We say give this task to you and you take on some sub tasks
that should be part of this.
You can capture those here in the checklist.
You can say that
Validate user as a permanent employee.
I'm just making up a list.
Or you can go on and you can create more.
We can also enter a comment.
This is a very social experience.
And with that you can assign a task and you can get started.
Ok so if we switch over to my pc then I should have this task
and I can see that my tasks have gone from 11 previously to 12.
So if I look at mine I can see
that my assign licenses, there we are at the bottom.
We have all the information that you just added in there Sajan, yep.
I'm going to add some more items because I know I need to
download the PowerShell module
because I'm going to script all of my license assignments.
And we'll also figure out which users we want to actually assign.
So, select users we'll say.
And then after that I can say well I've validated who's a permanent employee for example
and i've already downloaded my PowerShell module.
So I've already gotten started.
The nice thing is once I've made those two different changes to my checklist
I can actually move that into In Progress just by a simple drag-and-drop.
And if I scroll back up to the top of the page
now it's in my in-progress tasks that I've got here in my all task list
This is really across all of my plans that I'm working on.
Exactly.
So what else can we do now?
Once you've got a simple project created
let's move on to a larger project that already has been populated and is kind of midstream.
to share really the the power that we can do with Planner.
Sure, for that Jeremy I'm going to take you to the Planner Hub.
So once you come to Planner Hub
you can see all the plans that you're part of.
Now, let's say here were going to talk about and dive deep into Tech Summit.
I'll click here first where I marked some as a favorite.
So next time when I come here I can see all my favorite plans. Ok.
Now here you can see color wise, like yellow means these tasks have not be started.
Red is late.
Blue is in progress and green is completed.
So let's click on this and we can dive in and see what's going on with this plan.
So once you come in you'll always start with the Board view.
And first thing is that if I scroll to the right
you can see that there are three different ways that you can organize all the tasks that you have.
The bucket is one view that we have
that you already talked about.
Now, next we can go and click on Assign to.
And very quickly you can say that the whole experience got rearranged
in terms of the different folks that are on the team.
You can easily go and see who's working on what.
What tasks they are on and what type of documents they're working on, you can see that.
The third thing you have it here is you can go ahead and click on Progress.
Now you essentially get to see your task as not started,
in progress, and completed.
Now Jeremy, last week I had a chance to speak with our friend Garth
and he's on vacation now.
And I know that he's already done with this task
So I can go ahead here and mark that as completed.
That's how as a team we can all stay up to date
and we know what's going on.
So it's not statically assigned to just the person the task was assigned to?
That way we can very fluidly be able to do things like this.
Exactly.
Everything is very transparent and the whole team can collaborate on that.
Now let's say in this case I want to see what is the status of everything in a report.
You click on charts.
You will see an experience and you will see all the tasks that are there.
And right in the middle you can see that all the tasks
that are either a work in progress or they are not completed yet.
I see here, Ann has a red mark here
because this task is running late.
I can click on this and you'll notice that on the right side
the whole list got filtered.
So I'm looking at Ann's ask now and I know this task is running late.
So that's how we can go and track them.
Now the other thing is that Planner is built on top of Office 365 groups.
It integrates out of the box with other capabilities we have with 365.
You can see here we have a Notebook.
We have other features such as conversations, calendar, and a whole lot of other features.
That's how you get the best of the whole 365 that comes with Planner.
And now if I were to click on conversations
you'll come and you'll see your conversations experience.
Like here, I'm seeing my plan Tech Summit.
You can go ahead and you can respond.
You can like something like this comment I wrote
I can like and those are the type of experience we can have.
If I click here, you can see we have a good dialogue going on.
I asked you to send me template
and I still didn't get a template.
I'm going to tell you that, ok please send it soon
so that I can get our work done.
And that's how we can sort of collaborate on this.
Right, so if we moved back to my machine then we'll be able to see the comment
stream that we have on that particular task.
I'm just going to go back into my Planner Hub.
I'll be able to see all the things I've pinned to the top as favorites
and there we see the Tech Summit.
And if i go into that task that you have
in this case it was the building the reports
for the for the governance side of that specific event.
And then scroll down, we'll be able to see the Please send it soon task that you just sent to me.
So very tight grade integration across Office 365 groups.
If you want more information on groups, of course we covered that
on an earlier show with Christophe a few weeks back.
Now beyond all of this stuff, it's really great to see this from a planning
and a team workforce management perspective.
But, what's coming to planner in the upcoming months?
There's a lot going on our end.
So I'll talk about the key things that we're working on.
First, we're working on external users access
so that you can collaborate the task with folks who don't work for your company, that's one.
Second thing is that, one of the request we have from many users is that
The ability to assign a task to multiple users, that's second.
And third, we are working on a Windows universal app
as well as native apps for iOS and Android.
So those are some of the top things that we're working.
Really great and really looking forward to seeing those changes.
So if I'm new to Planner, where do I get started?
I think it's very simple because, we're in the process of rolling it out
I would say go and login to Office 365
and go to the app launcher.
If it has been provisioned you should be able to see Planner right there.
And then you can give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback on that.
Be sure to keep giving us your feedback because we've set up a user voice
specifically for that as we're just rolling out planner now
and don't forget to keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest tech updates.
That's all the time we have for today's show.
Thanks for watching and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics