- Hello, my name is Jacob Brown Schwager,
and I'm going to walk through
some of the trial features soon,
Shipping and Planner.
Planner is a collaborative work management tool
that is included as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.
At a high level, Planner allows users to easily create
and assign tasks, organize their work
with boards and labels, and collaborate with their team.
As the work becomes more demanding,
and as teams need a better way
to manage tasks and schedules,
Microsoft Project is the next step as the Premium Tool.
Project enables users to visualize a project
in the timeline, easily add dependencies between tasks,
add custom fields to allow you to customize the project,
and understand how work is assigned to your team.
Project can be acquired separately
from Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
To help you see what users will experience
when they start a project trial from within Planner,
and how you can support them as the administrator.
I will walk through a demo.
Imagine you are the Planner user.
Here is your plan that you are using
to manage work for your team.
You have a lot of work to track
and you want a way to visualize
what is going on in your plan.
As a commercial user, you will soon see a timeline tab,
and you click on it to learn more.
A timeline visualization or Gantt chart is a heavily
requested feature by our users
and it is included in Project.
You quickly learn that there was a trial of Project,
which includes other useful features, like custom fields,
dependencies, and smart scheduling.
You click on start trial and get ready to see
what Project has to offer.
After your trial is assigned,
Project is automatically importing your plan into Project.
As the user, you want to be able to try out your plan
with Project's premium features
instead of building a new plan.
Project also tells you that it is making a copy,
so that it will not affect the original Planner plan
your team is working on.
When you are finished adding premium features,
like custom fields, and dependencies,
you can have your team switch over
to your project by sharing it.
In the future, we will extend this feature
to allow you to import any Planner plan.
Now that your plan has been imported,
you were brought to the timeline view,
which is what stirred your interest in Project.
You can walk through the additional features
Project offers over Planner.
Within the trial, you can access everything
that would be included in a paid subscription for Project.
As you continue to work through your project,
you know you are in a trial with the indicator at the top.
Clicking on the indicator will tell you how much time
is left on your trial
and what you need to do to get Project directly
or request a paid subscription
of Project from your administrator.
By requesting, your administrator will be able to follow up
with you and get you a paid subscription.
Switching back, you, as the administrator, can follow up
when your users submit requests for paid licenses.
You'll be notified of these requests
in the Microsoft 365 admin center
and will be able to easily view all new user requests,
including who made the request and which product they want.
You decide to give your user a license to Project
and send them a quick message that it was approved.
You can customize the request flow to direct users
to a specific site your organization
may have already set up to help with product procurement.
That way users can follow an established process
without you needing to redirect them.
We have also provided an option for you to control
how users interact with end user trials.
You can choose by supported product,
if users can start an end user trial,
purchase the product themselves,
or if they must always request a license directly from you.
A PowerShell command will allow you to make these decisions
and a link to it will be included in this video.
Finally, we have released the Project usage dashboard
in the Microsoft Admin Center.
From this dashboard, you can easily see who
is using Project within your organization
to help decide who receives a subscription.
The data is also exportable,
so that you can analyze it as needed.
Project trials give your planner users an easy way
to try out Project and see what features it has to offer
without impacting their current team.
You have the control to decide if your users can try out
and purchase Project, as well as understand,
who is requesting and using Project in your organization.