Hi everyone, my name is Holly,
and I'm a Program Manager on Planner at Microsoft.
Today, I'd love to talk to you
about Microsoft Task Ecosystem.
This is obviously a topic near and dear to my heart
as a Planner PM.
And it's a journey that my team has been on
for quite a while.
To that end, some of the content
that I'm going to show you may be familiar,
but I would love to provide a refresher
since this is just such an important journey we are on
and an update as to what's been happening recently
and what will be happening soon
to help you manage tasks across Microsoft 365.
First, I'd love to show a quick video to illustrate
some of the exciting capabilities
I'll be talking about today.
[upbeat music]
NARRATOR: Schedule a meeting,
pick up groceries,
assign a team,
cross off more tasks
in Microsoft 365.
Stay on top of your day
with access to tasks wherever you are.
Say goodbye to searching for the things that you have to do.
Your tasks follow you through the apps you use most.
So you always know exactly what you need to accomplish,
and won't miss any important deadlines.
It's easy to manage your tasks or your teams,
so you can take control of your workload,
stay focused and productive,
keep a team organized
on any device.
Since tasks are integrated in Microsoft 365,
you can start using them today.
Stay on top of your tasks
with Microsoft 365.
Now, before I get into the details
of all the functionality you just saw in that video,
let me take a step back
and show you the problem we're working on,
specifically, why are we trying
to build a Microsoft 365 tasks ecosystem?
For my talk today, I'd love to first share with you
some of the pain points we're seeing
in the working world today
and how we're building a task ecosystem
at Microsoft to help.
We hear this constantly from our users.
It is incredibly overwhelming to track
and manage all the work you're being asked to do.
I'm sure this resonates with all of you.
I can certainly relate to this myself.
There are signals now from so many different places
telling you, reminding you, notifying you
that you have work to do.
And this problem is only getting worse
as more and more productivity tools
are added to your daily work management.
And these tools each have their own unique way
of letting you track work in context,
get work from others, and remind you about your work.
Keeping track of all these different places
is now one more thing on you're already too long to-do list
and trying to remember all the places you have to check
to find your task to fit the purpose
of making a to-do list in the first place.
Additionally, having these tasks spread across
so many different tools and services
means it's really tough, if not, impossible
to get an all up view of everything on your plate.
This causes stress that you are missing something
you're supposed to be doing
and it also makes it difficult to prioritize
across all your work to ensure you're working
on your most important task.
And those are the problems we want to help you with
and why were you building a Microsoft task ecosystem.
With this ecosystem, we want to make sure
you can still capture all your tasks contextually.
There's a reason you have all these different places
you are tracking tasks.
You don't want to break the flow of what you are doing
and you need to jot down a quick reminder of a task.
The problem is these tasks then get stuck
in whatever app you were using
at the time you wrote it down.
So we want to make sure that these tasks,
wherever you are capturing them
are syncing to a shared task backend.
This task backend is as an aggregation
of everything you need to do.
And we can build awesome tools and services on top of that
to help you better manage your tasks.
These task management tools
can help you understand your full set of work,
triage and track them, prioritize and focus.
In any changes you make to your tasks
in any of these awesome tools,
sync to that same task backend.
We want you to feel confident
that all your tasks are captured
in control of your full set of work
and a sense of calm that you're prioritizing effectively.
And as we continue to build out the task ecosystem,
we always keep in mind these 3 pillars.
I'll talk more about these throughout my presentation,
but to give a quick overview now.
Coherence, you shouldn't have to struggle
to recognize what a task is
or we learn how to manage it based
on what tool you happen to be using when you access it.
We want you to know when you see a task
and know what that means,
you can expect about its behavior.
Intelligence. Throughout the task ecosystem,
from capturing, triaging, prioritizing, tracking,
and completing tasks, we want to make sure
we're providing you whatever assistance we can,
from suggesting tasks you might've missed
to helping you build your lists of tasks for the day.
We want you to feel like you can offload
some of the mental burden of planning your work.
Integration. We believe that
all the fabulous Microsoft tools and services
should only be better when you use them together.
And we should bring you some behind the scenes magic
by making all these tools and services
talk to each other and share information,
giving you the flexibility to move between them seamlessly.
Now let's take a look at how we think about
the different pieces of the Microsoft 365 tasks ecosystem.
So this slide is our mental model
of the Microsoft 365 task ecosystem.
Starting at the center, you have your task your apps
which are rich, full feature task management experiences
for enthusiastic users who want a dedicated experience
in advanced functionality.
Moving out to the next strength,
we are building task hubs
into your existing work management platforms
like Outlook and Teams.
This will give you contextual task management
user experience, enrich integrations
with your existing workflows and tools.
Then finally, you have your task endpoints at the edge.
These are the endpoints
where you capture your tasks contextually
and you can manage a relevant subset of them as well.
With this structure, you can capture your tasks everywhere
and manage them anywhere.
As you can see, each piece of the ecosystem
plays an important role
throughout the process of task management,
from capturing tasks everywhere to managing them as you work
to focusing and managing VMO dedicated experience.
For the rest of this presentation,
I'll dive into some examples in each of these categories
to show you how this works in practice.
Let's now start at first step, task capture,
showing you some exciting tasks endpoints we're working on
to help you capture your tasks everywhere.
Let me start with an experience that may be familiar to you,
but it's had some exciting updates recently,
Tasks and Office documents.
We know many of our users like you
are collaborating in Office documents,
having conversations in the comments
around the contents of that document,
mentioning others or yourself to send a notification
that some input is needed.
And generally using the comments pane
as a way to generate, track and manage work
that needs to be done in the document.
This "work to be done" sounds a lot like tasks, does it not?
We thought the same,
which is why we're making this part of the task ecosystem.
We are releasing Tasks and Office documents
in two main phases,
each to help serve different customer need.
Phase one is about helping users
in Word, Excel and PowerPoint
create and track explicit task on themselves or others.
That is, users can ""taskify" a comment thread
by mentioning either themselves or someone else
and assigning it to that person.
That person will get a notification
that a task was assigned to them.
When you go into the Office document,
the comments that are tasked will look distinct
and there's special coloring
to help you find the tasks in a document assigned to you.
Our hope is this will help our users prioritize
where to spend their time as there a sifting
through all the conversations
that are happening in an Office document.
Phase one is rolling out now in Word and Excel web apps,
and we'll be coming soon to PowerPoint
when 32 Mac and mobile.
We'd love to hear what you think about this experience.
So please send your feedback via user voice.
And phase two is where we truly bring this experience
into the task ecosystem.
With phase two, the mentions you choose to turn into tasks
will sync to the task ecosystem backend
and will be tracked along all your other tasks.
While we don't have a concrete date to announce yet,
we're hard at work on it
and excited to bring it to you as soon as we can.
While we don't have a date to announce yet,
I did want to provide a sneak peek
of some of the work we've been doing
to bring these tasks from Word, Excel and PowerPoint
into the task ecosystem.
You can see the tasks you are adding to the word doc
are now triggering the creation of a plan
linked to that doc and the tasks are syncing there.
Obviously, there's still a lot of work for us to do,
but we were excited to share this piece of progress
with you all.
Another way we help you capture tasks at Microsoft
is a little help from Cortana.
Cortana will send you personalized daily briefing emails
that include suggestions for tasks you may have missed
based on your emails, calendar, et cetera.
These suggested tasks can also be found
in the Insights add-in on Outlook
and added to your to-do list
and use to prioritize and manage your work for the day.
This will become generally available
for M365 enterprise users in English,
starting September 2020.
The demo you're seeing here shows the briefing email
delivered automatically to your inbox
near the start of your day to help you prepare
for upcoming meetings and manage your tasks.
This is personal and private,
carries especially if you've new emails, meetings,
and documents.
This email will also include personalized pending requests
or commitments from prior emails.
And with one click, you can add these as tasks
in Microsoft To Do.
We love having Cortana offload some of the mental burden
of keeping track of all your tasks.
And we're continuing to expand on the ways Cortana
can help you feel confident
that you are capturing all your tasks.
And we also let you turn your emails into tasks explicitly
via the Outlook web app.
There are a couple of ways we let you do that.
You can open up the To Do pane on the right hand side
and drag and drop any email into that pane
to turn it into a task.
From that task, you can open up the original email again
to help you find any context you would need to work on it.
Alternatively, you can highlight any task in an email itself
and add that as a task directly,
which helps narrow down the focus
of the task you're creating.
There's a demo of how that works
later on in this presentation.
We're also working on enabling
similar functionality in Teams
since this is another place,
so many of your conversations are happening.
While this isn't released yet,
you'll soon be able to quickly create tasks
right from any Teams' chat or channel conversation
without having to switch apps or windows.
In this way, you can turn any Team's message into a task,
setting an assignee and due date.
And like with tasks from emails,
we'll make it easy for you to get back
to the full conversation to make sure you have the context
you need to complete the task.
Speaking of Teams and Outlook,
these are such central hubs of work management
that we also provide task management functionality
from within those contexts.
Obviously, giving you full task management functionality,
these hubs is a journey,
but we recently took a big step forward
with the introduction of the Teams Tasks app.
As you may have already heard,
we have recently started rolling out
our new Task apps in Teams.
We know that for many of our users,
Teams' the center of your work day,
especially now that so much of our work is done remotely.
So we're really excited about Teams being a place
you can now see your tasks are both planned
to do it together in the same place.
This gives you powerful task management capabilities,
all in the context of the app you were already using
for so much of your work day.
We know that Outlook is one of the other primary apps
you use every day to get your work done.
And so we consider it a key task management hub as well.
In fact, as you may already know,
the tasks experience in Outlook
is now fully powered by To Do
and this close partnership means you can do things
like drag a task on to your calendar
to block off time to work on it,
see the work you've planned in your My Day
without leaving out the context, et cetera.
We see this as a hub
with equally important task manager requirements as Teams.
So we will continue to invest in making the Outlook hub
a powerful center of task management.
So we've covered your task endpoints and tasks hubs.
So we just may have one topic left, Task Your Apps.
So last, but certainly not least,
in my very biased opinion, you have To Do in Planner.
These are dedicated apps
for when you want to focus task management experience.
Planner gives you simple, collaborative by design management
for Team tasks.
To Do is for planning your own personal day and workload.
As you likely already know,
tasks creating Planner that are assigned to you
will also show in your To Do app,
making To Do your one-stop shop
for managing all your personal tasks,
including prioritizing your backlog and planning your day.
Speaking of planning a day,
I have one last thing to show you.
I wanted to end on one of my personal favorite tools
with the Microsoft 365 tasks ecosystem, My Day in To Do.
I personally start every day by opening up To Do
and using My Day to plan out my workload for that day.
I see a set of tasks suggested for me
based on what I didn't finish yesterday,
tasks that are due today, what reminders I've set,
what tasks I captured recently, et cetera.
These suggestions are an aggregation
from across the tasks ecosystem,
including my flagged emails, my Planner tasks,
my To Do tasks,
Outlook emails that turned into tasks, et cetera.
I then spend a few minutes sorting my day
in the priority order I want to work through things.
And because I'm usually a little over-optimistic
about how many things I can get done in a day,
I started the ones that absolutely have to get done today.
This way, I start each day confident
that I'm working on the most important work
that needs to happen today.
I know tasks that I've added anywhere will show up here,
so I have one consolidated set of task to reason over.
With my trust in the Microsoft tasks ecosystem,
I spend way less time trying to remember
all the places I need to check
and worry that I've forgotten something important,
and I can spend more time actually getting the tasks done.
Well, that's the end of my talk today.
There are other resources here for you to learn
even more about the task management experience.
These resources are updated regularly.
So check back for the latest and greatest
for the Microsoft task ecosystem.
And if you want to learn even more about tasks,
I encourage you to check out
our other task management sessions.
And thank you for letting us walk you
through the Microsoft 365 tasks ecosystem.
I hope you're as excited about it as we are.
Well, maybe as I am.