Today we'll take a look at recent updates to Microsoft Planner
including the updated look and feel as well as faster web interface.
Deeper integration into Office 365 app experiences
such as Microsoft Teams,
assigning multiple users to a task,
new ways to access your plans on the go via mobile,
and how you can automate your plans with Microsoft Flow.
Microsoft Mechanics
Today I'm joined by Dave Heller from the Planner team, welcome.
It's good to be back.
So Planner is already one of the more popular Office apps
with its simple and visual way to organize team work
and you were last on the show at Microsoft Ignite.
But what's the team been working on since then?
Yeah it's been a busy year since we last met at Ignite.
Since then we've been gathering your feedback to make Planner even better.
So what has the team been focused on in terms of the updates with Planner for this round?
The focus has been on delivering against the most requested features
that you've submitted, such as mobile apps for iOS and Android.
As well as foundational improvements to make the web app perform faster
and enable users to extend Planner throughout the Microsoft ecosystem.
For example, within the applications that you use daily
Such as Outlook, SharePoint, Dynamics
or any number of SAS applications.
You can trigger a task in Planner using Microsoft Flow.
So before we take a look at all of these updates in action,
can you briefly step back and kind of give us an example of what the core Planner experience is?
Sure thing.
Planners primary purpose is to give you a simple visual way to organize team work.
So I access Planner through the app launcher here.
And we've gone into the Planner hub which is where I have a higher view of
all the plans that I care about this week.
And so I'll click on my online marketing plan
where the online marketing team has already
organized all the work they're doing to fit their team this week and this month.
What we see here are these columns that you call buckets, which are way to categorize your work.
Specifically to the different work streams that are happening.
What I'll do is go up here to the Chart's page.
And here we have a view of who's doing what.
So we see the whole team here.
And suppose I care about what Alex is doing, I can click on the task bar next to his name.
It'll filter by that.
And maybe I want to see the progress of his work
and specifically what is currently in progress.
So here I'll see that YouTube strategies is behind and I can reach out to them if I need to.
Lastly, we have the My Tasks page.
Which as you can imagine you have tasks assigned to you from many different plans.
And you don't want to have to go to all of them to view your tasks.
So they all funnel down into the my tasks page where you can status your own work very quickly.
So it's a really great central place to be able to stay on top of all the plans
and tasks that you've been assigned to.
It's also a really great way to build out team plans.
But if you want to understand the core concepts of Planner and how to build you own plans,
check out a show we do a few months back on Planner on Microsoft Mechanics.
But Dave can you walk us through all the updated experiences?
For sure.
So first let's take a look at the original UI.
And you'll notice that the colors are a bit different.
There's less information on the page.
And I'll click on the IT department plan
and you'll notice that it takes about a second to load up.
So now I'll go over to the updated UI,
and I'll click on the same plan
and you'll notice that the tasks and the plan load very quickly.
We've also made the interface cleaner, more modern, more consistent with Office 365 experiences.
We've also been able to improve the efficiency of the interface
so that you can see more information from your plans on one screen.
And then lastly and importantly as you noticed it's more performant.
And what we've done is we've made some foundational changes
to make pages load faster
by querying and prefetching more information on the initial page load.
So you mentioned the latest updates are really based on specific user requests.
So what are some of the updates the team's implemented there?
Right, so the most requested feature on our Uservoice is the ability to assign
multiple users to a task.
In the previous experience you could only assign one user per task.
But as you'll see here you can assign
multiple and up to ten users if you so choose.
So we're some of the other top requests that people were feeding back to you?
So in May we ship Planner mobile apps
so you can now view and edit your plans on your iPhone and Android phones.
So Jeremy I'm going to go into a plan here.
Let's see we have a Product Launch event.
And I see that a keynote presentation planning is late.
I know you're great at keynotes and you love doing them.
It's my favorite thing.
And so I'm going to drag your name over and assign you.
And that will pop up in your mobile device.
All right so now that you've assigned me a task, I'm going to go ahead and pick up my phone here
and open up the Planner app
and here in the Planner app I can see all the different tasks
that are assigned to me in the My Task pane here.
And if I click on the keynote presentation planning that you just assigned to me
I can go ahead and click on the status of that and I'll put it as in progress.
And now that should show up on your side as well.
But before we look at that, we're going to show a couple other things on the phone.
So here I can also see what's in progress, what's completed,
and I can also check out the Planner hub
to see all the tasks that I favorited and all the plans that I've favorited.
They're straight for my phone.
So beyond then what I've shown here on the phone,
what else are we working on for the phone?
Yeah, in the upcoming months
you'll be able to create a plan
from your mobile phone to have a full-featured Planner experience.
And mobile application management is coming with Microsoft Intune.
Now you've also mentioned the team's been deepening integration
with Planner into other app experiences.
What's new there?
Yeah so we've been continuously improving our integration with Microsoft teams as you can see here.
So first I'm going to show you a plan called Product Launch.
We're going here and I just want you get a feel for the tasks that are part of this board.
And then what I'll do is I'll switch over to teams.
And you'll notice that we have product launch here as a team that's associated with the same group.
what I'll do is I'll click this button and I'll add a Planner tab.
It'll give me two prompts to either create a new plan or use an existing plan.
I'll use an existing plan, I'll click the drop down, I see product launch and click Save.
What's happening now is it's taking the data from Planner
and bringing it to Teams so you have a fully synced plan so you can work on your
Product Launch board in Teams or in Planner as you like.
And your mobile device.
And it will sync bi-directionally to fit the way you work.
And the great thing about Teams that were in here is that now we can actually chat
against those plans.
So are there some new features there that we can show as well?
Yeah so you'll notice here that I have a late task to launch on the web.
And what I'll do is I will copy a link to that task
And as you noted I am able to chat within Teams.
So I'll open the chat box.
And I will @ mention you, so you'll get a notification within Teams.
And I'll say "Hey, I need help with a task".
And then I will paste the task.
And then I would say most importantly I'm going to assign you.
So you'll get a notification through Planner and on teams because I really want you to know.
So on my screen I just saw a task there in the corner that you've @ mentioned me
and I can see activity here in my Activity Feed
that you've just mentioned by name.
Now if I go into Teams, I've already got that pinned on my site.
And I can see a link to that task that you've assigned to me.
And the great thing is here it won't only just launch the plan itself
but it's also going to launch me straight into that task so I can update that if I want to right here.
And I will do that because I want to say that I've got a message.
And I'll say I'm on it.
And post that.
And now I've just updated the status straight through Teams.
It's going to synchronize back with planner.
Now you've mentioned though something even more interesting a bit cooler I think
from the automation perspective.
We can start automating tasks creation using other items and Planner
and combining that with Flow.
What are some of the practical uses we can do in terms of automating plans with flow?
With Microsoft Flow you can connect to any number of end points
and create integrated scenarios that you don't necessarily have out of the box.
So in this scenario I'll be Megan Bone who's an administrator at Contoso.
And every time that there's an All-Hands meeting,
there are certain tasks that I have to do on a repetitive basis.
And so what I've done is I've gone into Microsoft Flow
And I've created an integration between my Outlook calendar and Planner,
so that whenever there's subject of an event that I create
contains the words All-Hands.
There are four tasks that are automatically created.
So I'll go over to Outlook
and I'm going to create a task that just says Team All-Hands.
And click Save.
So now that I've created that task, I'm going to go back into Planner
I'll click on the team All-Hands plan,
where these tasks populate.
And you'll see that I have the four tasks
that I need to do every time there's an All-Hands meeting.
And you also notice that the due date is the date of the meeting
and that I have automatically been assigned.
So I can see these tasks in the my tasks page.
So Dave where can people go to learn more?
Well if you're not an Office 365 Enterprise licensed user,
you can learn more at the link below.
Otherwise you can find out more about how to use planner on our support page
and keep helping us shape planner with what you'd like to see
by giving us your feedback via the tech community.
Thanks for joining us today Dave.
And of course keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest tech updates across Microsoft.
Good bye for now
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics