Uses of Office 365 Planner

Challenges in the modern work place:

Recently, we have come across multiple challenges in the modern work place, such as:

1. Users work from multiple locations
2. Most of the user’s time goes in looking for information
3. Failure to coordinate across units and users
4. Microsoft project server is too complex or too robust for their needs. So users simply turn to Microsoft excel for managing projects and tasks.

The Microsoft Office 365 lineup introduced a new and improved way for business using Planner tile in office 365 Launcher. Office 365 Planner has  been rolled out to all eligible Office 365 customers, including Office 365 Enterprise E1-E5, Business Essentials, Premium and Education subscription plans.Customers with these subscriptions, will see the Planner tile in the Office 365 launcher when it becomes available.

Office 365 Planner is a new project management, enterprise-ready and globally available team collaboration app that lets you assemble team work organize visually and easy to use, assign and update tasks, share files, chat and more.

Office 365 planner’s key aspect is the `Hub’, where we can visually see plans and tasks along with overall progress and can go through each task. We can see who is on time and who is falling behind in the hub. The pllanner utilizes the concept called `Boards’ , to keep team work organized in each board. Boards are individual cards, which will have their own due date, conversations, attachments and categories. Cards can have attachments (images,documents etc) to assess information in just a single glance. Cards can be represented as columns called “Buckets” and buckets can be prioritized and color coded in the planner. Visual dashboards and email notifications help to keep everyone informed on progress.

With Planner,  users and teams can create plans and each new plan automatically creates a Office 365 group. Users can create a “Task” and its details as shown below.

Conversations in the Planner will be accessible in Outlook 2016, web Outlook and in the Outlook app as well. The Planner is tightly integrated with conversations, calendar and OneNote etc. We have the option to select and remove favorite plans in the planner hub.

Planners support  technical requirements larger organizations demand, including multiple redundant backups, instantaneous recovery and HIPAA, FISMA, ISO27001 and EU Model compliance.

We have options to add members to the plan and that member will be automatically added to Office 365 Group related to that plan.We have charts in Office 365 planner . These charts will display the summary of the tasks visually as shown below

Planner app hosted on the azure environment and developed using Microsoft graph API as shown below:

Office 365 Planner enters a competitive world which includes other softwares like Trello, Atlassian’s JIRA Core and Asana. Planner will fill Microsoft customers’ need for a more lightweight, easy-to-use tool and replacement for SharePoint Tasks, which were removed well ahead of Planner’s initial debut.

Advantages of the Planner when compared  to other applications are

1. Lightweight and easy-to-use tool.
2. Integrated with Office 365 as an online app.
3. Enterprise-ready and globally available app.
4. Visualization might give planner thumbs up over competitor.
5. Cute color-coding to denote task progress.

Some of the new features Microsoft plans to introduce over the next few months are:

1. Ability to assign a task to multiple users.
2. External user access and assigning task.
3. Customizable boards.
4. Plan templates.
5. Apps for iOS, Android and Windows.