During ESPC 24, Howard Crow, the Group Program Manager for Planner, introduced the new Planner for web, what Copilot brings to Planner and what I was really looking forward to was the new Project Manager Agent! And boy, he did not disappoint!
This new Planner, which was already live on Teams but is now updated for the web, brings together To Do, Planner, and Project. Today marks the general availability of the new Planner for the web, which can be accessed at planner.cloud.microsoft. The transition to this new Planner will occur over the next few months. One of the key benefits of this new Planner is that it uses the same codebase, allowing new features to be released faster based on user feedback.
New feature: Portfolios, milestones and baselines
Some of the new features include managing multiple plans together through portfolios. This provides a unified overview of the status for all your plans and allows you to track tasks across multiple plans in a single timeline. You can also share portfolios with teammates. Additionally, the new Planner includes baselines in project management, project level variance, task level variance, critical path, and other insights. A roadmap with milestones is also available.
A whiteboard feature is enabled within Planner as a tab, allowing you to convert ideas added on post-its into tasks. The Loop feature in Planner enables collaboration on tasks by creating a separate workspace for this purpose.
Copilot in Planner
Copilot in Planner can create tasks and goals, helping to manage costs and drive revenue growth. A great demo showed how an email can be used to create tasks from its content. Copilot can also build your plan by creating tasks and buckets. A prompt library is available to create, understand, edit, and ask about tasks. Very cool stuff!
You can ask Copilot to plan for your next project and it will start generating the work breakdown.Project Manager Agent
The Project Manager Agent was announced at Ignite as one of the five agents. When you create a new project manager plan, it will create a plan with a group. The SharePoint agent, which lives on the SharePoint site behind the scenes, will take care of grounding. There are currently 42 agents behind the Project Manager Agent, which are extensible for partners. These agents look at goals, break down tasks, and perform various mini-tasks while communicating with each other.
As AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more advanced features and capabilities to be integrated into Planner.You can assign tasks to the Project Manager Agent to complete the work, although only a human can mark a task as complete. The Project Manager Agent is currently rolling out in public preview.
The new Project Manager homepage and project manager board view are also being introduced. The Multi-Agent Runtime Service (MARS) is a service that uses the right agent to complete specific tasks when needed. Coming soon are status reports, where you can choose your reporting month and report goal, and create a prompt. These reports will be created in a Loop page. There was so much goodness here in the session, and I am looking forward to see what will come next!
Beyond ESPC24, continue the learning...
The following Microsoft Ignite session recording takes you a little deeper into "Boost productivity with Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps". Watch it now:
Also, check out the related Planner blog published during Ignite, "Orchestrating human-AI collaboration in Microsoft Planner"
Cheers and happy task'ing, Marijn Somers
