Announcing Tasks in Teams, a coherent task management experience in Teams.

Hi,

my take on the "tasks". For quite a long time (being a Sharepoint 2007 user), there is too many task structures - SP, Outlook, Planner, Project, To-Do. And then e.g. your flagged emails, which mix with real tasks in Outlook. And everythings is mostly desintegrated.

Two years ago, we have moved our management from the shared Excel file with tabs, to just Planner. My notion was, that sometimes less is more, and Planner had a great potential, but is also killed by the almost non-existant progress:

• How long will we wait for @ mentions? Is there any product architect at MS? Missing this one is not even a fun anymore.
• Calendar view is completly useless.
• Why on earth are checklists and displaying an image on the card, mutually exclusive? We want both!
• Why are checked checklist items removed from the card view? Then all your board looks like there was no work being done.
• When will list / grid view arrive?

We wanted to start using a Project for better project management, not just tasks. What a mess:

• So there is a big Project server and app.
• Then there was Project online, which you could use with the Project professional desktop tool.
• Later on, MS brought in a Project for the web. Looks nice, but you can't open that in the desktop app.
• You can't even export it to Excel (at least this one is coming).
• Then users wanted a custom fields. Those were added, but those don't export for the Power BI - so another half working solution.

But what is even worse and related to the task management:

• Tasks for Teams (recently To-do) does NOT integrate MS Project tasks! Why on earth is that like that?

And - do you really want to get me started on Roadmaps? One of my colleagues company has moved to the SmartSheet solution, because with MS tools, it is just scattered mess. Even Atlassian is working on Roadmaps (now in beta) for Jira.

/Petr