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ICYMI: Summer 2023 roundup of fresh new features in Microsoft Planner

SakshiB's avatar
SakshiB
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Aug 08, 2023

Microsoft Planner gives you and your teams an intuitive, collaborative, and visual task management experience for getting work done. Read on below to explore a set of rich new features that have rolled out recently to enhance your experience using Planner in your day-to-day task management. When your team work evolves and grows, and you find you need more enhanced capabilities to manage your cross-team projects , don’t miss the update below that will enable you to move over your existing Planner plans into Microsoft Project for the web for a free one-month trial. Then, head over to the summer roundup blog of new Project features that have been rolling out.

 

Bring your Planner plans into a Microsoft Project for the web trial

As your plans grow in scope, you may need some additional help managing it all! With a free one-month Project for the web trial, you can test out enhanced capabilities such as timelines for your projects and plans with dynamic scheduling and workload balancing, goal-setting for your individual and team tasks, Agile views and approaches, or custom views, forms, tables and columns to suit your project management priorities. You will soon be able to start a free Project for the web trial without having to replicate plans that you are already working on in Planner. Check out the video below to learn how to easily bring your Planner data into a free one-month trial. Want to learn more about Project for the web? Explore the summer roundup of new Project for the web features.


Create a new plan from template

Need to quickly start a new plan after returning from a summer holiday? You can leverage new pre-made templates for Planner that can help you save time and ensure that you are including key elements you need. Templates include Simple Plan, Project Management, Software Development, Business Plan and Employee Onboarding. Watch the short video below to learn more about how to use pre-made templates and kickstart your new plan!

 

 

Rosters in Planner to support container sensitivity labels

For organizations that require additional protection for sensitive or confidential work or need to be able to categorize and label plans and work associated with them, admins can require sensitivity labels to be applied to rosters in Planner, and users will now be able to apply container labels to rosters in Planner. This is enabled directly in Planner and by using Microsoft Graph APIs. Rosters are created automatically for task lists in Microsoft Loop. Tenant admins can make container labels for these rosters mandatory and set a default label, or not make them mandatory. Planner rosters then follow container policy settings. For Graph API requests, if labels are mandatory as per tenant settings, roster creation fails if a label is not provided at the time of request.

 

Frontline Worker enhancements to the Tasks app in Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Planner: Checklist completion requirements

The Tasks app in Microsoft Teams is available to organizations using Microsoft 365. The Tasks app includes unique capabilities designed for organizations with frontline workers such as task publishing. With task publishing, an organization can centrally define a set of tasks to be completed, distribute those tasks at scale across hundreds or thousands of locations, and monitor results. The task publishing capability in Microsoft Teams is now enhanced with a new feature: checklist completion requirement. This feature ensures thoroughness and accountability in task execution by preventing task completion until all checklist items are marked complete. Moreover, organizations can utilize the Business scenario API to create tasks with the checklist completion requirement enabled, for task automation outside of the publishing process. For example, when a machine health monitoring system detects a failure in a specific machine, a task titled "Machine Failure Follow-up" can be created automatically for the employees at that location to follow up. This task can include checklist items for each step to investigate the cause of the failure, perform necessary repairs or maintenance, and conduct post-repair testing and verification. By enforcing the completion of all checklist items, organizations can ensure that tasks are executed with the necessary attention to detail, ultimately leading to improved operational efficiency and reliability. This feature is now generally available.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay up to date with new features coming to Planner and Project via the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

Continue to share your feedback: https://aka.ms/Planner_on_FeedbackPortal

 

Updated Nov 11, 2024
Version 5.0
  • RobOK's avatar
    RobOK
    Bronze Contributor

    PetrKrenzelok Does Monday work well with Teams and email integration? We might need to move in that direction.

  • NerdyWasabi's avatar
    NerdyWasabi
    Copper Contributor

    AndrewFriedman & SakshiB - Are there any plans to implement the following -

    1) Allow sending of notifications to only the task assignee and not the entire group?

    2) Allow Creation & Deletion of Labels along with an option to let the user select the color for the label?

    3) Allow creating templatized checklists, which could be added to the task basis relevance.  For example - I create 5 different checklists with unique activities under them and can decide to use 1 of the 5 checklists, basis which is more apt for that task?
    4) Automatically showing the task in RED, if the due date has passed.  Something that catches the eye, the moment someone opens their planner board?

    5) Ability to watch a task, even if I am not the action owner because I am interested to know what's happening on the task. Example - I am a Product Manager who is interested to know how the task is moving and if the assignee is actually doing the work.  If I am watching the task, any activity or comment added, should send out the notification to me 

    Would be awesome if these features can be added to your product backlog and prioritized as they are a must for the platform you have created.  Look forward to an affirmative response

  • Gene McEnery's avatar
    Gene McEnery
    Copper Contributor

    Integrate planner and task calendar view to business central.  We use requested delivery date in sales and shipping. We put all off the requested dates in planner manually. We look at the month and week and can drag requested delivery dates to new date easily. The visual planner helps us plan production. We have to update in two places when any changes are made.

    We use planner to plan production in bc for our requested delivery dates in calendar view on our teams meeting.... very visual. 

    Please integrate...... would make bc a must go to for erp

  • Half a year ago we completly left O365 for the project management purposes. We use Monday now. The feature set is incomplete, scattered across the To-Do, Planner, Project, etc.

    We have even created an advance custom PBI reporting, exporting Planner daily, so that we could track changes / deltas, introducing checklist last item as a date and parsing it out, so that we could use it as regular subtasks e.g.:

    - Check-list item 1 (9.9.2023)
    - Check-list item 2 (1.10.2023)

    But still - are you aware, that you can't even export complete Planner record? E.g. Priority is not part of the export. Exporting labels is difficult to work with. Planner can't even be a source to Roadmap, etc.

    Now to Project online - even such simple stuff like comments, are a complete mess! It switches the user from the Project itself to Teams, and if you post comment to the task there, it is not kept hidden, but exposed to the channel. If you then click the chat link to the task, it does not even bring you back to the task itself, but to the whole Project file, and you have look it up again.

    I am kind of upset, as I have brought O365 to our enterprise, only to move away from it for the Project management purposes. Please consolidate your products. Open product like Monday and i 10 minutes you get the idea, what I am talking about.

  • PetrKrenzelok
    Is there any chance checklist items will support due dates in the future? We would find it really handy ....

    Hi PetrKrenzelok, we are not working on support for adding a date to checklist items at this time.  We've heard other requests for similar abilities, like adding an assignee to a checklist item. So we're tracking these requests on our backlog. If you're comfortable sharing an example or two, we can capture these examples with the backlog item to inform our future planning and prioritization.

  • HammerOZ's avatar
    HammerOZ
    Copper Contributor

    Lets get the basics right. We need to be able to delete and create labels! A panner is created with a million labels too. Thanks

  • ManuelBerfelde's avatar
    ManuelBerfelde
    Copper Contributor

    I really like the grid view you added recently. Shame you cannot sort the grid in a meaningful way.

  • Is there any chance checklist items will support due dates in the future? We would find it really handy ....