Forum Discussion
Ability to send an email to Planner and create a Task
HalDavis85 Way to shoot a fly with a cannon.
All we (read, at least most of us) need is a simple way to add new cards to the table using email. If I use Planner for ToDo, it's easier to just throw a quick email at it and have it create a task for me. If it includes a picture, fine. If there's a link, just as good. If there are no attachments, who cares? It still saves whatever you wrote there. No need to switch apps, you can just throw anything you were doing in the email client at it and It Just Works. That is, if you're using Trello. Not so much with Planner.
And no, there are no REAL reasons why Planner couldn't have just the same. You can talk all you want about tasks and Apache servers, but it won't change that. Today's work place is (for many) not location or device dependent. You use what you have, where you need it and you need things to work. I don't care whether I'm using my Windows desktop with the Outlook app, my Macbook laptop with it's Apple Mail, my iPhone or my Android tablet. I need to be able to add new tasks no matter what the platform is -> emailing them to your "planner address" solves all that. No need to create clunky flows, no need to learn sharepoint, no need to do anything other utterly ridiculous to just get by in a small company.
Let's be realistic: a toy app like Planner is not used in enterprise environment anyway. It simple, it's easy, it's used by those who want to get things done rather than spend their days writing code to get it to do something you could've done manually at fraction the cost.
Teams have their own email addresses. There's no reason why Planners couldn't have them as well if only Microsoft bothered to think about what they're doing even for a while.
I gave up on Planner ages ago and went back to Trello. Just forgot to turn off notifications for this thread. I'll do it now. Microsoft will not do this and without it Planner is just useless.
Trello isn't just an app. It utilizes outside servers to run automated processes that handle converting your emails to tasks. Microsoft provides the automation architecture, not the underlying code, which could be massively simple or massively complicated.
If you use a basic mail item, you run the risk of having the address hacked and used for spam, which could ruin your project boards. However, if you have certain requirements in the mail, that allows you to test that email first. You can set the box to only accept from those in your company, which is safer but still has some complexity. Mail items don't conform to the same structure as a task, which is why the two functions are separate in outlook, and use different item types. Tasks in exchange are a mailbox item, but are processed differently. Calendar items also. If you were to use the TASK data type, you could look for that as an attachment or react to it as a sent type. Processing a Task data type into a task data type results in filling in mostly the same fields of data from one to the other. This is very simple by comparison to using mail data types. It also allows you to automate your processing with checks for the data needed to place the item, and create a backup of the information for quick use later.
Again, Trello is great, especially if that is how you work. They have their own processing servers running the conversions of items. You are asking microsoft to provide the servers and the processing fully coded at no extra cost, which is a tall order. They provide the automation services in FLOW and in Azure with Power Apps. However, they do not pretend to know how each person or company works, they build their solutions to hit the widest audience possible in the most cost effective manner. They don't specialize to particular groupings like corporate entities with any single app. Instead they target every user with the widest and simplest building blocks so that each entity can build on top of it to make things fit.
IF you have been using trello or similar, I recommend you stick with it. Planner isn't garbage, its just a basic Kanban Project Board for all. You can build more into it yourself, if you want to, but for those small to medium sized businesses I've worked with, a basic board is more than enough, providing a place for work-groups to lay out projects and select those tasks they can fit into their schedules.
It is a basic tool. If you want more full featured, you have to purchase a tool specifically for the set of functions you want beyond the basic task management. Alternatively, you can build the features with automation of your own using desktop FLOW's or program the cloud service yourself and link it. You may have a little trouble with the OAuth data handling that handles user authentication since it's one of the more updated sets of code.
I'm sorry you were disappointed with planner. Every company with whom I've rolled it out has been ecstatic about it. Some did eventually move to trello, and one of them had me design the basic algorithm for using both planner and trello together. A programmer built the automation onto one of their servers, which constantly runs the checks in an app that is registered in their cloud, with a service user account. It functions much the same as trello, but people send a task item to the Planner, which is converted to a planner task, then copied to an email for a trello board. They are a hybrid of Microsoft and Google, so much of their cloud is synchronised between the two in such a fashion. Trello houses the information for both, but planner is used as a front end, along with email, to send new tasks to the boards. It took a few weeks to build it, but it works. They can also send emails to the 365 group and it will get processed, putting up tasks onto the planner, which fires an auto copy to trello. I also heard the apps check Trello for changes of certain types and checks them against planner. People who select to take a task get a message from trello if they are in gmail, the others get the items added to their to do lists. It took nearly a year to build the code and get the nuances right. That's why Trello gets some $$ to work the way they do. They provide only one particular service and can do that well. Planner is not meant to be a replacement for Trello. It is an alternative.