Forum Discussion
New Planner: Plans not staying pinned; Still no Outlook integration?!
Finally have access to New Planner and couldn't agree more on the flagged Outlook email integration.
On this point, seem I clearly misunderstood the intent for this new unified experience, as I thought you'd be able to move tasks (flagged or manually created) in To Do > Planner.
Now appears you can only move tasks initially created (as personal/only for me) in New Planner to shared Planner/Project FTW plans, and not those created manually or via Outlook flags in To Do (which you can still only be move between lists in To Do).
I've personally found To Do incredibly useful and intuitive (for an admittedly simple task manager) since it's origin as Wunderlist. The key frustration at work was exactly its isolation: where I used it to quickly and seamlessly create tasks either from emails or on the fly but would then need to manually recreate them via copy/paste in Planner when they became part of a bigger project.
Despite this, I could learn to live with creating all my new tasks in New Planner, if only flagged emails would show up here as such (and not just these isolated tasks in To Do).
Make sense???
- Exactly! It seems like THE #1 most obvious point to integrate.
I did find a good Power Automate workaround from asking in a Reddit group (haha!), but I haven't finished setting it up yet. But here is basically what I was told to try in Power Automate:
1. Find the action "When an Outlook email is flagged..."
2. Add "Create a Planner Task" to this flow, and choose which plan & bucket the flagged email tasks will be sent to. In our case, I created a bucket in one of our Plans called "INBOX" to send all the flagged emails. Once they are there, because they will be actual Planner tasks, you can then move them to any plan or bucket you want (there may be a way to put in more granular settings that can assign it to different buckets/plans based on keywords or sender or something, but I don't think we are going to bother with that.)
3. Finally, add "update task" to this flow and set parameters to pull additional info from the email into the task (e.g., email body, attachments).
I'm sure there will be some glitches, and it is annoying that we'll still have to recategorize them (vs. having a built in option on Outlook emails that we could connect to Planner and then assign them directly to the appropriate plan & bucket), but it's better than nothing!
One small detail we are going to do to make this work better for our setup is to ask all our internal colleagues to send us SharePoint links to files vs. attaching the actual files. This is because when you add an attachment to a Planner task (unless it is a link or you have chosen it from "team files" within Teams/SharePoint), Planner/SharePoint will automatically save the attachment to your team's main SharePoint documents folder. We don't want that because in most cases, a file is already saved on our org's main SharePoint or OneDrive, and does not need to be duplicated in our department Teams SharePoint files (and use extra storage) because we can also access the main SharePoint files.
Once we get everyone on board with that (sending us links), I will then probably adjust the flow to include email attachments on the corresponding Planner task so that when we get files from people outside our org that would not already be saved to an organizational SharePoint somewhere, those WILL be automatically saved.
