Forum Discussion
What’s Good About Microsoft Planner So Far (and What’s Still Missing)
After several months of using Microsoft Planner in Office 365 to manage tasks and collaborate on projects, I've put together my thoughts on what's good so far, and what's missing.
Click here to read my blog post
Things on the roadmap that I'm looking forward to:
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
- Assigning tasks to multiple people
- External guest access
- Templates
Things I couldn't find on the roadmap yet, but I would like to see:
- Better Outlook integration (there’s no connection between Planner tasks and Outlook tasks).
- Wrapping of long bucket names.
- Marking checklist items within a task should automatically mark the task as “In progress”.
- New tasks in a bucket should be added to the bottom of the list
- Sorting of My Tasks list by due date
- Notifications for tasks about to expire/expired
- Daily digest email of tasks due today/tomorrow/this week/this month
- Favorite plans not added to Outlook favorites automatically
- Multiple plans per Group
- Charts for plans showing per-bucket progress of items
38 Replies
Armando Roman brought up a great point with burndown charts which also means that estimates should find their way into Planner. Because we are a Scrumban organization we would love to have analytics for lead and cycle time :)
I think lacking estimation (hours or story points or at least T-Shirt sizing) is a big draw back because I need it to estimate how many tasks can fit in to a day or a period, and I need it to see if I shall break up a large task to a smaller one, and I need it to fit things into daily focus or to a sprint.
There is a few user voices already here! Find one and vote!
https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum?query=estimate
/ Adam
would also add better graphics and visual reports of states, as a burndown chart, tasks flows, workloads per user or member, or better yet, the ability to connect to PowerBI in my work area or the same group of planner plan. I would like to migrate all my projects to Planner but it is important to have more visibility of activities even if the other product costs me more money, additional licenses, etc
- Great post. We have not embraced Planner yet because it is too basic. I hope it continues to mature.
Fully agreed. But it is a good start for smaller teams where no full project management solution is required, or even for SMBs that cannot afford expensive PM solutions.
RobOK Can you let me know what features you are looking for in Planner in order to use it?
Would love for it to integrate with Project Online.
We are using Planner to manage our support tickets. Planner helped us a lot in simplifying ticket management a lot. So Planner's integration with Outlook calendar, setting reminders for task due dates are most important.
Great writeup, agree with a lot of your points. In addition to plan templates it would be great to have card and bucket templates which would save a lot of time. Another thing we are desperately hoping for is customizable stages for plans. At least for us the basic "Not started, In Progress and Completed" stages don't cut it and we would love to have the ability to create custom ones and be able to group by them, especially in the "My tasks" view. And of course recurring tasks would be a welcome addition too.
