Announcing Tasks in Microsoft Teams public rollout
Published Jul 28 2020 09:00 AM 130K Views
Steel Contributor

Tasks are the building blocks of our work. They help us keep track of what to do now and what needs to be done next. But tasks are hard to manage, especially when you have to flip between different places to see them all.

 

That’s why we’re thrilled to begin rolling out Tasks in Microsoft Teams, a coherent task management experience in your hub for teamwork. The new Tasks experience brings together Microsoft Planner and Microsoft To Do into Teams, giving you one place to manage your team plans and individual tasks.

 

We’re starting to roll out Tasks in Teams on desktop today to a small group of users, and that rollout will continue through September. The Tasks in Teams mobile experience will not be available until the desktop rollout is complete.

 

As a reminder from our announcement blog during Ignite last year, the Tasks in Teams experience comes as an app, which shows both Planner and To Do tasks, and as a tab, which is added to individual Teams channels and only shows Planner tasks. That blog also reiterated our commitment to Planner—and that’s still true today. We’re as dedicated to Planner as ever; in fact, there’s never been more momentum behind Planner because it powers key elements of the Tasks in Teams experience.  

 

tasksinteams.png

 

To get the Tasks in Teams app when it’s available, click the ellipses in the Teams left siderail and select Planner. No, that’s not a typo: as we roll out the new Planner experience in Teams desktop, the app name will initially remain Planner. It will then briefly change to Tasks by Planner and To Do. Finally, it’ll be simplified to Tasks. On Teams mobile clients, users will always see the app name as Tasks.

 

gettheapp.png

 

The above is true for the tab, too, which you can add by selecting the “+” icon at the top of a Teams channel.

 

We’ve devised this naming sequence on purpose to alleviate confusion among customers who miss our communications about this release. Nothing about the app’s functionality will change during this process; it only affects the name. Here’s a graphical representation of the sequence for reference.

 

namingsequence.png

 

If you’re not seeing the new Tasks experience after adding the app, hang tight. We’re enabling Tasks in Teams for customers little by little, and you will see it in the coming weeks. When it does appear, check out this support article first for tips on getting started. Government tenants will see the app and all its name changes but will not get the updated Tasks in Teams experience during this rollout. We'll be in touch through Message Center when it becomes available.

 

We’ve made some exciting additions to the Tasks in Teams experience since the Ignite announcement. Here’s short summary of those changes, which are covered more extensively on our dedicated Microsoft Docs page.

 

  • Task publishing lets companies create tasks at the corporate level and push those tasks to targeted teams across their Firstline Workforce. For example, leadership for a nationwide retailer can create tasks for an upcoming promotional campaign, send that list to all affected store locations, and then track progress against the assigned tasks. Store managers can easily assign tasks to individual employees, while Firstline Workers can see a simple prioritized list of those tasks on their personal or company-issued mobile device. As of now, task publishing is only available in private preview. If you’re interested in getting the private preview of task publishing for your organization, please fill out this form to nominate your company.

taskspublishing.png

  • Tasks in Teams is available in Teams desktop, web, and mobile clients. If Tasks in Teams is added in Teams on desktop, it’ll appear in the other two environments, too. The exception is guest users, who can access the Tasks tab but will only see the app on mobile.
  • Both the Tasks in Teams app and tab include four views: the traditional Board, Charts, and Schedule views from Planner, plus the new List view. All four are available in the Teams desktop and web experiences, but only the List view is available on mobile.
  • The new List view also comes with a new capability: edit multiple tasks at once. In both the desktop and web experiences, instead of making the same edits to each task individually, you can edit all affected tasks simultaneously. This feature supports changes for progress, priority, due date, and more depending on what task list you're looking at.
  • If you’re an IT admin, the Docs page includes steps for enabling or disabling Tasks in Teams for either your entire organization or specific users; setting a policy to automatically pin the Tasks app to the Teams siderail; and, hiding My tasks lists for users.
  • You can use Graph API and Power Automate integrations for To Do and Planner to surface tasks created in other apps in Tasks in Teams. You can read more about these APIs on our respective Planner and To Do pages. Note, the existing To Do Graph API will soon get updated to a new one, which is currently in private preview. For Power Automate, you can easily build workflows that create tasks based on certain criteria (e.g., a task is created when a form is submitted with a specific response). There are lots of premade Power Automate templates for To Do and Planner here, just search for the product name.

 

Tasks in Teams is the first major step in building a more connected task management experience across Microsoft 365 apps. Outlook already syncs all tasks to To Do where you can manage more task details, and Office will soon support task assignments from @mentions in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

 

We’re calling this entire effort Tasks in Microsoft 365, and it revolves around three core principles: coherence, intelligence, and integration. It’s part of a larger collaborative work management initiative that we just launched last week at Microsoft Inspire. You can watch the 30-minute presentation video about that effort here.

 

To stay current on our progress, keep checking the Planner Tech Community. We also invite you to check out our new Tasks in Microsoft 365 webpage, where you can find more information and announcements about Microsoft’s connected tasks experience. If you have ideas or suggestions for improving this experience, drop us a line on Planner UserVoice.

 

Planner AMA! We hosted our second hour-long Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) of the year on July 28. It was a huge success with lots of participants and questions. If you missed the event, we'll be publishing a summary of it here soon.
 
 

Bonus coverage! Several members from our team recently sat down with the hosts of The Intrazone, a biweekly podcast series from the SharePoint team, to talk about Tasks in Teams. You can listen to that conversation using the media player below.

 

46 Comments
Copper Contributor

Love the enhancements coming.  Getting better and better every day and your pace...yes, please!  Keep speeding the improvements up.  It certainly helps us advocate/champion your product.

Iron Contributor

With the new meeting "experience" you added an option in settings to opt in to get it early. Why not do that for more features such as this one? Then the people who need it most and are most exited about it can try it earlier instead of having to wait up to two months. It would also give IT people a chance to test it and prepare education material before everyone gets the new feature.

Copper Contributor

Sounds great and its amazing to see how everything comes closer. My question is: I work in a university and we need to roll out a new guideline in regards to tasks/ Assignments. The Problem is, should we still use the assignment functionality in teams or should we start using Tasks? 

Copper Contributor

We're very much looking forward to using Tasks and Lists but need to run it through our own onboarding processes, so we need to turn it off for the time being. However the options described in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-tasks-app and 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-lists-app aren't available to us in the Admin Centres. Some of our users are on the targeted release and are seeing the Lists feature in the App Launcher. Can you advise where to turn it off if we're not seeing the option?  

Brass Contributor

Outlook and Planner supports both Start and Due date for tasks, but To-Do, and if I should judge by the illustration, Tasks in Teams only support Due date. I don't see the logic in this? I am OK with having Start date as an option for those who only care about Dues dates, but I would really like to see a consistent experience and all apps supporting both Start and Due dates.

Copper Contributor

Does anyone know if/how we can force the update to the Planner App in our environment?  REALLY don't want to have to wait to (potentially) September before the rollout hits us.

Steel Contributor

@mikeparkie currently Microsoft To-do doesn't support Start Date or Priority. Unfortunately I've found users find this really frustrating as they have to keep jumping between apps to see the different features.

Microsoft
Copper Contributor

Will there be a way to import tasks from a csv or Excel file

Copper Contributor

Will it be possible to use tasks with private channels? This wasn't possible with planner if i recall correctly?

Copper Contributor

Very excited to see this and the release of Microsoft Lists as well. 

Copper Contributor

Need to add Planner and Tasks functionality to private channels.  Our PMO manages hundreds of customer projects with internal and external consultants and having to create a team for each one is a pain.  We would like to have one PMO delivery Team and private channels for each of the active customer projects, and the subset of individuals and sales persons involved added to the channel, would be great.  Our sales people want us to have private channels so that other sales people don't see what is going on in other's accounts.   We also need the ability to archive private channels for inactive or completed projects - but this is another issue.  Having the capacity to add a Planner to each of these private channels 

Copper Contributor

I need the DAY functionality of To Do, but as a GCC person I only have planner rightnow and I cant sketch subtasks, rank order of priority, etc. It's all team based and big picture and I lack a way to handle on my own. It's really killing me. PLEASE add more features for GCC users so we can make the most of public money...gotta be honest we need this more than anyone right now with our disrupted workflows and reduced interactions. I need to be able to send my supervisor my daily list of to dos. Currently I manually type stuff up every morning and I hardly have a records of what I am doing and things are unraveling with out a big picture view of my everyday s stuff. HELP!

Silver Contributor

@PlannerTeam, still waiting for this to roll out.  When is rollout of this?

Brass Contributor

Takes long the roll out!
It was announced for mid juli. so now we have september...


Iron Contributor

We’re starting to roll out Tasks in Teams on desktop today to a small group of users, and that rollout will continue through September. The Tasks in Teams mobile experience will not be available until the desktop rollout is complete.

 

From the article above.

Brass Contributor

Thx for the info Andreas!

Copper Contributor

@ngathIs there any way to volunteer to get in this rollout sooner?

Brass Contributor

haha, nice try Team4PH :)
but if it is possible, i want to be on board also please! LOL

Iron Contributor

@Teams4PHIf you read my other comment you can see I suggested that but MS has not replied so I would assume not unless you can get into their testing groups.

Copper Contributor

Hi, any updates on when the full roll-put will take place? I added Planner in my Teams but it offers no functionalities

Copper Contributor

The announcement for tasks in planner in my desktop app is gone and now it's just named planner again :(

Brass Contributor

in the desktop app it will named "planner" for a while and will change in "tasks" over a longer time period.

so, only the name "planner" will not show us if it is the new "tasks"-app or the old planner app.

Copper Contributor

Hi! Any updates on rolling out from Planner to Tasks?

Brass Contributor

it is getting frustrating to wait and wait and wait....

Silver Contributor

@ElinaB and @Philipp0474, I feel your pain.  We don't have it here and my demo tenant doesn't have it.  It was announced at last year's Ignite and hasn't totally rolled out even after this year's Ignite.  @PlannerTeam, is it ever going to arrive or is it a unicorn?  I know people claim to have it but...

Copper Contributor

At least allow a path for those that really want the Planner App upgraded to trigger the update themselves.  Likely many tenants are getting updated even if they don't use or could care less about the new Tasks capability.  Very disappointing @PlannerTeam .  

Copper Contributor

Still just Planner for me on Sept 29.

Microsoft

Reposting from here: We are very close in completing the desktop rollout! This rollout took a lot longer than expected as we wanted to ensure we don't break the experience for the millions of people who are using the existing Planner app inside Teams. We understand the frustration and appreciate your patience!

Brass Contributor

Hi there - a few of our users had this update roll out on their system, and unfortunately it is wreaking a bit of havoc for then (eek).  

 

They have lost the ability to see the Board view in the planner app.

 

The can still see the Board view in each Teams planner tab, but the app that shows all tasks across all Teams in Board view is not selectable.  This feature has become quite critical to our users and would be fairly detrimental if we lost this function.  Any guidance would be appreciated!

Brass Contributor

@lhutton28 the board view should be only seen if you have boards shared with teams. right. this is not good! i wish to have the boardview of my personal planner boards again! hope this will come back. just a switch so you can choose which view you want would be great.

also the filters for the listview are not stored. every time you come back from chat are teams you have to change it it again :(


Copper Contributor

at my personal planner view is is not possible to sort by source... all other categories a sortable... 
the listview should be stored....
board view is missing...

Brass Contributor

there is definitly more to do for MS before it is usable.

now i use my MS ToDo again.... and Planner itself

 

Silver Contributor

@PlannerTeam, Tasks for Teams is FINALLY rolling out for our tenant. Not sure if all have gotten or not but it is coming out. I'd like to see My Day in Tasks for Teams like on the To Do app and if that arrives, I will be doing most of my work in Teams.

Brass Contributor

Not to be ungrateful, but why would you not let flagged emails be visible and maintainable from within Team/Planner?

 

Many people flag emails as to do items they show up with other task's in outlook and even in "MS To Do"... so why filter them out in Team Planner (soon to be tasks)?

 

You've just made it an un-unified view for many users, so we'll have to stick to having "MS To Do" open in the browser separate to Teams I guess :(

 

 

Copper Contributor

@PlannerTeam , This is not open to the public yet, correct? I don't have a way to roll it out in my Teams environment. How do we get access?

Copper Contributor

@PlannerTeamHave you already scheduled rolling out the Task-publishing function for Germany?

Copper Contributor

@PlannerTeam I have the early release but I do not see where I can add a task in a document using mentions.  Has this been rolled out yet?

Microsoft

@ergoflix task publishing has not rolled out yet and is still in private preview.

@BASICS_LLC you should be able to create a task using @mentions in the Comments section for Excel for the Web & Word for the Web. We're working on lighting up that feature on other endpoints.

Copper Contributor

@Shin-Yi Thank you very much.  I was able to create a task abs revived the email notification. However, it has not populated in the Planner. Isn’t it suppose to also to post to the Planner???

Microsoft

@BASICS_LLC We have plans to have the tasks sync to Planner but it is still currently work in progress and not on the public roadmap yet.

Brass Contributor

I guess even this page is lacking an update ...

Microsoft

@MichaelDano We strive for accuracy at the time of publishing but do not update the blogs after that. For updates, please check the Planner Blog homepage for the most recent news: Planner Blog - Microsoft Tech Community. Since the publishing of this blog post, we've had a few updates (in order of publishing):

Brass Contributor

Just got the Tasks by Planner update.

 

Still no To Do Items based off Emails in Outlook 365.

 

Is that going to ever happen.

 

We really want to see everything in one place in Teams,  a partial list doesn't cut it.

Iron Contributor

To-do is visually much worse experience than Planner or Tasks. I still can find those tools pretty much desintegrated. To-do app contains flagged emails, while the To-do section in Tasks / Teams does not! Why a To-do section in Teams tasks dos not contain a Container column? Why can't we filter using columns or at least one search field? Tasks on mobile have only list view? Why is that? Planner mobile app and its container / card (Kanban) view is so nice experience. I just hope, that Planner app is not going to be discontinued or replaced by the To-do nonsense, or I'll realyl give-up on the MS task management. Another one - why are not Project tasks being synced to Tasks? :) So many things to improve, go go go!

Copper Contributor

Consulta, como descargo las tareas creadas? antes tenia esta funcionalidad, que se podia descargar todas las tareas creadas en planner en un excel. Pero este año ya no encuentro esta opcion.

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