I set up my family with microsoft 365. I wanted to be able to play with the features a bit and get used to them without deadlines etc. I played with free FLOW addons.
When working with FLOW, you first need to design an ALGORITHM for your particular use. So many of you want to create a kanban style board that you can send an email to that will update the information on the board. I'm afraid that's not going to be an easy one to build.
The advantage of a service like trello is that they run in an apache based webserver with an automated attendant process. Everything is just a message that gets handled based on the message type, which directs the process to handle each piece of information accordingly. Planner does not run the same exact way. In fact, it only has one full item identification, the task. Each task has features associated with it, but all messages are a task, handled as a glob of data for a database running in the background. While it was built to be a starting point for the feature set, it has remained at that level. Microsoft is targeting a wider array of small to medium sized organizations with that, it isn't a fault or a failure, but much of the functions were already covered by trello or others, and microsoft didn't want to try and compete with an already existing market that would require much more development time and effort, which would push the pricing up.
I agree that tasking and other capabilities are important and even integral for every business. I just don't think they will be rolling out any extended features for this app. It was meant to get people into the idea of the function, and to drive developers to integrate with it, while providing basic and simplified functions for everybody that wouldn't require a lot of maintenance.
For those of you still looking for a solution, I may have some notes. I'm going to play with FLOW and see what I can find for Planner, but it will take some time for me to lay out all the data objects and how to move them around.
From what I can tell, you want to automate a mailbox with its own planner, which I concede is not easy, but should be simple enough. You'd have two avenues to follow:
1. Create a form that gets used by outlook, with its own button initiator that creates the "task" and sends it to the board--which is a bit superfluous as it would require access levels you don't want to give out.
2. Create one or several FLOW automated applications that will take an email, create a data object from that email with the pertinent information and move any items in attachments to their necessary place where they can be properly accessed without being "accidentally" deleted. You would then have to utilize the data you just built as a data object (sharepoint lists are great for this because the data can be read as numbers, or text or whatever you need, right from the list and it is handled on the fly by the FLOW) and build a task from that, with a link to any attachments. It would be prudent to set a value as a flag, something like the "task delegate" field would do. Utilizing this Task Delegate info, any task that has a person attached other than the mailbox itself would be locked for editing, and only the "Mailbox Owner" or person designated by access rights would be able to alter the task. Then the flow ends and from then on, the task is only editable from the planner by the person responsible for maintaining the board. If you have no person, you could make an almost zerox copy of the FLOW, but you can make an adjustment that would search for a specific word in the first letters of the subject of the email; if you add a hashtag and an autonumber to the name of the task in the original flow, you can use this to find and update the information. If your sharepoint list is in order, you won't have any problem in the second flow, finding and updating the rows of the list, then using those to find and update the task.
If you don't restrict the access to the mailbox or planner, then you could end up with people fighting over who does what, and when bonuses depend on tasks completed or tickets or leads, it can lead to some mix up, or even force out some of your talent. Enter Sharepoint. You can restrict the mailbox and the planner but that may restrict functions you need unrestricted. It defeats the purpose. Sharepoint can have a value for how many updates there have been, and a list of the persons who take the task, usually in the order in which they apply for it. This leads to the third FLOW, which checks the planner for changes, and updates sharepoint only. The other two don't have to fill this value. When there is a change made, the changes Flow will make the adjustment. Here's the key, run the first flow, check for the hashtag and only process the ones without, then run the second flow, check for the hashtag and run on those that have it, and at the end of the second flow, run the changes flow, which updates sharepoint values for all of the changed tasks, using the flag on the task. If you create the sharepoint list with the first flow (if it doesn't exist) before you start testing the received items, you can run the second and third without the test for it. IF you delete the list, you can start fresh later. Every so often it might be prudent to output this list to an excel file, and then start over. While processing the items, don't forget to move the mail either to a folder outside of the inbox or archive it somehow. You don't want others with access to the mailbox and planner to delete or otherwise foul up the data, so you might create a mailbox that just holds these, and forward the message during the first and second flow, then delete it. This will create a searchable, locked down archive of the emails with which you can quickly reconstitute the planner, even if you don't get all the numbers on how many updates there are, you will get the ending task set. If you build a flow that uses your sharepoint list, you can subtract one from the updates value, and then set your flow to run normally on the group mailbox (not the archive).
That should do. Have this run every 5-10 minutes. You should be gold. Larger organizations, maybe push to 15-30 minutes. If you need this to run more immediately, get power apps for desktop and run this in constant loop fashion on a single machine, in one flow that tests the mailbox for changes and for each change runs an instance of the flow for only those changes. You can run this every minute or so, and it should appear almost instantaneous. Put it on a higher core count processor with plenty of ram.
