Planner and Yammer integration for Task Comments (Conversations)

[Jacques van der Hoven]

I'm not a great fan of using Outlook as a place to store running conversations/posts regarding tasks in Planner. It may work for some, but it just feels like we're using Outlook for something that it's not intended for.  As far as I can see the tasks themselves, even when assigned to you, don't appear in your Outlook tasks list so why would conversations be done there (apart from the underlying technology i.e. Exchange groups, etc.)

If Yammer offered one additional feature, spaces (as they're called here in the tech community), then we could see great integration between Planner and Yammer where the following could happen: 

1. When you create a plan, automatically create a related group in Yammer
2. Assume that buckets would synchronize as Spaces in Yammer
3. Assume that tasks would synchronize as Conversations in Yammer
4. As tasks are created and assigned to team members, or if members are explicitly added to the plan, add those users to the Yammer group
5. When a task is viewed/edited in Planner the conversation is extracted from Yammer

There is obviously a lot more thought that would need to go into the requirements and technical aspects for such a move, but I think it would result in much better usage out of the two platforms and a far better collaboration experience. 

Anyone else have this thought? 

[#2]

Currently there is no connection between tasks generated by Planner and Outlook Tasks...Task generated by Planner ar Tasks Teams while Outlook Tasks are personal tasks...by the way, Microsoft is not currently providing any integration in this area and what you can expect is that third parties create (there are some already) Outlook Add-ins that allow you to work with Planner from Outlook. In regards of Planner and Yammer integration, this is something is not going to happen directly...what you will see is that when you create a Yammer Group, an Office 365 Group would be created behind the scenes so you will have the opportuity to have a plan for your Yammer Group. This is something Microsoft is currently working on and it will come in the coming months

[#3]

So creating a Yammer group is going to create an O365 group in the background... how would you then be expected to associate a new Planner plan with this group? 

I still think that Outlook is the wrong tool to manage Planner conversations and that Yammer is far better suited to the task and the benefits of direct integration would be more valuable. Maybe I just can't see how the work that Microsoft is currently doing is going to work in practice. 

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Creating the Yammer group would create the Plan. And the Group. And a team site. See this post for more detail.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Yammer/Announcement-Yammer-strengthens-team-collaboration-thr...

I'd also suggest watching this video from Ignite, it filled in a number of gaps for me.

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/1283

There's a roadmap they have to complete so this is not all available today but there is a path to having all these elements interconnected with Yammer as the discussion tool.