Managing task capabilities across Microsoft 365

[MelissaBathum]

Find out how task management across Microsoft 365 helps you find your tasks where you need them, regardless of where you captured them. In this session, we’ll share the latest integrations of tasks from Teams, Outlook, To Do, Planner, Office documents, SharePoint and more.

[Benoit Fournier]

@MelissaBathum,

Why don't we see Project for the Web in that ecosystem? It looks like an evolution to Planner; has some overlap with Planner but lives in a completly different storage than Planner. 

Our users need a little more than what Planner currently offer and those features are in P4W. But then, P4W doesn't integrate with Office / Outlook / To-Do.

Thanks.

[timdejonq]

Hi @MelissaBathum and Holly, you mentioned that Cortona becomes available for M365 Enterprise users, does that include Business Standard licenses? And you mentioned that it becomes available in English. Our company is in the Netherlands, and i've set up my apps and OS language in English. Will that make it work for us?

Thanks!

https://youtu.be/03gWoSx791c?t=505

[Malavika Rewari]

@timdejonq Briefing email from Cortana is starting to roll out for Exchange Online users with English mailboxes. For more on Cortana, visit https://aka.ms/cortanaupdatesignite2020

[timdejonq]

Thanks @Malavika Rewari !

[Gunter Danzeisen]

@MelissaBathum This looks very promissing. However, until the notification issue around comments in Planner tasks is fixed (only people the comment on the task get a notification), our users refuse to use planner.

[mjjohnst_gp]

@Gunter Danzeisen @MelissaBathum - this has been a headache for us as well - and I believe it was expected to be resolved via @mentions at some point (see UserVoice idea below) - but we're still waiting for that functionality to materialize.

I'm glad to see continued innovation for tasks across 365, but it would still be helpful to see this addressed as well.

https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/11551248-ab...

[TMunib]

@MelissaBathum Hopeful to see the Azure icon on the ecosystem slide! Would be awesome to see Azure DevOps integration with To Do/Tasks in Teams as we use Azure Boards for our kanban needs instead of Planner.

[FabienChiron]

+1, unique task concept throught MS ecosystem (project, Planner, ToDo...) would be great.

To be able to see directly daily tasks including project or planner. To be able to see resources tasks through all the tools ecosystem

[chrisschlekewy]

@Benoit Fournier 

I completely agree in regards to seeing a need for P4TW and Planner integration. I understand that most of the same features that are in Planner are in P4TW today but integrating the two would help streamline end user's task management by being able to see all of their tasks together in one place, i.e., Outlook, To Do, Tasks in Teams, etc., Besides, why have two of the same? Maybe the Project Plan 1 license requirement is the roadblock. 

And although the ability to see P4TW tasks lives only in P4TW, you can now add a P4TW project to Teams and also notify a Team member via Outlook when they have been assigned a task with a Flow through Power Automate. 

[RobertMcKay]

Glad to see OneNote mentioned here. While I don't love OneNote myself, my school and students can't be disentangled from it and integrating it into more modern task workflows would be great. Currently OneNote is like this giant paper notebook where things get lost. If those stupid checkboxes and flags were turned into clean, modern tasks that could be assigned in Planner or put into To-Do seamlessly, that would be great.

Even better, for educators: make tasks in Class Notebook pages automatically assign to each student when a page is pushed out. Here's how I would envision that working:

• I should be able to make a homework checklist once in my teacher page, then
• distribute that page to students via Class Notebook or Teams Assingments.
• I should then automatically (or one-time opt-in/opt-out) get each task in that checklist copied into a Planner Board category with the same title as the OneNote page,
  • with sub-tasks indented on OneNote also created as checklist items within the main task.
• I should then get notified in Teams (or however I tell the system to notify me) whenever a student checks off a task in any app--or doesn't check it off.
• The ultimate would be if Viva AI could catch students not checking off tasks, remind them, remind me to remind them, etc. It would also be great if Class Notebook pages that are assigned or pushed out to students triggered Viva reminders for students and Teams Insights for teachers if the student did not do any work on them by a certain time before the due date.

On a related, er, note: the way I use OneNote Class Notebook is mostly through the Teams Assignments app. Here too I think there is room for improvement in Planner-like project-management functionality specifically for educational end users. To wit: many school assignments, especially where I teach using a lot of project-based learning, has many steps to check off within the assignment. So an even more pie-in-the-sky way to solve students' app-fatigue pain point would be as follows:

• When a Teams assignment is created, there would be the option of creating tasks (and sub-task checklists) within the assignment. Each student would get their own version of the checklist assigned in Planner, under a bucket with the same title as the assignment (there could even be an option to have an assignment have its own plan, for more complex projects that might have multiple buckets). I've done this manually but it's a pain to get students using it: it adds to app fatigue if it's one more place they have to go and check.
• Both student and teacher could add and modify assignment tasks, and some of this would be automated: for instance, a teacher comment on a doc attached to the assignment would automatically be assigned to the student as a checklist item within a task called "Address feedback on [doc title]."
• In the assignment, the student would see a progress bar correlated with the percentage of assignment tasks completed (even cooler would be if this responded to any estimated completion times on the tasks, so bigger tasks would move the completion bar more).
• When all tasks were checked off, the student would be prompted to turn in the assignment. Attempting to turn it in without checking off all tasks would prompt an "are you sure?" or "forget something?" type of message.
• On the teacher end, Teams should have a progress dashboard for a given assignment (perhaps within Planner, just filtered for that assignment). It would also be great to be able to see a student view with their progress on all assignments. The ability to remind with a quick personal note, in a way that's smoothly attached to the task/assignment, would be great here too.
• And of course wherever the student checked off an assignment task (Planner, Teams, To-Do, OneNote, Word, etc) it would sync back to that assignment's Planner entry.

[Ignacio_Prati_Adecco]

Hi! I would like to know if Phase 2 is ready. I would like to be able to create tasks from Office Web, and be able to see these new tasks in Planner. Is this posisble? Considering that the original announcement is from 2 years ago, I would expect it to be there. But from my tests, I was not able to produce this scenario. Can you help?