Microsoft has begun rolling out the new Tasks app in Microsoft Teams, bringing together both Microsoft Planner and Microsoft To Do within its popular workplace collaboration platform.
Microsoft announced in April that it would rename its Planner application to Tasks in an effort to provide a single, unified application for planning and managing both team plans and individual tasks within Teams. It is part of a broader effort by the company called Tasks in Microsoft 356, which aims to consolidate and unify the scheduling of tasks in Computers, Outlook, Scheduler, Microsoft To Do and Office. Outlook already syncs all tasks with To Do, and Office will soon support ‘@’ mentions task assignments in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Microsoft is now in the process of implementing Desktop Tasks for a small group of users, which will continue through September. The Tasks mobile app won’t be available until the desktop launch completes, Microsoft said.
SEE: Office 365: A Guide for Technology and Business Leaders (Free PDF) (TechRepublic)
“Teamwork is the important first step in building a more connected task management experience in the Microsoft 365 app,” the company said in a blog post announcing the public launch.
“We are enabling Team Tasks for clients little by little, and they will see it in the coming weeks.”
Microsoft has made a number of additions to the Tasks app since it announced it in April 2019.
This includes task posting, which enables business leadership teams to create task lists and assign them to teams at different locations in an organization. As an example, national retailers can create tasks assigned to individual store locations and then follow the progress of assigned tasks.
Store managers can also assign tasks to individual employees, who can then view a prioritized list of those tasks on their personal or company-issued mobile device.
Another addition is the new List view for the Tasks app, which allows users to edit multiple tasks at once instead of having to edit each task individually. The list view is available in the desktop and web versions of the Tasks application.
Other highlights of teamwork include:
- Dashboard views, charts, and Planner programming, plus the new list view.
- IT management controls to enable or disable Tasks on computers for your entire organization or specific users; set a policy to automatically pin the Tasks app to the Teams siderail; and hide my to-do lists from users.
- Graph API and Power Automate integrations for Pending Tasks and Scheduler to show the tasks created in other applications in Tasks in teams.
