Integration of tasks, planner and pending tasks
Teams has supported Planner as a channel tab and app since 2018. It is a popular integration used by many Office 365 tenants to support the coordination of team activities. Initially, a team could only support one plan, and the need to support one plan per channel accelerated progress toward supporting multiple plans in 2019. Originally announced at the Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft gave the integration a complete makeover. and new team tasks The app is now generally available. As usual, it will take time before Team Tasks is available to all tenants.
Within Teams, the new app is still called Planner because it replaces the old Planner app, but the name will change. Microsoft says to call Planner application “alleviate confusion among customers who lose our communications about this version“And they plan to move to a simpler Tasks name later in the year. I think they should have bitten the bullet and gone to Tasks now, but I guess I’m not a salesperson.
Taking a common view of tasks
The big difference is that Team Tasks includes personal and team tasks, while Planner only works with team tasks. The Microsoft 365 substrate views tasks as a common object, with the idea that task objects can appear in different ways using different applications. At the application level, personal tasks are generated by Outlook and To Do, while team tasks are generated by Planner. Unifying the types of objects extracted and managed by different applications is a key role of the substrate. Tasks are a particularly good example, but the same unified approach to objects is seen in people, contacts, and even messages and documents.
Tasks in Teams offers a unique integrated view of the things you are working on or need to do, whether you have noticed something like a personal item or have been assigned a task in a team. Figure 1 shows how Teams shows the tasks, separated into Personal lists (personal tasks that you create or those assigned to you) and Equipment lists, shared tasks managed on plans associated with teams.
Some of the categories (like Chores) present objects of only one type. Others, like ImportantCreate a unified view that encompasses personal and team tasks with the same feature. In this case, personal and team tasks marked as important.
Linking to do and planner
Providing a single view of personal and work tasks is good, but Teams isn’t the first Office 365 app to offer such capability. To Do has had this ability for some time. If you choose to connect Planner tasks with Pending Tasks, you can work with Planner data through Pending Tasks (Figure 2 shows the settings in the browser application). The connection can also be created in the To Do mobile app. The connection does not synchronize Planner data with Pending Tasks. Instead, the tasks assigned to the user are obtained from the Planner data when the view is accessed. Again, active and completed tasks are available.
Working with tasks in teams
When the Team Tasks app starts, it loads personal and work tasks. User-created personal tasks come from the Tasks folder in your Exchange Online mailbox. In general, Outlook and To-Do items are stored in the Tasks folder, while items in the To-do lists are stored in To-Do subfolders. Planner data is obtained from plans of which the user is a member using the Planner Graph API. All plans belong to a Microsoft 365 group, but not all Microsoft 365 groups are enabled for the team. As expected, Teams only gets tasks from plans that belong to team-enabled groups.
After the application loads the data, the tasks can be divided and diced according to the view selected by the user. For example, you can display the items assigned to you in all plans (complete or active), focus on tasks in a specific plan, or use the Planned View to see all tasks (personal and work) that have an assigned due date.
Figure 3 shows the tasks in a plan called Office 365 Message Center Notifications, which are used as a synchronization goal for Planner integration with Message Center. The tasks created in this plan are notifications about changes and updates to Office 365. Many organizations use the integration to monitor the changes published by Microsoft and assign the responsibility of acting within their tenant to the designated people.
Because the Tasks app combines personal and work items, the default view is a list. List view includes the ability to select and apply actions to multiple tasks, something not possible in Planner’s browser interface. This makes it easy to close a set of open tasks, update tasks with a new date, or reassign tasks to a new person who joins a team. I couldn’t find how to remove people from multiple tasks, which you might want to do after reassigning tasks, but this is a minor complaint.
Filters and Views
If you select a specific plan, you can use the views and filters supported by Planner to group and display tasks by dashboards, charts, and schedule (Figure 4) or to focus on the tasks that interest you. No functionality is lost – everything you can do in the Planner browser app can be done through Teams.
Updating tasks in teams
The same access is available for tasks in the plan as through Planner or if the plan is available in a channel tab. Figure 5 shows the details of a task being edited to assign it to someone, move it to a new repository, set its priority and due date, and tag it with one of the six available tags as visual bookmarks. You can add attachments, checklist items, change the description and title, etc.
Editing or adding a personal task is simpler because there are fewer properties available (Figure 6). Other than that, the experience is very similar, which is the main point: users should see as little difference as possible between managing personal and work items. For some, the blurring of the lines between personal and work commitments will be a disaster. For others, it will offer a single, high-value, integrated view of what to manage at home and at work.
Changes made through the app appear in the underlying apps after a short delay to allow updates to the client cache. In practice, this does not cause problems. For example, if you just created a personal task in Teams, you probably won’t rush into Outlook to verify that the task appears there (it will).
Planner Channel Tab
The ability to connect an individual plan to a channel tab remains. This facility is used to allow quick access to tasks for a specific plan associated with a channel, and is especially useful when people need to focus on a set of tasks for a specific project. Figure 7 shows an example. In this case, the plan contains the tasks associated with producing a book, including writing, publishing, and generating books. Only the tasks in the plan are displayed and the user experience of creating and editing tasks is the same as through the Tasks application. And of course the tasks created in this plan can be accessed in the Tasks app.
Unification of tasks
The previous implementation of Planner in teams was useful. The new implementation brings personal and work tasks together in a way that makes the Team Tasks app even more productive. From a strategic perspective, the new application reflects the importance of the Microsoft 365 substrate and how it allows data originally designed to be created and managed across multiple applications to be merged into a unified view. This underscores the increasing integration into Microsoft 365, which has to be a good thing.
