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Microsoft To Do vs Outlook Tasks
Is Microsoft To Do replacing Outlook Tasks? Or how do they work together? Is Outlook Tasks being retired? I'm a Technology Adoption Analyst who co-leads our Champions program and we want to make sure...
WillDeHaan hey, good questions
Why are there 2 places for To Do tasks?
Outlook tasks have been around for a long time and there would be users who still use it and the features are slightly different.
Is there a best practice or best overall tool to use for this? Is To Do a better tool to push to our end users since it integrates with Planner and Teams and Outlook?
I'd be promoting To Do for individuals.
- It has its own handy features (lists, grouped lists, smart lists, list sharing, tags, recognised dates, My Day etc)
- It's integrated with Microsoft Teams
- It surfaces your Planner items
- It surfaces flagged emails
- It has a dedicated app with mobile widgets
I've used Outlook from on-premise Exchange in the earliest forms in the early 2000's, to O365 currently and all along that use, Tasks have been an integral and foundational reason I still use MS Office. The ToDo option, for those that use Tasks is simply a waste of time. I doesn't come close to the capability of Tasks in terms of the settings, the reminders, the drag/drop capacity for an email, calendar, file attachments & flags/categories and such to become a task. Quite literally, Tasks is it's own wonderful database and a great resource to have onhand. It is a project management tool, a Wiki (advanced search is amazing), and with the ability to send/assign to others on our teams Word/Excel docs which we use in Teams all the time. ToDo is similar to the "new Outlook" which is woefully underpowered compared to the full version. This, I saw even on my new MacookPro running Office, where the "new" version was the 1st to load but I quickly switched to the full. There, Mac still doesn't have ALL the tools of the Windows version of full Outlook, but it's close. It's a shame that MS would even consider deprecating Tasks - when so many look alike apps exist, Tasks is still better than most (MOnday.com, Trello, OneNote/Evernote (which I use for personal projects), and so on and so forth. To put it bluntly, the reason we continue to use MS Office 365 is Tasks, and then Email/Outlook - and if Tasks go away it goes without saying we won't stay with Office365
