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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
Over 20 years ago we implemented Outlook across our entire enterprise from Lotus Notes, the competitor at that time. The tasks with delegation feature along with automatic task progress updates made an impressive impact and reduced internal email significantly. Like -30%.
Unfortunately it appears things have gotten messy at MS and the products, in particular the cloud version are so dumbed down they often are useless. Today we are facing exactly the same dilemma as you are, internally and as advisor to our clients. Happy to share our current approach in the hope it may help you as well as highlight to the MS moderators the issues we face when seemingly geeks instead of business experts set the specifications and interoperability products.
Excuse the short bullet point style...
1. Personal "to do or tasks" - use whatever tool you are used to, and make sure it syncs with your phone and categories and flags are included. We support a variety of add-on apps that sync between platforms, apps and devices.
2. Team based tasks - we moved to Outlook and Teams new "To do" as this is the future. Indeed, like many we suffer from the extreme dumbed-down functionality and the inherent lack of industry best practices missing in the product. Pity no no-one at MS actually asks us. Ahem, sorry to have to say so.
To mitigate some of these shortcomings we have integrated Planner and in particular a KanBan view for each internal function, (Finance, IT, Marketing, sales, etc) and major internal projects. This provides team task visibility located directly in a Team chat level and is focused on their day-to-day.
Our current work-in-progress is to link this with calendars, individual and shared team calendar so that people can perform their basic time management and planning. Ideally they should be able to click on selected calendars to display meaningful overlays. Like company events and major business cycles, like invoicing, budgeting, appraisals etc.. We haven't yet figured out how best to link to do with blocking time in calendar(s) and have given our champions the task of trying out different possibilities to see which works out best. Happy to share progress.
Still a major adoption obstacle is when the cloud or Mac version lags behind, In particular Excel cloud does not run essential macros or VB routines and MS is increasingly making "open in APP" user unfriendly. Custom fields in contacts that are essential for any organization are also not supported on the cloud and mobile platforms with no visibility if ever this will be. We currently use 3rd party add-ons as a messy work-around. Custom contact fields is such a basic requirement for any business it is astonishing to understand the lack of support. Ho-hum.
Hope this helps, thumbs up or contact me if you'd like to hear on our progress...
Unfortunately it appears things have gotten messy at MS and the products, in particular the cloud version are so dumbed down they often are useless. Today we are facing exactly the same dilemma as you are, internally and as advisor to our clients. Happy to share our current approach in the hope it may help you as well as highlight to the MS moderators the issues we face when seemingly geeks instead of business experts set the specifications and interoperability products.
Excuse the short bullet point style...
1. Personal "to do or tasks" - use whatever tool you are used to, and make sure it syncs with your phone and categories and flags are included. We support a variety of add-on apps that sync between platforms, apps and devices.
2. Team based tasks - we moved to Outlook and Teams new "To do" as this is the future. Indeed, like many we suffer from the extreme dumbed-down functionality and the inherent lack of industry best practices missing in the product. Pity no no-one at MS actually asks us. Ahem, sorry to have to say so.
To mitigate some of these shortcomings we have integrated Planner and in particular a KanBan view for each internal function, (Finance, IT, Marketing, sales, etc) and major internal projects. This provides team task visibility located directly in a Team chat level and is focused on their day-to-day.
Our current work-in-progress is to link this with calendars, individual and shared team calendar so that people can perform their basic time management and planning. Ideally they should be able to click on selected calendars to display meaningful overlays. Like company events and major business cycles, like invoicing, budgeting, appraisals etc.. We haven't yet figured out how best to link to do with blocking time in calendar(s) and have given our champions the task of trying out different possibilities to see which works out best. Happy to share progress.
Still a major adoption obstacle is when the cloud or Mac version lags behind, In particular Excel cloud does not run essential macros or VB routines and MS is increasingly making "open in APP" user unfriendly. Custom fields in contacts that are essential for any organization are also not supported on the cloud and mobile platforms with no visibility if ever this will be. We currently use 3rd party add-ons as a messy work-around. Custom contact fields is such a basic requirement for any business it is astonishing to understand the lack of support. Ho-hum.
Hope this helps, thumbs up or contact me if you'd like to hear on our progress...
I just started using the new Outlook and my fears have come true, they have taken out Native tasks from Outlook and just have web-based to-do tasks. Sadly now I have to be connected to the internet to use my task. Please Microsoft do not lose native tasks they are the backbone of the email client. The todo applies so useless and clumsy to use it as a very poor substitute.
