New and Improved: Board View in My Tasks and My Day
One of the most requested features from our customers, Board view in My Tasks, is now available in Planner. This feature is not only available in My Tasks but also in My Day, making it even easier for you to manage your tasks each day. The new view offers a more visual and organized way to manage your tasks, helping you stay on top of your priorities and improve your productivity. In this blog post, we'll dive into the benefits of Board view, show you how to use it, and share some real-life examples to help you get the most out of it. Whether you are managing personal tasks or working on a project, Board view aims to make your planning process smoother and more intuitive. What is Board view? Board view in My Tasks and My Day in Planner allows you to organize your tasks in a more visual and structured manner. Unlike Grid view, which presents tasks in a list format, Board view displays your tasks as cards grouped under columns on a board, providing a clear overview of your workflow at a glance. My Tasks in Planner presents all your private tasks, tasks assigned to you, and emails you’ve flagged in Outlook. Board view can help you stay on top of the tasks that matter, making it easy to focus on individual plans and your top priority tasks, as well as manage your workload to avoid taking on too much. In My Day, you can see your tasks due today and tasks you’ve added to your day from My Tasks. Using Board view helps you tackle those tasks in the way that works best for you, whether it’s focusing on one plan at a time, taking on your important tasks first, or staying on top of the tasks you’re already working on. Where to find it In My Tasks and My Day, you can easily switch between Grid view and Board view using the options in the header. How to use it When you are using Board view, you can change how the tasks are grouped into columns using the ‘Group by’ control. Board view enables you to group your tasks by: Plan: Including Private Tasks, Flagged emails, and each plan that includes tasks assigned to you. Progress: Not started, In progress, and Completed. Move tasks between columns to change their progress. Due Date: Late, Today, Tomorrow, This week, Next week, Future, and No date. Move tasks between columns to change their due date. Note: Due date of premium plan tasks cannot be changed from My Tasks and My Day. Priority: Urgent, Important, Medium, and Low. Move tasks between columns to change their priority. Note: Priority of premium plan tasks cannot be changed from My Tasks and My Day. Private tasks cannot be moved to ‘Urgent’. Top tips Use ‘Group by priority’ in My Tasks to stay on top of your most important tasks. Change priority by simply moving tasks between columns. Note: Priority of premium plan tasks cannot be changed from My Tasks and My Day. Private tasks cannot be moved to ‘Urgent’. Use ‘Group by Due date’ in My Tasks to view your most urgent tasks – quickly reschedule by moving tasks between columns. Note: Due date of premium plan tasks cannot be changed from My Tasks and My Day. Use ‘Group by plan’ in My Day to help you focus on one plan at a time. Use ‘Group by progress’ in My Day to limit how much you take on at a time – just move tasks between columns to mark them as in progress or complete. Try it out today Board view in My Tasks and My Day is available in the Planner app in Microsoft Teams and Planner for the web. Try it out today and let us know what you think! There are several ways to share your feedback with us—either via the Planner Feedback Portal or directly in the Planner app by selecting More (the questions mark) in the upper right corner, then Feedback. Resources Check out the Planner adoption page. Sign up to receive future communication about Planner. Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates. Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of Planner. Watch the recording from September's What’s New and What’s Coming Next + AMA about the new Planner. Visit the Planner help page to learn more about the capabilities in Planner.Enhancements to Planner in Microsoft Teams channels
By adding Planner as a Teams tab, you can now seamlessly create and add both basic and premium plans directly to your standard Teams channels. This includes the ability to start a plan as a tab from any of our out-of-the-box templates. This unified experience means everything you need is now in one place, making it simpler to collaborate on shared projects right within your conversations. Try it out To get started, follow these steps: Select any standard Teams channel. Select the Open Apps icon at the top right of the channel and search for Planner. Select Pin a tab for Planner. Select Save. You can now add an existing plan to the channel or create a new plan. Note: When you create a new plan, you have the option of starting from scratch or trying one of our templates. These templates range from event planning to building a CRM pipeline. A video demonstrating how to pin a tab for Planner and create a shared space for using the app in a Teams channel. What’s new to Planner in Teams channels One of the most significant advantages of adding Planner as a tab to a Teams channel is the ability to track your work, visualize progress towards goals, and monitor workloads—all within the context where your team works. Our most recent updates extend this benefit further by integrating both basic and premium plans directly into your Teams channels. By consolidating these into a single interface, you can now create and manage your plans without needing to switch between different apps or tabs. As your project requirements grow, you can also easily upgrade to a premium plan from a basic plan right within the Teams tab. This transition between plan types ensures that you can get access to the features you need as seamlessly as possible. This includes capabilities such as: Task dependencies: View and manage the relationship between interconnected tasks. Task history: Review all progress and changes made to tasks. Custom fields: Keep track of important information specific to your plans and workflows. Subtasks: Break down complex deliverables into smaller, more actionable tasks. People view: Visualize and manage team members and their workloads, assign tasks, track progress, and collaborate efficiently, ensuring everyone stays aligned and productive. Goals view: Set, track, and link project goals to tasks, ensuring alignment and visibility of progress towards key objectives. Copilot: Leverage AI to assist users in planning, managing tasks, and generating project insights, enhancing productivity and project visibility. Baselines: Capture and compare the state of a project at specific moments, helping to track progress and identify variances from the original plan. Portfolios: These plans can now be added to portfolios. Check out the full list of advanced capabilities with premium plans in Planner. If you don’t have a premium license, you can still try the feature by acquiring a free 30-day trial. Your team can continue to edit the same fields as before on the premium plan with their Microsoft 365 subscription. Share your feedback We’d love to get your input on this new experience! We're committed to continuously improving your experience with Planner, and your perspective is one of the channels that enables us to shape future investments. There are several ways to share your feedback with us—either via the Planner Feedback Portal or directly in the Planner app in Teams by selecting More (the questions mark) in the upper right corner, then Feedback. Resources Check out the Planner adoption page. Sign up to receive future communication about Planner. Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates. Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of Planner. Watch the recording from September's What’s New and What’s Coming Next + AMA about the new Planner. Visit the Planner help page to learn more about the capabilities in Planner.From Overwhelmed to Organized: How Subtasks Transform Project Management
Do you often find yourself lost in a maze of tasks within your projects? Are checklists not enough for you to keep your projects organized? With the new Microsoft Planner, you can bring order to chaos with subtasks, enabling you to manage complex plans and projects with ease.What's new in Microsoft Planner – December 2024
We’re excited to wrap up the year with some major updates, including the rollout of the new Planner for the web, portfolios, and Project Manager agent, to name a few. Customer feedback continues to inform improvements to our product, so be sure to check out the updates we have in the works at the end of this article! A look back at Planner’s Microsoft Ignite announcements We recently announced several new capabilities at the Microsoft Ignite conference to make it easier for you to coordinate your projects. Planner for the web: The new Planner for the web is now generally available, and it’s packed with features to help you manage all your work seamlessly across Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project, while leveraging the AI capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Planner (preview). To try out the new Planner for the web, you can go to planner.cloud.microsoft today. Portfolios: With portfolios, users with a Planner and Project Plan 3 or Planner and Project Plan 5 license can easily group related plans, track progress from a high-level view, and organize tasks visually with the Roadmap view. This means you can keep an eye on all your plans in one place and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Read more at: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/plannerblog/manage-multiple-plans-effortlessly-with-the-new-portfolios-feature-in-microsoft-/4342145?previewMessage=true Project Manager agent: With Project Manager agent, we’re bringing the power of AI directly into your plans. As your virtual project manager, Project Manager agent serves to streamline your workflow by handling tasks so you can focus on the big picture. Learn more about Project Manager Agent in our Ignite blog: Unleashing the power of agents in Microsoft Planner | Microsoft Community Hub App-powered tasks in public preview The app-powered tasks feature offers your organization more control over what users see when they open their tasks in the Planner app in Microsoft Teams. Instead of showing only the standard set of task fields, you can provide users with an experience tailored to the task at hand. That experience might be a workflow-specific set of fields or step-by-step guidance to walk the user through a workflow from beginning to end. To use this feature, your organization will integrate a Teams app with the task, which will enable app-powered task functionality. Learn more about the public preview of tailored task experiences with app-powered tasks or how to manage app-powered tasks in Planner for tailored task experiences. Project Operations and Project Online plans in the new Planner You can now view Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Project Online plans in the My Plans section of Planner. This update makes it easier than ever to keep track of all your work in one convenient place. Bugs fixed in the new Planner We wanted to take a moment to thank you for your customer feedback, and this month we wanted to highlight two notable bug fixes that you helped us identify. Now, labels associated with tasks get transferred over when you copy a plan. Furthermore, you should expect date formats to match your locale settings. Coming soon Based on your valuable feedback, we’re rolling out new features to make your planning experience even better. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming soon: Smart backgrounds: Get ready to customize your plans like never before! With smart backgrounds, you’ll be able to quickly spot the right plans. This feature was part of our legacy Planner experience, and we’re now enabling it for basic plans in the new Planner. Board view for My Tasks: Board view in My Tasks offers a visual representation of your tasks similar to a kanban board, making it easier to track progress and manage your workload. See all your tasks at a glance and move them between columns to update their progress. Board view will be available in addition to the existing grid view in My Tasks in early 2025. New Planner tab in Teams: Collaboration just got easier! With the new Planner tab, you can add any plan—basic or premium—directly to a Teams channel. This means you can work on shared projects seamlessly, right alongside your conversations. Removing the default filter: We understand that changes can be challenging, especially when they affect your preferred way of working. When we released the new Planner, we introduced a default filter to hide completed tasks as a temporary measure to help manage clutter in existing plans. However, this made it difficult for many users to find their completed tasks. With the recent update that saves your filter settings, you now have more control over your task visibility - you no longer need to change the filter to match your preference each time you visit a plan. We are now removing the default filter to give you full control over your plans. Additional column customization options: We’re currently rolling out the ability to reorder your Grid columns in the My Tasks and My Day views and are planning to launch the ability to hide columns after. Stay tuned for next month’s update on how you can use this feature to focus on the most important details of your plan. Share your feedback Tell us your thoughts on the new Planner for the web by using the Feedback button in the top right corner of the app. We also encourage you to share any features you would like to see in the app by adding it to our Planner Feedback Portal. Your feedback helps inform our feature updates, and we look forward to hearing from you as you try Planner’s new and existing capabilities! Resources Check out the Planner adoption page. Sign up to receive future communication about Planner. Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates for Planner. Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of the new Planner app in Microsoft Teams. Watch the recording from September's What’s New and What’s Coming Next + AMA about the new Planner. Visit the Planner help page to learn more about the capabilities in the new Planner.How Microsoft Planner Works
*** Update 11/5/2021 - we now have a public article of the various limits in Planner - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/planner/planner-limits *** Planner is pretty straightforward to use, so I guess you all know how it works – but the aim of this blog is to explain how some of the features are implemented and the parts of the Microsoft stack they use – which I hope will help you understand some of the scenarios where Planner might not work. This could be situations where you are in certain configurations where you might have changed some settings in Exchange Online or Office 365 not realizing that this would impact Planner. TL;DR - Comments are in the Group inbox, Attachments in the Group's SharePoint document library - and the Planner has it's own stuff stored in Azure. Read on to find out how Planner really works!Provide more tailored task experiences with app-powered tasks, now in public preview
Tasks can range from simple to complex, requiring varying levels of detail and guidance. For simple tasks, a clear title may be sufficient to convey the work needed, while complex tasks often require detailed instructions and may include dependencies between steps. These detailed instructions can be provided through task fields like notes, checklists, and attachments. However, offering guidance in a more immersive experience can significantly enhance the accuracy and efficiency of task completion. Now your organization can do just that, with app-powered tasks – in public preview in the Planner app in Microsoft Teams. App-powered tasks allow organizations to integrate tasks with Teams apps, providing more control over users’ experiences when they open a task. Instead of the standard task fields, you can use this feature to show a workflow-specific set of fields or step-by-step guidance to walk your employees through a workflow from beginning to end. Your employees can get all the info they need to complete their work, without ever having to leave Planner in Teams. We expect these tailored experiences to benefit workers of all types, including both knowledge workers and frontline workers. App-powered tasks are an extensibility feature that relies on programmatic creation and management of tasks and facilitates integration of a task with another Teams app. We're announcing public preview for this feature, starting today. It’s supported in Planner on Teams desktop and web as well as Planner in Teams mobile. It’s not supported in clients that show Planner tasks outside of Teams. To learn about the requirements for using app-powered tasks and how you can get started, see Manage app-powered tasks in the Planner app - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn. To learn about other new Planner experiences: Sign up to receive future communications about Planner. Review our other recent improvements such as What's New for Planner in October 2024 | Microsoft Community Hub and our frontline features from earlier this year New task features for organizations with frontline workers | Microsoft Community Hub Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates for Planner. Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of the new Planner app in Microsoft Teams. Watch the recording from September's What’s New and What’s Coming Next + AMA about the new Planner. Visit the Planner help page to learn more about the capabilities in the new Planner. Share your feedback You can share feedback through the Planner app in Teams or send us your feedback via the Planner Feedback Portal.
Orchestrating human-AI collaboration in Microsoft Planner
How Microsoft Planner is shaping the future of work management Today at Microsoft Ignite, we announced the next step for Microsoft Planner in the era of AI: Project Manager agent. Project Manager agent is an end-to-end work orchestration experience in Planner that leverages generative AI to streamline the journey from idea, to plan, to done. This is the first time the groundbreaking automation capabilities of Microsoft AutoGen will be available to customers at scale. The new Project Manager agent will be rolling out to public preview in the Planner app in Teams in the coming weeks. To explore these capabilities, customers are required to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and also need to ensure their current Microsoft 365 licensing allows them access to Microsoft Loop. Introducing Project Manager agent A team of agents working together Project Manager agent in Planner orchestrates multiple agents like a project manager. Working directly with task-specific execution agents, Project Manager agent assures tasks are completed efficiently. This GenAI-powered system uses task decomposition, planning, and a multi-agent orchestration to enhance team productivity. The system brings together specialized agents, each with their own expertise, to work collaboratively on various tasks with humans in the loop to review and guide outcomes. These agents communicate and cross-check each other's work, much like a team of experts refining each other's contributions. At Microsoft Research, pioneering work on AutoGen has demonstrated the benefits of multi-agent systems. Project Manager agent puts these ideas into practice, streamlining completion of complex tasks: Specialized Expertise: Each agent is a specialist, ensuring high-quality outputs tailored to specific tasks. Specialized agents make output more reliable and predictable while preserving the dynamic nature of agentic systems. Team Collaboration: Agents communicate and cross-check each other's work, much like a team of experts refining each other's contributions. Adversarial agents are specifically designed to challenge each other's work to produce more refined and detailed results. Problem Solving: AutoGen research demonstrates that multi-agent systems significantly enhance problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to tackle more complex tasks effectively. For instance, the integration of multiple agents improves performance in math problem-solving (MATH), real-world reasoning (AFLWorld), and sensitive coding tasks (OptiGuide). Contextual Awareness: Certain agents provide context from your team's existing content, integrating historical data and insights into the current plan. Research on AutoGen shows that multi-agent systems facilitate improved contextual awareness and understanding by integrating multiple retrieval mechanisms, enabling a more interactive and dynamic approach to information retrieval. While in preview, Project Manager agent has access to a small set of "built-in agents" that are tuned to complete common information work tasks. Project Manager agent is scalable, and we are excited to expand the set of available agents and capabilities over time. Human-AI collaboration Whether asking Copilot a simple question or automating a complex workflow, teams in every industry are accelerating work with Generative AI. Collaboration is already a pain-point for many teams and the introduction of AI into workflows can further confound the problem. We believe that Planner’s familiar and accessible collaborative work management concepts and tools can effectively streamline human AI collaboration. Project Manager agent leverages Planner to plan, execute, and iterate agentically in an environment where the human team maintains control. Work Breakdown – When presented with a complex goal or task, Project Manager agent identifies a set of steps to achieve it. This structured approach not only breaks tasks into manageable pieces but also distinguishes work suitable for autonomous agents from higher-value or complex tasks requiring human input. Under the hood, Project Manager agent will be collaborating with multiple agents to deliver the desired outcomes. Complex task execution requires creating a plan, intelligently sequencing actions and dependencies, and maintaining a memory system to store the status of individual steps and their outcomes. Assign to Agent – The user is always in control of exactly what and how much work is assigned to Agents. Project Manager agent is flexible and can handle single tasks or orchestrate longer flows. At any time, team members can pause agent work and make manual adjustments as needed. Human in The Loop – During task execution, Project Manager agent can identify situations where more information or context is required from the team. In such situations, Project Manager agent will compile a list of questions that, when answered, will unblock the Agents working on the task. If the system lacks the tools to complete a task altogether, Project Manager agent can provide advice and assistance to the team member working on the task. Integrating Feedback – Project Manager agent won’t always complete tasks perfectly on the first attempt. Once initial agent work is complete, the team can review the task and leave comments on the content. When the review is complete, Project Manager agent will orchestrate iteration on the content, incorporating the feedback. Safety and privacy Generative AI systems have unprecedented capabilities, which introduces novel risks into our products and services. The Planner team is committed to proactive and continuous mitigation of these risks. We employ a handful of key strategies to ensure that we responsibly deploy generative AI: Impact Assessment: We audit new generative AI products in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI standard, identifying harms the system could potentially cause. Redteaming: We thoroughly evaluate new products for risks identified in the impact assessment throughout the development process. Ahead of release, our redteaming results are reviewed by a joint Microsoft-OpenAI Deployment Safety Board, as outlined in Microsoft’s AI Safety Policies. Harm Mitigation: Project Manager agent has multiple redundant checks to prevent harmful content, including harm-specific classifiers and a dedicated responsible AI agent. Additionally, your data remains private when using Project Manager agent. Customer data is governed by the commitments we make in the Microsoft’s Data Protection Addendum, Microsoft’s Product Terms, and the Microsoft Privacy Statement. The future of work management As AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more advanced features and capabilities to be integrated into Planner. The vision is to create a truly intelligent work management platform that not only supports project managers but also empowers teams to achieve their best work. The orchestration of human-AI collaboration with AutoGen in Planner represents a significant leap forward in the field of work management. Project Manager agent is a testament to the potential of AI to transform the way we work, making it more efficient, productive, and collaborative. As we look to the future, we are excited about the possibilities that AI holds for work management and beyond.
