Planner capabilities in SharePoint Online Sites

Working with O365 implies that everyday you face new integrations and new features that have been deployed to your tenant. In this case it is Planner, which allows to integrate into SharePoint online, or event to create plans directly from SharePoint Online Site.

Adding a plan

This button in the homepage of SharePoint Site, allows to add a Planner plan.

The good part of it, it shows a window to create the plan or event to select an existing plan. In my case the SharePoint Site it is a Team group, so it makes completely sense

Once you have linked the plan to SharePoint Online Site, it creates a shorcut into the navigation and you are able to show the main board and the charts of the projects. I found it beatiful since it is great to have this integration without difficulty.

take into account that this integration is more or less the same as editing the main page and adding the planner web part to it:

But in this case, the integration being a new link I found it muche better 🙂

This is all, till next time!

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Developer preview in Teams and Planner integration

After seeing that MS is launching new features to Microsoft Teams via developer Preview, I decided to enable it and try it. But for my surprise, this option was not enabled in my tenant, so I struggled how to activate it.

First I navigate to: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/setup#3-enable-sideloading-of-apps-for-microsoft-teams where is it possible to find the instructions of how to activate. In my case the steps to follow where pretty simple:

• Go to the admin center
• Settings, select Services & add-ins or Apps
• From the list of services and add-ins, or apps, select Microsoft Teams.
• On the Microsoft Teams settings screen, switch both Allow external apps in Microsoft Teams and Allow sideloading of external apps to On, and then select Save.

After doing that, I went to https://teams.microsoft.com and under my profile I was able to select the Developer Preview:

Accept the dialog:

And start with the new available features in this mode. One of these new available features is Planner, well done Microsoft 🙂

Is great to see how Microsoft is improving the collaboration in Teams, and in this case bringing Planner to the app, instead of having to add the plan as a tab.

With this implementation, we can see all our assigned tasks in Planner, in addition to that able to edit the tasks, assign tasks to other users. It’s like accessing to Planner, but integrated into Teams.

We have different views, where we can group by tasks or even by plan, is important to show all our assigned tasks.

To close this post, I have to add that this new feature it is only available via web, I expect that this implementation will be also added soon to Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile app.

16/11/2017 Edit: Once again Juan Carlos Gonzalez is right 🙂 ,  developer view is it already available in desktop app, so is it possible to take advantage from the Planner integration. Thanks again!

Planner, Project, task list… which tool should I use?

Most of my customers are confused with the introduction of Planner in Office 365 and its use to track activities or projects inside the company.

The main idea of this post is to resume which option is best to tackle activities in projects and tasks. So, what we have? What we should choose in each case?

• Microsoft Project: it is used in Project management, a tool that allows to have in one site all the projects, and at the same time have a lot of tools to integrate the projects and manage them. The main drawback that it very hard to implement inside a company.
• Microsoft Planner: it is used to manage little projects or to manage activities in workgroups. The great advantage of this tool is that requires a low effort to implement it.
• SharePoint Task list: it’s a kind a task management, in this case allows to manage task individually.

So now, we’re going to take a deeper look to these options:

Product	Advantages	Drawbacks
Microsoft Project	Detail of resources, calendars and assignations Management of hours Gantt diagram Report diagram Possibility to integrate with PowerBI Integrate with SharePoint Risk Management	Knowledge of management High license cost It is necessary to associate a mail to the sites
Microsoft Planner	Very easy for the user Centralize projects in one site Graphics to report activities and state of the projects Mailbox for each project It is included in Office 365 license	Only is it possible to relate tasks by 3rd party solutions Gantt diagram with 3rd party solutions
SharePoint Task List	Possibility to create and assign task to users Possibility to relate tasks Send mails when activities are completed or assigned See how tasks are delayed or personalized views by user It is possible to synchronize it with Project	It is necessary to create a list for each Project Does not exist a site where is it possible to see all the tasks lists No possibility to see a graphic

That’s all, till next time!

New Flow templates for Planner

Do you need to automate your tasks into Planner and don’t know how to do it? Today, is your lucky day, recently, Microsoft Flow is updating their flow templates to cover migration tasks to Planner and able to manage them from there.

So, the new available templates are the following:

Create planner tasks for flagged emails in Office 365: with this flow, will be possible to create tasks in Planner from all the Outlook mails that have been flagged in our inbox. Every flagged mail, will be created and assigned to us. Great start 🙂

On new SharePoint items create Planner task and assign to creator: Most of my customers demand this, they have a task list in SharePoint, and they want a solution to automate this “migration” to Planner. So, when new items are added to the SharePoint task list, new item will be created in Planner and assigned to the person who created the task.

And finally, an option to migrate from the competitor Trello to Microsoft Planner: will be possible to get a task created in Microsoft Planner for each card added to a list in Trello.

I hope that Microsoft will continue updating those kinds of templates to offer new features and new possibilities.

till next time!