Publishing Planner Tasks to To-Do

Synchronize My Tasks from Planner to To-Do

Promised for Q2 CY19 in Office 365 Roadmap item 48624, the integration between Planner and To-Do is now rolling out (the option showed up in version 1.56.3 for the browser interface). The integration promises users can view, edit, and complete Planner tasks from To-Do, and that’s exactly what happens.

To enable To-Do to connect to Planner, set the Tasks from Planner slider in To-Do settings (Figure 1). Alternatively, accept the invitation to track tasks assigned to you in Planner that should appear in the lower left-hand corner of To-Do.

One-Way Traffic

The integration is one-way: Tasks assigned to a user in all plans in a tenant appearing in that user’s My Tasks list in Planner are synchronized to To-Do where they appear in the Assigned to Me list. All assigned tasks from all plans are synchronized, which means that the initial step to bring the tasks into To-Do can take a little time if, like me, you have hundreds of assigned tasks. Eventually, the synchronization completes and you can work with the Planner tasks (Figure 2).

To-Do does a good job of presenting Planner tasks in its interface. Some differences in nomenclature are obvious: Planner’s checklist for a task becomes steps in To-Do while a task description are shown as notes. Users probably won’t notice this because all they’re interested in is being able to work with tasks as if they were native To-Do items.

Some Compromises in Functionality

All integrations come with some compromises. In this case, you can work with tasks to:

• Change the completion date for a task.
• Mark a task as completed or mark a completed task as incomplete (but not mark a task as in-progress).
• Add checklist items.
• Update the task description.
• Hide completed tasks.

To-Do synchronizes any updates back to Planner where they appear almost immediately. On the downside, you can’t use To-Do to:

• Change the assignee(s) for a task.
• Add an attachment (file or link).
• Change the tab for a task.
• Create new tasks.

If you need to perform these actions, click the Open in Planner link to open the task using the Planner app.

Planner in To-Do Mobile

To see Planner tasks in the To-Do mobile clients, you need version 1.56 of that app (Figure 3). The mobile app seems to be a little smoother than the browser client, which sometimes pauses slightly when moving from task to task.

Remember that you can also synchronize Planner tasks with Outlook. However, that integration is not as slick or easy to use as the To-Do integration is.

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Planner is covered in Chapter 15 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.