Planner, the task management app built into Office 365, has been upgraded to support a priority field for tasks. By itself, that’s not very exciting, but the new Group by Priority view is pretty good and makes it easy to move tasks within priorities in a plan. It just goes to prove that how a new feature is implemented is equally important to the existence of the new feature.
If you’ve integrated Planner into Teams by creating channel tabs for plans, users are now notified when they are assigned new tasks.The notifications turn up in the Teams activity feed. Why? Well, the Planner bot sends messages to people about new tasks, so its chats as treated like new messages in a personal chat.
From version 1.56 on, you can synchronize your My Tasks list from Planner to To-Do. The integration works well and it’s easy to manage Planner tasks in To-Do. Some of the more advanced actions aren’t available in To-Do, but a quick link to Planner solves the problem. Planner tasks are also accessible in the To-Do mobile app.
Microsoft has announced that Planner now boasts the ability to copy a plan. Apparently, the idea is to save time by setting up plan templates that you can reuse. Office 365’s task management app might not get as much love as other apps, but this is a useful set forward. Only users who are allowed to create new Office 365 groups can copy plans.
The Office 365 Planner app is now available for U.S. Government Cloud tenants. Only it’s not the full Planner because some bits still have to be tested to make sure that they meet government standards.