Issue No. 49Aug 2016
New Tool Added to Microsoft Office 365,
“Microsoft Planner”
Over the last few months, Microsoft has added a new tool to some plans of Office 365 called “Microsoft Planner”. This tool offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your teams more effectively.
One of the most valuable aspects of Planner is that it helps teams organize their work visually. Each plan has its own Board, and within each Board, each work item or task is represented by a Card that can have due dates, attachments, categories and conversations associated with it. Team members receive an email notification whenever they are assigned a new Card or added to a conversation.
Every Card can have documents (or pictures) attached that automatically get rich image previews, so it is easy to understand what the Card is about at a glance. In addition, Cards can be organized on the Board into customizable columns called Buckets, which can be prioritized and tagged with colored labels.
Planner also gives you views to keep your work on track. The Hub view lets you track overall progress across all plans, while the “My tasks” view lets you filter down to see just what you need to do across every plan. In addition, the “Charts” view includes interactive charts for visualizing people’s progress against deadlines. Click a red segment on the histogram to quickly see which aspects of a plan are behind schedule and use the Board to re-balance work across the team. With Planner, everyone is always on the same page. A single glance of the Charts view is all it takes to know where things stand.
As a member of the Office 365 suite, Planner is integrated with other Office 365 services, such as Office 365 Groups, so all of the conversations in Planner are available in Outlook 2016, Outlook on the Web and the Outlook Groups Mobile Apps.
Planner is also an ideal way to organize your Office files. Attach Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to a Card and start editing them right away. When a document is attached to a Card, it is stored in a SharePoint Online document library, allowing you to work on them offline.
Technical features such as multiple redundant backups, virtually instantaneous recovery and HIPAA, FISMA, ISO27001 and EU Model compliance ensure that your data is safe, secure and always available. To make certain everyone has fast access to Planner, the service is deployed in multiple data-centers around the globe, so everyone has their work close at hand.
