Office 365 Planner

Introduction

This document will walk you through the usage of Office 365 Planner

What is Office 365 Planner?

Office 365 Planner is a new application that Microsoft is adding to the suite of functionality available to tenants. In many respects, it is similar to the popular Trello application and well-suited to the management of small projects or the set of collective tasks owned by workgroups. It is not intended to be as powerful and flexible as Microsoft Project, which remains the tool of choice for project managers and those involved in the day-to-day management of large or complex projects.

What about licenses?

All users with eligible subscription plans will automatically see the Planner tile appear in the Office 365 app launcher when it is available for them to use. No specific action by Office 365 admins is needed.

Will Planner appear for on-premises customers?

Given the dependency that exists on Office 365 Groups and the Azure service, it’s very unlikely that Planner will ever be available on-premises. Microsoft Project Server is available for on-premises clients.

Who can create new plans?

Right now, anyone can create a new plan. The OWA Mailbox Policy used by Office 365 Groups to restrict the ability of users to create new groups is ignored by Office 365 Planner. This can lead to a situation where a profusion of new plans (and groups) are created without planning (no pun intended) to create the need to clean up plans and groups afterwards. Microsoft says that they are working on lifecycle policies that will make it possible to check for and remove obsolete plans (and groups), but this feature isn’t available yet.

What’s a plan?

A plan is represented by a collection of tasks that are assigned to different team members. Each task represents a discrete piece of work or other activity that has to be completed by a certain date.

What about tags?

Six color-coded tags are available to help manage tasks. It’s up to the members of the group/plan to decide how these tags are used.

Do plans support checklists?

You can assign checklist items to a task. Each checklist item is independent of the others and is either in a completed (unchecked) or done (checked) state.

What’s a bucket?

A bucket is a container for tasks within a plan. In practical terms, you can have as many tasks as you like in a bucket and as many buckets as you like within a plan. By default, a plan starts off with a bucket called “To Do”, but you can rename it to whatever you like.

Can I drag and drop tasks between buckets?

Absolutely!

Take a look on Planner that used to manage any plan

Statistic Chart of all tasks in all buckets of a plan look like

Step by step to configure Planner for our organization

The first time we browse to https://Tasks.Office.Com be look like , sign with your o365 Login

Click to create a [New plan] look like 

Creating a new plan look like

Plan email address be created automatically for our plan. Use the email for discussions with all plan members

Creating our plan

The empty plan that just created look like 

 Add a task to a bucket of a plan look like

Click on [Task Name] area to show the detail and can be set Status, Start Date, End Date and put assign for the task also

The default detail of a new created task look like

Choose a status for a Task

Choose a Start date for a Task

Click on [Assign] icon to assign a one to do the task

Can choose yourself to do the task or select another one by click on [Add someone new]

   I choose myself to do the task and close the detail task window
   Can set a label for the task

The Task with yellow label be setting look like

The task with a resource be assigned look like

Changing the title of a bucket from [To Do] to [Apply Planner to Organization] look like

 A welcome email to join a Plan look like

Click to add a new bucket

A new bucket with a new task be added look like

Statistic chart of Development Project look like

See this article for more information on how to use Planner