Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Interested in project planning for mere mortals?  If you have Office 365, Planner may be your answer.

Here’s our announcement:

We are excited to introduce a brand new experience in Office 365—Office 365 Planner, which 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, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.

Teamwork Organized
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 rebalance 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.

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The login page for Planner is: https://tasks.office.com/

Read more here:

• OFFICE BLOG: Introducing Office 365 Planner
  https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/introducing-office-365-planner/
• PRODUCT PAGE: Office 365 Planner
  https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-planner
• DOCUMENTATION: What is Office 365 Planner Preview?
  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-is-Office-365-Planner-Preview-4a9a13c6-3adf-4a60-a6fc-15c0b15e16fc
• DOCUMENTATION: Office 365 Planner Preview for admins
  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-365-Planner-Preview-for-admins-9652e4c7-48e3-4dad-9e71-0c783ec3d0f8
• FEEDBACK: Office 365 Planner
  https://planner.uservoice.com/