ICYMI: Summer 2023 roundup of fresh new features in Microsoft Planner

[Guest SakshiB]

Microsoft Planner gives you and your teams an intuitive, collaborative, and visual task management experience for getting work done. Read on below to explore a set of rich new features that have rolled out recently to enhance your experience using Planner in your day-to-day task management. When your team work evolves and grows, and you find you need more enhanced capabilities to manage your cross-team projects , don’t miss the update below that will enable you to move over your existing Planner plans into Microsoft Project for the web for a free one-month trial. Then, head over to the summer roundup blog of new Project features that have been rolling out.

 

 

 

Bring your Planner plans into a Microsoft Project for the web trial

 

As your plans grow in scope, you may need some additional help managing it all! With a free one-month Project for the web trial, you can test out enhanced capabilities such as timelines for your projects and plans with dynamic scheduling and workload balancing, goal-setting for your individual and team tasks, Agile views and approaches, or custom views, forms, tables and columns to suit your project management priorities. You will soon be able to start a free Project for the web trial without having to replicate plans that you are already working on in Planner. Check out the video below to learn how to easily bring your Planner data into a free one-month trial. Want to learn more about Project for the web? Explore the summer roundup of new Project for the web features.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Create a new plan from template

 

Need to quickly start a new plan after returning from a summer holiday? You can leverage new pre-made templates for Planner that can help you save time and ensure that you are including key elements you need. Templates include Simple Plan, Project Management, Software Development, Business Plan and Employee Onboarding. Watch the short video below to learn more about how to use pre-made templates and kickstart your new plan!

 

 

 

 

Rosters in Planner to support container sensitivity labels

 

For organizations that require additional protection for sensitive or confidential work or need to be able to categorize and label plans and work associated with them, admins can require sensitivity labels to be applied to rosters in Planner, and users will now be able to apply container labels to rosters in Planner. This is enabled directly in Planner and by using Microsoft Graph APIs. Rosters are created automatically for task lists in Microsoft Loop. Tenant admins can make container labels for these rosters mandatory and set a default label, or not make them mandatory. Planner rosters then follow container policy settings. For Graph API requests, if labels are mandatory as per tenant settings, roster creation fails if a label is not provided at the time of request.

 

 

 

Frontline Worker enhancements to the Tasks app in Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Planner: Checklist completion requirements

 

The Tasks app in Microsoft Teams is available to organizations using Microsoft 365. The Tasks app includes unique capabilities designed for organizations with frontline workers such as task publishing. With task publishing, an organization can centrally define a set of tasks to be completed, distribute those tasks at scale across hundreds or thousands of locations, and monitor results. The task publishing capability in Microsoft Teams is now enhanced with a new feature: checklist completion requirement. This feature ensures thoroughness and accountability in task execution by preventing task completion until all checklist items are marked complete. Moreover, organizations can utilize the Business scenario API to create tasks with the checklist completion requirement enabled, for task automation outside of the publishing process. For example, when a machine health monitoring system detects a failure in a specific machine, a task titled "Machine Failure Follow-up" can be created automatically for the employees at that location to follow up. This task can include checklist items for each step to investigate the cause of the failure, perform necessary repairs or maintenance, and conduct post-repair testing and verification. By enforcing the completion of all checklist items, organizations can ensure that tasks are executed with the necessary attention to detail, ultimately leading to improved operational efficiency and reliability. This feature is now generally available.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay up to date with new features coming to Planner and Project via the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

 

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