Have you heard of Microsoft Planner? Your Office 365 subscription comes with a lot of new and exciting features (with more coming all the time). Microsoft Planner offers teams the ability to create plans, assign tasks, upload files, and communicate with team members. Along with integrations with SharePoint, Outlook, and more, it can be a powerful tool to help your business work more efficiently. Microsoft Planner comes standard with your Office 365 subscription for business and enterprise.
The central landing page for Microsoft Planner is the project hub, which displays all your projects in a single location. Tasks are organized into buckets, which can be further delineated into checklists. You can drag and drop tasks from one project to another—or one bucket to another. Once the project is created, a new SharePoint site is created in your site collection to house documents, which can be linked to the project. Plans also come with Office 365 groups. Like most Office 365 applications, it’s mobile friendly for all operating systems.
To get your team working collaboratively on a project, Microsoft Planner offers a few features and integrations. Working on a key document with multiple people? The co-authoring feature in Sharepoint allows everyone to work together in real-time, locking down sections instead of the whole document. Instead of sending emails, your team can use the chat feature to keep everyone informed, and using the plan’s calendar, you can keep track of major events and milestones. The integration with OneNote helps your team keep meeting minutes, whiteboards, and more together and visible.
A great feature for managers and executives are the boards and charts Microsoft Planner automatically creates. You’ll be able to see any tasks that are late, those due today and next week, and even handle resource management. Managers can also create custom views so they can keep track of the information they want to know about, and even receive daily email summaries of progress.
Many of these features may seem very familiar to Microsoft’s other project planning software, Project. Think about Planner as Project Lite – a software that doesn’t require a lot of coding, but also doesn’t provide a lot of customization. Planner is great for businesses who need just the basics, whereas in Project, the sky is the limit. That also means organizations can configure and use Planner without having to invest in a Microsoft Project resource, or project licenses. Depending on your business requirements, one may work better than the other.
At eSoftware, we can help boost your productivity, become more efficient and see all the Microsoft 365 platforms have to offer.. Call us today or click here to set up your free consultation! 1-800-682-0882