Planner

Microsoft Planner is a lightweight task management tool that can help organize and track small projects such as departmental initiatives. It provides collaboration features from Office 365 Groups such as shared calendars and document storage to help teams communicate the status of work more easily. Planner is better than distributing Excel spreadsheets for sharing task lists, and it is less expensive than purchasing or subscribing to other project management services. However, it is not a replacement for sophisticated project management tools, and it has several reporting and administration limits.

Planner Overview and Benefits

Planner allows team members to create plans, assign and track tasks, share content, and receive automatic status updates. The service relies on Office 365 Groups for user management and access to collaboration features such as document storage, e-mail, messaging, and notebooks. (For details on functionality, see the illustration “How Planner Works“.)

Planner is a browser-based, multiuser application with no stand-alone client, which should simplify deployment and management and benefit organizations with remote users. All users in a plan have the same level of control over content in contrast to other products that offer multiple user roles. For example, a user could inadvertently delete tasks or change the status of tasks of others. Planner users can create and update tasks and see all comments and documents associated with a task. Teams will need discipline to avoid update conflicts, but the transparency of content could improve project communications and reduce meeting times.