How Planner Works

Planner is a lightweight task management tool that can help organize and track small plans. The service allows team members to create plans, assign and track tasks, receive automatic status updates, and share documents (services provided by Office 365 Groups). The illustration shows two screen shots from the service.

Plans (left) are at the hub of the product. Each plan displays a visual board of task cards (center) that represent discrete work items. Plans are stand-alone projects and do not connect to or share resources with other plans.

Tasks can be assigned to one or more individuals, have a due date, progress status, description, and additional comments, notes, links, and attachments, including images. Tasks can also have a check list of sub-items to be finished before the task can be marked as complete. Tasks are organized on the plan board by individual, progress status, or buckets (shown as “User Acceptance,” “Report Designs,” and “Systems”), which are user-defined categories. Tasks are assigned to a bucket with drag-and-drop features.