Office 365 Planner in Preview

Office 365 Planner (currently available in preview) 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.

The service will most likely benefit small projects or initiatives that are short in duration with few tasks and do not require a sophisticated project planning tool. For example, the illustration shows tasks associated with the rollout of new business intelligence (BI) reports that involve staff in multiple departments and locations. Planner is a better tool for sharing task lists than Excel spreadsheets and, for Office 365 customers, is less expensive than subscribing to a separate online service or deploying Project Server.

The illustration shows two screen shots from the service.

Plans (left) are the hub of the product, and each plan has a visual board of task cards (center) that represent work items. Plans are synchronized with Office 365 Groups, providing user assignment, calendars and conversations, document storage, and notebooks. Creating a plan automatically creates an Office 365 group, and every existing Office 365 Group automatically has an associated plan.