SharePoint Online Personal Tasks to Disappear

Office 365 administrators have received notice that beginning in Sept. 2014 the personal tasks feature in SharePoint Online is being deprecated. The feature is still available, but using it to display tasks requires manual editing of user profiles. Synchronization of tasks with Outlook will continue, but only for about a year, until Sept. 2015 when the feature will be entirely removed from SharePoint Online. The announcement appears to fit with Microsoft’s online services support policy for providing 12 months’ advance notice of any disruptive change, and it may cause some customers to begin searching for alternatives.

Tasks Deprecated in SharePoint Online

The ability to create, update, and assign tasks has been available in SharePoint Online (and in SharePoint on-premises) to help with project planning. A task is a single work item that can be assigned to project team member(s) who then can update the task status as work progresses. While not a full project management solution (such as Microsoft Project), SharePoint personal tasks give team members the ability to display, update, and manage their work items, which can aid in project coordination and resource planning.