An overview of Microsoft Planner

- [Instructor] Imagine you have some tasks for resources to complete, but it's not a large enough effort to create a complete schedule. You need to assign some work and manage updates. Planner may be just the right fit. Planner could be found by going to the Microsoft Office, Apple launcher and selecting Planner, or by finding all apps and then Planner. It will bring you to the Planner hub once you've selected it. You should use Planner to manage ad hoc work, meaning work that doesn't require dependencies or other related project tasks. In this case, I have some plans already in my Planner instance, IT requests, product release, Office 365 rollout, and of course this automated software installation. Each plan can have separate tasks and buckets, I'm going to click on the IT requests. In this plan, it shows how an IT request system might be implemented with submitted, proposed and backlogs. And it's grouped by bucket. Each plan can have separate buckets structures, labels or other options to determine how the work can be categorized. You can also select how to view that by clicking on the dropdown and saying progress, perhaps in this case not started in progress or completed, or by going to that dropdown and even selecting assigned to which will give you a list of names. I'm going to return back to the bucket list. In a Planner plan, creating tasks and having resources update their tasks in a simple browser is as simple as clicking on the task and it brings up the task window. They can progress to task by selecting the progress options. And of course, just closing that task back up. This way, users can see their assignments grouped by the name, the date, the priority, or other grouping as we've currently seen. Notifications of tasks can be found by going to the gear and selecting notifications. Here the notifications are someone assigns a task to me or a task assigned to me is late, due today or due in the next seven days. And I can get an email for those. You can select whether you want those notifications on or off. I'm going to cover a lot of things in this Planner chapter. However, if you want to know more, you may want to check out the Planner blog at this URL. This covers additional things that I might not have put into this course. Also, when you create a plan on the Planner tab here, and it's available to you, you may not want all your users, by default it's given to all users that have Office 365. If you want to remove that, you can not give out a license to Planner. However, the task URL task.office.com/yourtenant will still be available for people that can use existing plans. So if you don't want them to have access to Planner, you may also want to check out this article about how to remove Planner licenses and that option for your Office 365 instance. When working with Planner a few minutes, planning how to set up the tool and support the different work efforts can save you valuable time and reduce confusion on collecting task information.