Host Jeremy Cherny discusses best practices and how to use Microsoft Planner.

What is Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner does not have a desktop component, it is strictly from the web. It's also from your apps on your phone and tablets. So right now, there is no desktop component. So you go to Office and sign in with your credentials. It's kind of like task management for teams. Some might call it light project management. There are a lot of different ways to look at it depending on how you're going to use it. We've started to use it here at Tobin Solutions for a few small projects. So we understand how these things work so we can support them for you.

Create an event

We're going to start by creating a new plan. For purposes of this project, we're going to create a customer appreciation event. Now when you create the event or the planner plan, you can select what privacy level. So by default, it's a private meeting - only members that you add can see the contents of it. So that would be great if you have a project or plan that is just meant for a few people. If it's something for your whole company, then you would say it's public and then you'd be able to have that there and everyone in your company would be able to go in and see that plan and have access to it. The permissions are not that granular. So at this point, you either have access to it or you don't. There's not a lot of ways of controlling access to individual tasks and elements within the plan. Down at the options, you can also add some additional information so people know what this is like a party for our favorite customer.

Groups

One thing I want to point out - and this is an important piece - is Planner works really well hand-in-hand with Microsoft Outlook. So one of the features that you may or may not be aware of with Office 365 is this concept of Groups. Groups are just groups of people in your organization. Those groups get created behind the scenes for your use in different ways. So, since I am part of this customer appreciation party plan, if I open up Outlook, you can now see under Groups, it created this customer appreciation group. When I click on that, it says, “Welcome to the customer appreciation party group.” Groups are a special thing within Outlook. We could do a whole other demonstration and webinar on that. But basically, a group has its own mailbox and its own calendar and stores all the information together. So, if you create a plan, in Planner, it's going to automatically create a group for you. Likewise, if you create a group in Outlook, it's going to automatically create a plan for you that will show up under the plans. So they work hand-in-hand.

Tasks

This is a customer appreciation event, so what are some things we're going to need to do? First, we want to click on the plus sign. Then, I think the first thing we need to do is we need to select a date for our party. That would be a task that we need to do. We may also need to select a venue that may or may not be at our office. We need to create a team. So I just created a few tasks. Right now this is under what's called a bucket that’s called to-do. We're going to talk a little more about buckets as we go forward. You can rename these buckets, but they are essentially lists of tasks. If I open up this, create the team, you'll see it's in the to-do bucket, but the progress has not started. It doesn't have a start date or a due date. There's also no description. So I could start to put that together and say, “When do I want to get this done?” And I’m going to enter that date.