Microsoft Planner offers a collaboration, project management, and task planning solution for teams. Users can create plans, add tasks to each plan, assign team members to tasks, and track individual and team progress for every plan. The drag-and-drop interface allows users to smoothly categorize tasks, update statuses, and assign tasks.
Tasks can be organized into buckets, and flagged with multiple color-coded labels to identify shared features between tasks, such as requirements, dependencies, time constraints, or locations. Users can attach files to tasks through integration with OneDrive, and work collaboratively on Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote) with co-authoring. Comments can also be added to tasks, with a comment symbol appearing on tasks to alert team members to new comments.
Each created plan has its own board, on which tasks appear as individual cards, with user-selected preview images. Task buckets, labels, dates, progress symbols, attachments, assigned team members, and comments are all shown on the board. Users are automatically emailed when they create plans, are added to plans or assigned tasks, if one of their tasks is marked ‘Completed’, or if another user comments on one of their assigned tasks.
All plans also have a charts view, which gives users an overview of the progress across the plans as a whole, as well as breaking down individual team members’ task progress. The four task statuses - Completed, In Progress, Late, and Not Started - are color-coded across the charts, and users can select chart sections to see the number of tasks represented. Tasks can be reassigned from this view, for example if a team member is overloaded or has a number of late tasks.
Software by Microsoft
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