One of the key elements of success for modern businesses is the ability for team members to create and seamlessly collaborate on new plans, assign tasks, share files, chat about what’s being worked on, and get automatic updates on progress. That’s exactly what Microsoft Planner, part of Microsoft 365 business plan, empowers businesses to do.

Planner is an ideal web-based platform where Office 365 users can seamlessly work together on projects, start conversations and get the job done faster without switching between apps. With Microsoft Planner, you can create a plan, build a team, assign tasks, and update status—all in a few easy steps.

Key Features of Microsoft Planner:

• Keep yourself on top of everything and get to know who is working on what – at any time.
• Categorize tasks based on their status or to whom they’re assigned.
• Label your individual tasks using different colors, and define what you want the labels to mean, as an example, we use colored labels to represent task priority.
• Attach the right files to their tasks, work together on those files and start conversations around any task without switching between apps.
• Get users notified by email whenever they're assigned a new task or added to a conversation.
• Get an overview of all your tasks as well as their status across your plans.
• Planner works across all devices, keeping everyone together on the same page.

1.    Sign in to Microsoft Planner

To sign in to Planner, go to tasks.office.com and sign in with your work account. If you're already signed in to Office 365, you can choose Planner on the Office 365 app launcher.

2.    Create a plan in Microsoft Planner

Sign in to Planner, and you'll see a plan for each of your Office 365 Groups.

To get started, you can:

1. Select a plan under Favorite plans or All plans.

OR

2. Start a new plan by choosing New plan.

3.    Add tasks to a plan

Once you've started a plan, you can add tasks to list what needs to get done.

Enter a task name in the box under To do, and then choose Add task.

4.    Create buckets to sort your tasks

After adding tasks, you can sort them into buckets to help break things up into phases, types of work, departments, or whatever makes the most sense for your plan.

Set up buckets

To set up buckets for your plan’s tasks, on the Board, select Add new bucket, enter a name for the bucket.

Once you've created a bucket, you can drag tasks into the bucket to start getting organized.

5.    Add people to your plan

In Planner, select Members, and then enter the name of the person you want to add. Each member will receive an email notification that they've been added to your plan.

6.    View charts of your plan's progress

Which tasks are running late?In Planner, every plan has a Board and a Charts view. The Charts view shows how your plan is progressing, with details about what’s done, in progress, not started, and late.

Which tasks are running late?

You can view just the late tasks for your team.

1. In Charts view, choose Group by and select Due date.
2. On the right, you'll see a list of your Late tasks (if they aren't showing, click the arrow to open the list).
3. You can also expand and view tasks due Today, or tasks due in the future, sorted by date.

See who's overloaded

Planner lets you see if one person has more tasks than everyone else. The bars on the Charts view show the number of tasks each person has in the plan, color-coded by progress.

In this example, Megan has a lot of late tasks (red), one in-progress task that's on track (blue), and one task she hasn't started yet (gray).

We hope we've managed to help you get started with the most basic steps of using Microsoft Planner. If you need more information or have any questions regarding any of Planner's functionalities, feel free to get in touch with Ctelecoms any time you wish. We are Gold Microsoft Partner in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah & Riyadh) with all the expertise to help out with a wide array of Microsoft Cloud Solutions.

Ctelecoms team.