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Overview: On February 2, 2016 Microsoft hosted the Office 365 Planner YamJam to discuss the worldwide release of Office 365 Planner Preview. Read the notes below for a summary of what we discussed and next time tune in to the live YamJam!ResourcesBlog: Planner preview expanded to include more plans and additional First Release typesBlog: Admins—get ready for Office 365 Planner preview!Blog: Introducing Office 365 PlannerMicrosoft Graph Tasks APIOffice 365 Planner UserVoice TopicsRollout and Release ScheduleFeatures RoadmapOffice 365 IntegrationDevFeature RequestsRollout and Release ScheduleQ: When will Planner be available for First Release for Selected People? A. We will update the blog. Planner is available as of today (February 2, 2016) to partial tenant First Release as well.Q: How long before Planner enters General Availability?A: We expect to start General Availability rollout in 2Q-Q3 CY2016.Q: How can we activate this feature in our tenant? At the moment we don?t get it even for First Release users. Should we do something special?A: Check out the FAQ at the bottom of this blog. An Office 365 Admin will need to register for First Release and then activate Planner.You will need to enable your tenant for First Release for "Entire org" or "Select people". Then, apply the promo code for either Commercial/Nonprofit/Government or Education. This support article details how to enable your tenant and apply the promo code.Use the following promo code URL for eligible E-SKUs, Nonprofit and Government tenants. Use the following promo code URL for Education tenants.Q: Are there any known issues with trying to activate the planner trial, we have the code in the Admin message center, but whenever we try to open it (in private) we get an error message saying sorry not available.. any suggestions?A: Please ensure you are not using an expired code. New codes are available in the previous question above. Q: There is an established mechanism for First Release Select Users, why do we need to use license assignment to grant access to Planner? This makes admins lives difficult when there isn't consistency.A: We approached this a little differently as Planner was a new service - not just a feature on an existing service. Hopefully the PowerShell options for license allocation mean this isn't too difficult. Only the First Release users will get the Planner tile.Q: So, if another Admin applies a Planner subscription to a non-First Release user they won't be able to access the application (meaning, no tile will show up and they won't be able to go to the URL itself and access the app)?A: The tile will not show up, but if they navigated directly to the URL they would get access even if individually they are not First Release.Q: Is there a User Guide for Planner? I just activated this and have our First Release group to test (about 20 people) and it would be nice to be able to provide a user guide to them so they know how to use the product.A: We are thinking of creating one, but probably once we are in General Availability, not in the immediate future. For now, this support article is something that can be repurposed.Q: How is the release of new features communicated to those in Preview?A: We'll announce features (say like checklists) via Yammer forum, in blog posts, and via the Office 365 Roadmap (). We will also use Message Center for major release updates. Features Q: My Planner-created group has a colorful header (green in my case). How can I change that color? Ideally, it should have a group-wide default with ability to set individual color by each user (so they choose which color servers best for them and kept each group they participate in in different color).A: The green header is automatically colored based on color samples it pulls from the Group profile pic. Try changing the Group picture and see if it updates!Q: When I go to "My Tasks" and Group By plan, I'd love to be able to drag a task to a different plan, any ideas why it doesn't work?A: The issue is that a plan corresponds 1:1 with a Group, which corresponds 1:1 with the Group Mailbox. Since Plan Task conversations are stored in the Group Mailbox, it becomes complicated to deal with these conversations when moving a Task to another Plan. The same complexity exists with Task Attachments.This can get really messy and hard, particularly if documents are stored, or the category list is different in the different plans. If you have some compelling scenarios then add them in the UserVoice for consideration.Q: Is it possible to customize the fields to fill in when creating a task? Is it possible to assign tasks inside a project to an asset?A: You can customize the color category labels. Other than that, you can't create custom fields like in a SharePoint Tasks List. If you want to assign a task to an asset, they have to show up as a user in your Org and be added to your Plan. We've seen this in some Orgs with service accounts.Q: For those organizations not using Exchange Online will there be any limitations with using Planner?A: Customers have to be Office 365 users because the Groups and Planner experience leverages multiple services from Office 365.Q: If an employee leaves the company, how can permissions be re-assigned to the Planner cards owned by the previous employee?A: You can re-assign the cards to anyone else in the Office 365 Group.Q2: What about Plan ownership?A2: Plans are 'owned' by the Group Principal, so there should be nothing here to do. With regards to Group Ownership (Admin), the tenant admin can edit this information in Admin Center.Q: Can a task be linked to another as a dependent task or a predecessor and have that relationship shown?A: There are no task dependencies in Planner at the moment. For scheduling, dependencies, and milestone sync like needs, Project is a better bet. We want to keep Planner very simple and easy to use. However, you can add scenarios for dependencies at UserVoice, just in case there is some middle ground here.Q: Planner creates new Office 365 Group which is now Public. How to change it to Private? The field is grayed. Why?A: Ability to convert an existing group from Private/Public is coming out soon. Right now, you have to pick the setting for Private or Public at the time of creation.Q: It has taken several hours to finally set up all parts required to full Planner experience. It should be significantly faster (5 minutes max for small tenants).A: Understand there is an initial hit configuring things for the first time. Remember it's Preview and we're working on making it faster!Also, note that some of the delay in setting up all parts of the Plan can be related to creating SharePoint doc libraries, Exchange mailbox, or other artifacts. Thanks to the feedback in this Yammer group and First Release users, we've actually taken a few fixes across all our teams to speed up this process.RoadmapQ: Since the site is not a responsive design, a mobile app is critical. What are you plans for this?A: We are working on the mobile story for Planner. More announcements to come but we can't share anything at this moment. Stay tuned!We are also working on making the Web UI Responsive so that it will work better for all mobile devices.Q: How can I archive cards, buckets, and projects?A: Archiving isn't available at the moment. It's on our backlog and is something we want to offer at some point in the near future. A crowd favorite!Q: We need to have a way to convert a task to its own project and have the original task link to the new project.A: We have that on the Microsoft Project roadmap to start a Plan from a task in Project Online, and the insights to flow back directly to PM. When we ship the new checklists feature, you will have the ability to promote a checklist item to a full task. However promoting a task to a Group won't be supported yet since it requires creation of SharePoint site, Exchange Mailbox, etc.Q: Is there a way or will there be a way to add multiple users to a task?A: Yes, this is an often requested feature - expect to see it in the medium term.Q: A mobile app and a way to share and assign task to external users would be great additions. Any plans for these two in the roadmap?A: Yes and yes!Q: Will you allow outside participation (i.e. members that are not within your organization) into Plans?A: This is dependent on Office 365 Groups supporting external users. It's on the roadmap for Office 365 Groups and will be supported in Planner once it's available.Q2: Like with other external collaboration rollouts, I'm assuming there will be a way to opt out? We have opted out of everything related to external collaboration and would like to keep it that way.A2: Yes we are looking at enabling such control for Admins to manage the external access in their organization.Q: Do external users that you want to include in the Planner plans need to have an Office 365 account? What if they have non-Office 365 accounts?A: External user plan (aka Guest access) will support inviting non Office 365 accounts.Q: Do you have plans for subtasks/checklists to report partial progress of a task?A: Checklists is done and shipping soon.Q: Any roadmap items to allow for creating Plan templates (so we can pre-define buckets, labels, etc) for all new plans created?A: Yes, this is something we're thinking about right now but don't have many details to share yet.Q: Will there be a way to set the display language of Planner? Or to get Planner to follow the Office 365 account settings?A: At General Availability this will follow the Office 365 settings. Q: Are there plans for integration of Planner with Wunderlist? A: Yes, we are starting to work on it.Q2: If all our projects are already set up on SharePoint, on individual sites with associated task lists and document libraries, at the moment I don't think there's a way of integrating all that on Planner. A2: The idea is to make access to simple project and task management lot more ubiquitous and a lot more friction free. With Planner, there is no need to first create a team site, then add a task list and so on. Of course, visual elements and usability is a big differentiator too. Let us know your feedback. Q: I understand subtasks/checklists are in the works. I think it would be ideal to have the ability to assign people and dates to these subtasks. Will that be included? We currently use Asana for some use cases and would like to move completely to Planner - this component is critical to that.A: Assignment and due dates aren't available on checklist items, but we will have the ability to promote a checklists into a set of tasks. So if you have a checklist you then decide needs to have assignments you can promote it into a set of tasks to allow assignments and due dates.Q: Will it be possible to add multiple members to 1 task in the future? Multiple members per task is a must (or at least a very big preference) for a lot of business scenarios.A: Yes, this is being worked on. In the medium term you should see this.Q2: I'd also love to be able to put RACI type designations on a task as opposed to have to break out the separate items as a task. for example if I create the deliverable, someone else needs to review it and be aware of it.A2: When we have multiple persons assigned to a Task, we would be interested to know the community's thoughts on whether there should be some notion of the 'primary' assignee or some ordering of importance to the set off assignees or if all assignees should be equivalent. Also the max number of assignees you think you'd need for a Task. Let us know your feedback. Q: Which more advanced project management features can we see being implemented? Things like multiple users task assignments or dependencies?A: Dependencies, Scheduling, milestone sync are all in Project. Planner is all about simplicity and easy collaboration.Q: Would love the ability to have a timeline feature in Planner. I know this goes beyond the simple scenarios in Card based designs but believe this will really help set it apart from the likes of Trello. The timeline feature would work similar to Project Online timeline feature.A: This is a fairly well understood ask and one that we are considering.Q: When taking Planner for a test run we where puzzled with the amount of traffic we generated in each others inbox. Three things are not obvious to me with respect to the communication aspect of Planner:1. Why is the "inbox subscription" by definition on? 2. When replying to a message, the full group is always included and cannot be removed. 3. When replying to a message, next to the full group, the person who you are responding to is also included. These three factors together resulted in 30 messages for 5 people about only 6 tasks. A: We are aware of this issue and have plans to fix this hopefully soon and definitely for General Availability. Q: Whenever a task is added or assigned or any attribute added/changed; an email is sent to the group as part of the conversation. 1. This is overwhelming. I know this has already been raised on UserVoice and I've voted there. Would it be possible to add an alert engine, so that users can manage their own alerts and frequency? 2. Every activity is also recorded as a comment under the task. This is also good. But the problem is when we are having a corporate disclaimer/signature set. This gets appended to every comment and every mail that is sent to the group. Ditto for groups (sans Planner). This is very awkward, with a one-liner meaningful comment appended with 10 lines of meaningless signature. Can this be avoided? Why do comments get a signature? Are they added via email?A: Yes, we are aware of these issues. We have that as our top priority to fix before we General Availability. Thank you for the feedback. Q: Will there be the ability to hide Plans from non-members? I created a test plan and from a separate account I can see the plan listed when I browse Office 365 Groups. I don't necessarily want private project titles (or private Office 365 Groups) being visible to the entire community.A: Sounds like what you are asking for is the "Hidden Groups" feature. These would be Private groups that are not discoverable in the directory. This is on the roadmap for Office 365 Groups.Q: Our team is concerned that when you create a plan, there's no way to enforce a naming convention. Because an Office 365 Group is created when a plan is created, this could cause significant clutter in our Outlook Global Address List. We would hope that we could enforce a naming convention so that when a plan is created, it starts with the prefix "Plan - ".A: We will be able to address this via API enhancements with Groups coming along hopefully before General Availability.Q: What speed of innovation should we expect from the Planner team? Power BI comes out with updates every week or every other week. Is that something you guys plan (no pun intended) to replicate or are less frequent updates (for example once a month) more in line with your own expectations?A: We release a new build almost every day. The number of new features will vary depending on team priorities, product usage and feedback, but our engineering systems and processes are designed for very speedy innovation.Q: Can you give an example of a new feature we should see in Planner in the short term, one in the medium term and one that will never be in Planner (that has been requested in UserVoice for example).A: Great question. For the short term, I can communicate we're definitely shipping support for checklists. This will provide the ability to break a task down into subtasks. This was one of the most highly requested features when we first enabled the Compass Program and First Release. In the mid-term, we're looking at shipping the ability to support multi-assign. This is another highly requested feature, but we need to make sure we hit the right approach between have a single task assigned to multiple people vs copying instances of the task. As far as a feature that will never be in Planner, I never say never, but a request for a Gantt Chart view is tough to imagine in Planner since we have a very robust Gantt Chart scenario in Project Online. I could see us expanding on the ability to map dependencies and relationships, but possibly not through an actual Gantt Chart.Sorry for the long answer, but this was 3 questions in one!Office 365 IntegrationQ: Are there plans to surface tasks into Outlook?Outlook will allow link back to Planner through the Groups integration. We're prioritizing Wunderlist integration over integration with Outlook native tasks.Current thoughts are not to create new duplicate tasks everywhere - but consolidate a view of the different sources of tasks. Wunderlist would be one place this might happen.Q: Would be nice for a user to see in Outlook if any tasks are overdue or nearing due dates.A: Good idea. yes - we will investigate this feature request further.Q: Is it already possible or planned that task could be integrated or exported to Outlook calendar?A: Currently not planned, but thanks for the feature request and we will keep it in mind.We're amazed how frequently this request is popping up. The Group Calendars must really be getting a lot of use. Thanks for the feedback!Q: You can go from Planner to Groups, but not the other way. It would make the navigation easier as users often work in Outlook where they access groups.A: We will be adding this capability in the Header so users can easily navigate from Outlook to Groups.Q: Can we expect an integration between Planner and Visual Studio Online? For instance it could be nice to post Planner Tasks as VSO Tasks.A: Interesting thought. We offer integration between Project and Visual Studio TFS. This is not something we have a high priority for Planner. We are flexible. So, please do vote on UserVoice. Q: Any plans to surface Planner in Delve? I realize there will be a link to Groups in a forthcoming update.A: Due to our groups integration we already send some signals for the graph that backs delve. What sort of deeper integrations would be you be interested in seeing? Let us know your feedback. Q: Will you provide the ability to create Power BI reports / visuals from Planner information?A: We're looking at what it would take to surface Planner data in Power BI. For now, some customers are using the API to extract their Plans/Tasks and build Power BI visualizations on top of an external data store. The good news is we have experience with Power BI through Project Online, so we understand the scenarios.Q: The functionality of the Planner Hub to roll up data over multiple Plans would be great to have in combination with Task List. Will this functionality become available as a stand alone SharePoint App?A: Thanks for the question. We don't have any future plans for this.Q: I am interested to know where is the Planner data stored? Is it a SharePoint List stored somewhere in the special path (like the metadata of video)? Can it be brought on par with SharePoint Tasks? Like ability to add custom columns/attributes to tasks. Particularly, baseline dates vis-a-vis actual dates (on the lines of Project). Not asking to bring Planner to the level of Project, but bringing to the level of SharePoint Task Lists.A: Planner data is not stored in SharePoint or Exchange. It's stored in a separate service that runs on Azure.Q: What about Planner and SharePoint Online Team Sites integration story?A: We will get there based on the work Groups are doing in this space.What specifically would you like to see here? Planner Plans are part of Groups which come with their own site. If you'd like to integrate an arbitrary Team Site, wouldn't simply manually adding a link to the Team Site suffice? Or is the ask for being able to add links to arbitrary Team Sites in Planner?Q2: I would like to have the ability to "embed" Planner Hub or even a Plan in SharePoint Online in the same way I can embed a Video from Office 365 Video or a Yammer feed from Yammer.A2: Thanks for this feedback. Q: I know Planner is built on Groups but can we use this as the opportunity to sort out the Path assignments in Office 365. SharePoint should live on Teams and Sites, Groups on Groups, Planner on Planner and not all fighting for Teams and Sites. The potential for clashes and a mess is too great otherwise.A: Office 365 Group is the common identity that goes across experiences. A Group has a plan (Planner), conversations (Outlook) and files (build on SharePoint Site). Soon Groups files will graduate to a full team site. Connecting the entire suite of experience.Group files are built on top of SharePoint site and we are working on exposing the full capability that include governance much the way users are use to doing for SharePoint team sites. It is the intent to bring fill sites capability in addition to files.Q2: To clarify the question refers to the managed path you can choose when you create a Site Collection in SharePoint. We don't get to choose when creating a Group. If you had a separate managed path for Groups, such as tenant.groups/groupname, you wouldn't be fighting for namespace with SharePoint site collections.A2: Thanks for the clarification. We will follow up with my SharePoint colleagues on that specific ask. (Thread). DevQ: Is there an API available to access planner tasks? Can the charting capability built into planner be used in other parts of Office365 such as SharePoint.A: Yes, you can access Planner Tasks via the Microsoft Graph API. Currently the charting functionality of Planner isn't available in other parts of Office 365. You can access planner tasks via this api.Q: Are you going to provide PowerShell cmdlets to manage Planner?A: We have an API we shipped that can be used to access plans and task programmatically. What scenarios are you trying to fulfill with PowerShell?Q2: I would like to have at least the same operations I have for Groups, i.e, CRUD Operations: Read all the Plans I have, create a new Plan, Update a Plan, and Remove a Plan.A2: We have not considered providing PowerShell access over the APIs already provided, but feel free to leave this feature request on the UserVoice forum!Feature RequestsQ: Is there a plan in the future to being able to email a task directly to a board?A: This is a great feature request and we love the scenario. We actually have it on our backlog, but it's a bit further down. Requires a bit of parsing/validation processing.Q: We need to be able to assign a priority to a projectA: You can favorite a project but not prioritize at the moment, but this is a great idea. Please add it to the UserVoice forum. Q: What about the ability to assign a due date at the project level?A: Thanks for the suggestion. We will keep that in mind.Q: Do you have plans to be able to create and assign a category (more than 1) to a project?A: Do the current color code tab categories not work for your scenario?Q2: No, not really. They are at the task level. I am talking about being able to categorize the plans and then view/sort by category in the Planner Hub.A2: Please add this to the UserVoice. Q: We need the ability to search all projects (include details of tasks in search results). During our training of our staff, this becomes too difficult for them to remember. It would be much easier of you could search right from planner. It would also be great if you could see results from plans you are not a member of.A: We can see how useful this would be. Please add to the Planner UserVoice. Q: We need to be able to create and assign a status to a project (Green, Yellow, Red for example).A: Note that some of that you can already get red on a project visuals, meaning a projects is in trouble. For additional color assigned status, please add to the Planner UserVoice. Q: Are there plans to add the ability for a manager to be able to view another person’s task list, by security setting?A: Would simply adding the Manager to the Group suffice here? The goal of Planner is to keep things simple, and avoid potentially complicated security and sharing settings.Q2: On the Planner Hub, It would be great to see the person who is accountable for the project. Right now we have to maintain a separate list and that is cumbersome.A2: Great set of feature requests. Please add them all to the UserVoice forum. Building Simple Power BI dashboards using the Task APIs might also accomplish what you are looking for. Q: Are you going to provide a mechanism to auto-archive expired tasks after some time?A: Sounds like an interesting ask. What is an 'expired task'? An incomplete one that's past its due date? A completed one that's past its due date? For example, the latter is under consideration, but not the former, because that could result in lost work. A little more detail around the ask will be helpful.Q: I would love the opportunity to build something via extensions in Planner. Any plans on providing extensibility for planner landing pages? Or would you prefer developers leverage the API to build custom solutions in SharePoint/etc ?A: I think we'd prefer using the API to build custom solutions. We don't have any plans for 3rd party code running inside Planner via extensions.Q: Are there plans to create a Planner dashboard so that Office 365 admins can see at a glance usage patterns, how many projects in completion, how many members in a team are using it, how many external users are working with employees?A: No plans currently, especially at the Office 365 admin level, because that may be overwhelming in a large organization.Q2: But I'm guessing you can create a PowerBI report for this... correct?A2: An Office 365 admin can export all tenant data and potentially import it into PowerBI after some massaging but it isn't straightforward. To streamline it we'd have to do some work; please add the ask to the UserVoice forum so that we can gauge interest others may have.Q: Will it in the future be possible to see an overview of the progress of the tasks from a single "Bucket"? This would provide a kind of burn down chart for agile projects.A: Interesting request. We will have to think about it. Concepts like burndowns are more relevant in Project , TFS etc., Could be overwhelming for Information workers.Q: Will there be a way to add dependency between tasks in Planner? Currently tasks are independent of each other and it's only possible to know the number of tasks and their status without knowing which are on a critical path or blocking other tasks from completion.A: If you are getting into heavier scheduling then Project Online may be a better fit - but share your scenarios on the UserVoice forum so we can see if some simple dependencies make sense.Q: You refer us to post questions on UserVoice but Microsoft has been terrible at updating that site. I would love it if you had the same structure as Power BI that have "planned", "started" etc on their replies. I know you are only getting started but if you send people to UserVoice you should be there to greet them.A: Thanks for the feedback - we sure will have some more posts to review after this YamJam!Add your top two feature requests to this thread started by Principal PM Manager Eray Chou and please continue to voice your feedback in the Office 365 Planner group. ................
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