Later in the year the name changes again to Tasks. “Rather than building a brand-new experience inside Teams, it’s really about evolving Planner and To Do and bringing those existing experiences inside Teams,” Angela Byers, director of product marketing for Microsoft 365, told TechRepublic.Īfter a few weeks, the app will be called Tasks by Planner and To Do, which is one of Microsoft’s typical ‘does what it says on the tin’ names that should make it less of a surprise that your tasks from To Do are showing up. So if you already have it installed, you should get the new features by September, but you will still see the Planner name in the Teams desktop client.
The new Tasks app is really an update to the Planner app, with new features and (eventually) a new name. The Planner app is already available inside the Teams client, but previously it showed a board view of all your Planner tasks, plus new tasks assigned to you in the main Activity feed and the full Kanban board and calendar views if you added a Planner plan to a specific channel as a tab. This approach should also reassure everyone that Planner and To Do aren’t going away in favour of a new Tasks app, because while you can see tasks in the same place, they will continue to have different features depending on the app in which they were originally created. SEE: Office 365: A guide for tech and business leaders (free PDF) (TechRepublic)īut the name for the new way to look at tasks in one place is going to change several times, in an attempt to help people who are familiar with the separate Planner and To Do tools get used to the new option. It includes a new way for firstline workers and personal users to get tasks and some other Planner features, and marks significant progress in unifying tasks across different Microsoft tools and services. The integration of Planner and To-Do into Teams as the Tasks app, announced last year at Ignite, is now finally starting to roll out, creating a single place to see tasks from multiple sources. Even when Microsoft introduced new task management tools - Planner for team tasks and To Do (based on Wunderlist) for individual tasks - that used the Exchange task format from Outlook rather than creating yet another task format, connecting the different task lists meant extra work: installing the To-Do app or Planner app in Teams, or creating Power Automate flows. For many years, Microsoft has had isolated tasks in different systems: Outlook, OneNote, Project, SharePoint and Azure DevOps all had separate task lists with no single place to see everything you needed to do.