Microsoft had announced the rollout of their Tasks in Microsoft Teams for the public, an app that provides a coherent task management experience in your hub for teamwork and brings a better view of both your personal tasks and the team’s tasks.
Tasks app in MIcrosoft Teams is a consolidated product because it pulls together information from other Microsoft task-creation applications, namely Microsoft Planner and To Do. The aim is to have people create tasks across Microsoft 365 applications without engaging in application “context switching” or having to open a separate task application.
Tasks created in Outlook already sync with Microsoft To Do, meanwhile Office will soon support ‘@’ mentions in Excel, Word and PowerPoint. This means project leads can assign task to other users by ‘@’ mentioning them in a document, presentation or spreadsheet, which will then automatically appear in their ‘Assigned to you’ list.
To get the Tasks in the Teams app, click the ellipses in the Teams sidebar and then select Planner. The app is currently called Planner and will remain Planner as they roll out the new Planner experience. It will then change to Tasks by Planner and To Do and finally will be renamed to Tasks.
New Capabilities
Users will have a “My Tasks” space to see their personal tasks, which seem to come from To Do. There’s also a “Shared Plans” space for team projects. Another new feature in Tasks for Teams is a “Task Publishing” capability that “lets companies create tasks at the corporate level and push those tasks to targeted teams across their Firstline Workforce,” the announcement explained.
Microsoft also added a new “Lists” view for Tasks in Teams, which adds to the “Board, Charts and Schedule views from Planner.” Another new capability is the ability to edit a task across both the desktop and Web applications simultaneously.
Office Apps Integration
If all of that weren’t enough, the Outlook e-mail client apparently already has the tasks integration. The “My Day” feature in Outlook includes a To Do tab for managing individual tasks, for instance. Outlook users can also access a “Create a Task” option within e-mails to create tasks on the fly.
Recent To Do tasks also now show up in Outlook Mobile client searches, regardless of where they were originally created.
Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant, will show actions to take based on To Do tasks within Outlook clients.
Outlook’s My Analytics activities review feature has a “View Outstanding Tasks” option to show the tasks that were agreed to over the last 14 days.
Additionally, Excel, PowerPoint and Word are getting the ability to initiate tasks via the “@mentions” message-sending capability
Highlights of Tasks in Teams include:
• Board, Charts, and Schedule views from Planner, plus the new Lists view.
• IT admin controls for enabling or disabling Tasks in Teams for either your entire organization or specific users; setting a policy to automatically pin the Tasks app to the Teams siderail; and hiding My tasks lists for users.
• Graph API and Power Automate integrations for To Do and Planner to surface tasks created in other apps in Tasks in Teams.
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