It is purely focused on tasks and their management. Microsoft To Do was initially released in April 2017 and is available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers. (The lack of simultaneous synching will need to be addressed in future updates nobody wants to make “sync tasks” part of their task list.)īefore moving ahead, let us talk names and backgrounds for the apps that will comprise Tasks. That means discovering where Tasks lives in each aspect of Microsoft 365 and knowing where individual and team to-dos can be created, updated, managed – and where they sync and do not sync across apps in Microsoft 365. Since the Microsoft Tasks app will be the designated system for productivity and collaboration, it is important to understand how to access individual actions items (To Do) and collaborative deliverables (Planner) across Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Teams. Right now, although they are visible alongside of each other in the Planner channel in Teams, the tasks generated in To Do and Planner continue to reside in their respective services. Both Planner (aka Tasks in Teams) and Microsoft To Do are available in the same channel and changes made there are synched across all instances of those individual services. That is why Microsoft Teams seems to be the best spot for enterprises to begin building out their own task structure and connectivity. Right now, though, the best implementation of this fully integrated future vision is in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft’s introduction of Tasks in Teams illustrates this goal to bring all tasks, both individual and team items, into full integration across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Creating, sharing, assigning, and managing the tasks that allow projects to reach their completion is even more important to the enterprise now that so much work has moved to cloud-based, collaborative environments.

One of the smarter moves Microsoft has made recently is to collapse its To Do app (based off its Wunderlist buy) and its Planner app (intended for team projects) into one central app, Tasks, which is now available everywhere across the Microsoft 365 framework.Įventually, the ability of enterprise users to have one single pane of glass collecting both individual and collaborative tasks will elevate this aspect of Microsoft 365 to a critical piece of productivity infrastructure.

Using tasks in outlook