A New Planner Apps Arrives to Modern SharePoint Online Sites

As disclosed by Microsoft in the SharePoint Virtual Summit and in the SharePoint Conference North America, Microsoft is releasing an update to the way a Planner Plan can be integrated into a modern SharePoint Online (SPO) site. This update allows to easily add a Planner Plan as a full-page app in a modern SPO site. Bear in mind that this new Planner integration is not available in Communication Sites.

Adding a New Planner Plan to a Modern SPO Site

With the new Planner integration in modern SPO Sites, adding a new Planner Plan to an existing site is a very straightforward process:

• From the site home page, just click on New -> Plan:

Figure 1 — Adding a Planner Plan to a Modern SPO Site

• A “Create a plan” panel is displayed. You can either create a new Plan or just choose an existing one. Provide the name for the new Plan and then click on “Create”:

Figure 2 — Create a Plan Panel

• If you choose to use an existing Plan, then you will be asked to select an existing Plan linked to the underlying Office 365 Group:

Figure 3 — Adding an Existing Plan

In a similar way, by means of the modern Planner WebPart, it’s possible to add to any modern page in the Site and existing Planner Plan or create a new one.

Figure 4 — Existing Planner Plan Added to a Modern SPO Page

• The result we get when adding a new Planner Plan to the underlying Group is a full-page App where we can start creating Planner buckets and add tasks.

Figure 5 — Planner App Showing the New Plan Created in the Modern SPO Site

Working with Tasks in the New Planner App

Once we have created the new Plan, it’s quite easy to start creating tasks and buckets to organize those tasks. Note: Of course, we can also edit existing tasks and buckets. We can change a bucket name or just the details of existing tasks:

• To create a new task in a bucket, simply type a task name, set a due date, and assign the task to one or more site users:

Figure 6 — Adding a New Task to a Bucket

• To edit an existing task, just click on the task name. The task details dialog is displayed. In this task details page, you can update task information.

Figure 7 — Editing an Existing Task

• If we click on the Charts menu in the Planner App, we will see some insights in the performance of the Planner Plan. This is in the form of some charts where we can see the number of tasks by status, the number of tasks per bucket, and the task status or the number of tasks per Plan member.

Figure 8 — Charts View in the Planner App

• Of course, when required, we can change the Group by combo in the App. We can change the visualization of the data in the Planner Plan.

Conclusion

The new Planner App provides an easy way to create new Plans linked to an existing modern SPO site or simply use an existing one. The App provides a full-page experience where users can work with a Planner Plan without having to leave the modern SPO site and browse Planner location in an Office 365 tenant.

Juan Carlos González

Office Servers and Services MVP | Modern Workplace Team Leader