Planner

Microsoft has updated Yammer so that new groups use the Office 365 Groups service to manage the identity and membership of the groups. There are far too many “groups” in that last sentence, which kind of illustrates how a surplus of groups might be building up within Office 365.

The Mobile Planner app is another milestone for the Office 365 Task Management Service.

Microsoft Planner added the ability to assign multiple people to a task. It’s a good step, but it’s the first new feature in nine months. That’s curious when you compare to the development cadence of other Office 365 applications.

The latest version of the PowerShell module for Azure Active Directory contains the cmdlets to recover a deleted Office 365 Group (and a plan or a team). We have been waiting for this feature for two and a half years, but maybe the waiting makes the feature all the sweeter…

The Microsoft Teams application is now generally available. Lots has been done to improve Teams since its preview release and Microsoft has made many good updates. Some edges remain for Microsoft to work on, but Teams is now more than a valid competitor for Slack in the chat-based collaboration market.

Teams and Planner are excellent examples of new functionality that Microsoft can create using the toolkit of parts that exist within Office 365. The two applications have excited and delighted customers since their announcement, but the applications are not yet complete. Some challenges exist that Microsoft really needs to take on to round out functionality and capabilities.

Microsoft StaffHub is a new Office 365 application built from bits of Office 365 Groups, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Azure, and Teams. The concept is simple – provide an application to allow the schedules of workers to be managed through a combination of browser and mobile interfaces. It’s an idea that will be popular with some Office 365 tenants, but it’s probably of limited interest to the majority.