SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

This is part 2 for the Microsoft Planner overview, for those of you that missed the first part a link can be seen below:

http://bit.ly/1UD4GEY

In this post we will look at creating a new plan in Planner with some tasks and assignments. From the Planner hub, click New Plan from the left navigation pane:

Complete the new plan form as below:

The form will validate the plan name, email address (used for conversations / discussions), enable the plan to be visible to all the members of the organisation or private – private means only members added to the plan can see it and finally give the plan a description. Click Create Plan and Planner will go off and create your plan:

Once completed you will see your plan:

At this point the plan can be updated with tasks and team members but other options such as conversations and calendars will take a bit longer to be available as this is waiting for the Office 365 group to be created:

Whilst that is provisioning I will create 5 tasks for my plan using the add task option:

I will also set a Due Date:

Then click Add Task. Repeat this process for the required tasks or activities:

Now I will switch to the Buckets view:

Here I will create some new Buckets to group my tasks:

Now I will move all of my tasks into the buckets by dragging the task cards to the correct bucket:

Now I need to add the team members to my plan using the Add Members functionality in the top right corner:

Type the name of the user then you can select the correct user to add:

The team members are now added:

I can now assign the tasks to the team members, to do this click on the task card to load the task detail pop up:

Click the Assign button and select the team member:

At this point I’ve also added a description to the task so the user CPS knows what is required and also as the Office 365 group is now set up I have started a conversation about an issue I have with the current app:

Notice the email notification too for the new comment. Repeat this for all tasks as required:

Switching to the Assigned To view you can easily see who has what assigned:

The next thing to do would be to set start dates for the tasks if needed, this is done on the task details popup:

Repeat this for all tasks as required. I also set some labels for keys tasks:

These are then visible to the right of the task card:

You can also add attachments to the tasks, when you first try to do this the storage might not yet be available as seen below:

Once this is available you can attached a file already in the OneDrive site for this plan or upload a file:

As this is a new plan I need to upload a file:

This uploads the file to the OneDrive storage that is created as part of the Office 365 group for this plan. I’ve set the document to be the preview on the task card to get a nice visual on the card:

I’ve done this for a few tasks:

Planner will take one image / the first page from the uploaded document and use that as a preview.

Also I want to set a new logo for my plan to replace the red square with PM. To do this I navigate to the Group page for my plan by clicking the Conversations link:

This loads:

From here I can edit the Group settings including the logo, just click the current logo and the group properties pane will appear:

Change the logo as required. This might take a while to sync with Planner but once it has completed you will see the updated logo:

That is the basic plan set up and ready for the team members to start work on the tasks and join in any conversations for the tasks. On the planner hub page the project can be added as a favourite to get quick visibility of the plan status:

Planner data can be accessed and edited programmatically using the Graph API, this is currently only in Beta, see the reference link below for details:

http://bit.ly/1Xe7cYz

That’s it for the Microsoft Planner overview, look out for more posts on Planner in the future.