Use Planner in SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams

Using Microsoft Planner in SharePoint Online, and adding a tab in Microsoft Teams can really improve your productivity, awareness, as well as making quick decisions when needed, by tracking your project status.

In this blog post, we are going to:

• Create a new plan in SPO using Microsoft Planner,
• Link the SPO site to Microsoft Teams,
• Add the plan as a tab in Microsoft Teams

Of course, this is one way to do things.
We could, instead, create a Team in Microsoft Teams which will automatically create a SharePoint site, etc… But, you may have situations where a SharePoint site is not yet linked to Teams! 😉

Create a Plan in your SharePoint Online site

I have a brand new (modern) site already created, and I’ve added a few members to it.
From the Home page, click on New >> Plan to create a new one.

Add a new Plan

When the blade opens on the right side:

• Choose to create a new plan or use an exisiting one
• If new one (like our scenario), give it a name
• Choose if you wish to have it on the quick launch for easy access
• Click on Create

Create a new plan

Manage Tasks

Once you’ve created your Plan, you can start creating & assigning tasks to members.
Little videos below to help you manage tasks.

Creating & assigning a task

Renaming a bucket

Deleting a task

Link your SharePoint site to Microsoft Teams

If your site is not yet connected to Teams, you should see a little message on the bottom left corner for you to connect.
Click on Create a Team as below, then on “Click here to go to your Team”

Add a Plan tab to Microsoft Teams

Now that we are connected to Microsoft Teams, a General channel has been created, and therefore, a General folder is also in the SharePoint default documents library.
To add our Plan created in SharePoint:

Click on the “+” sign

Choose Planner

Select “Use an existing Plan […]” + choose the plan from SPO and click Save

Our Plan is now added in Microsoft Teams 🙂
From Teams, you can use Planner and the changes will be updated in the SharePoint site as well.

Good to know

• You can add the Plan tab to any channel you want to
• You can only assign tasks to members
• Edit the task(s) to add attachements, checklist items, comments or even labels!
• Use the Charts tab (right side of “Board”) to glance quickly at the status with nice graphs (Completed, Not Started, etc…)
• Using Planner instead of the “Tasks List” app in SharePoint is much more user-friendly and offers nice visualizations/colors with Charts & Labels