Planner has been in development for a long time (in cloud terms). It might be in competition with Excel, because that’s a tool long used for basic project and task management.

Trello has been around for a while and the two applications share many visual similarities, but the big selling point for Planner is its integration into Office 365. In terms of other competition, Planner needs to look no further than its big brother, Project Online, SharePoint, as well as third-party offerings for Office 365 task management, like ActionSpace or Tasks In A Box. You can think of Planner as Microsoft’s version of the Trello application. The feeling that Office 365 Groups are top priority for Microsoft is deepened by the recent worldwide availability to Office 365 enterprise tenants of Planner, a lightweight task-oriented planning application that is tightly linked to Office 365 Groups. The pace of development for Office 365 Groups is impressive and illustrates where Microsoft’s current focus for team collaborative working is, all of which has thrown some doubt over Yammer, the “other” collaboration platform available to Office 365 tenants.

Since then, Groups have received a steady flow of enhancements ranging from the essential-for-adoption ( Outlook 2016 support), interesting-and-useful ( apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile and connectors to harvest information from cloud data sources), to the not-so-good (the flawed integration with Power BI). Microsoft released Office 365 Groups as a new approach to team-based collaboration in October 2014.

Office 365 to do list