Large section on expansion on the to-do section. This is additions to planner, and it’s spread out everywhere and (with the possible exception of todo in documents) aggregated in one place.
There’s a ToDo app that was born of their acquisition of Wunderlist.
Core tasks are exchange on the back-end, show in outlooks tasks panel. They also appear in the centralized todo list. You can mark emails for follow up as a task, and it tracks back easily to the email.
Planner is getting templates, but unfortunately if you create a copy of a plan (via this template system) it always creates a new team for that plan. The dev team consider this a ‘bug’ and are moving to give the same options as you have when creating a new plan.
Project got a MASSIVE overhaul, and is really Planner + timelines and task dependencies. Educational licenses do NOT have the new version yet; they’re hopeful for Q4 2019 or Q1 2020.
The team is also working on a way to migrate a plan into project; so if you hit a stage of development in a plan where you need dependencies and timelines, you can migrate over. No ETA.
Word, Excel and Powerpoint are also adding a feature in 2020 Q1 to assign tasks to others in-line with existing document comment/markup features (in the right panel in word and powerpoint or in cell comments in excel). I could not get a solid answer in whether or not tasks assigned to you within a document would show in your aggregate “my tasks” list.
Within O365/Sharepoint Modern Experience: There are a LOT of new views and forms customizations and feature adds.
For forms, there is an easy way to show/hide and rearrange the order of fields, and even conditional visibliity (e.g. only show field A if field B has value C).
For lists, you can do conditional formatting on columns (e.g. gradient color based on priority) and on entire rows (e.g. alternating background colors on odd/even rows). This can be done NOW with JSON, and will be done soon for normal people with a UI.
NOTE: This JSON creates HTML structures, so we can do all sorts of fun things like we used to do with HTML outputs of calculated fields, except now it’s supported.
In Power Automate they’ve added new custom approve/reject options, so you can have any # of options.
We should also consider using PowerApps instead of forms, as this is the most feature rich way to collect data (maybe CAS Finance).
We should also consider using PowerApps for some views (maybe DeanDocs … person list left controlling docs list right?)
7/14/2026 is the end of life for SP Designer and Workflows (both 2013 and classic).
Modern view lists now support copy-paste from excel in quick edit in any browser!!!!!
SP Sites, Group sites, Team sites, etc can be built from JSON files for the creation of lists, settings, documents, etc. Those JSON files can be generated from an existing site.
In theory we can also add a flow app to teams and make flow options to generate planner plans from a post. Need to test this.
