En esta ocasión os dejo un video sobre el Agente de Microsoft Planner.

En esta ocasión os dejo un video sobre cambios que ha habido en la UX de Planner así como nuevas funcionalidades incorporadas.

Microsoft is introducing a new Board view feature in SharePoint online/Microsoft Lists. This Kanban like Board view allow users to work with list items in a board with swimlanes that represent their current progress. This view is ideal when users want to track items as they move forward in a process or workflow.

• The board view in lists will allow users to drag & drop items through the stages of process or workflow.
• Users will be able to configure which columns from the list are displayed in the cards and in what order.

This feature will roll out both on desktop and web. Currently Microsoft Planner also allows creating Kanban boards using content-rich tasks.

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 85634.

Release Timeline

Microsoft will begin rolling out board view feature in mid-January and expects to complete the rollout in late February (previously early February).

How this will affect your organization

After the feature rollout, you will see the Board as an option during creation of new views for a SharePoint online list / Microsoft Lists. Additionally, there will be a dropdown to choose a column to organize the board by. Presently, the board can be organized by any Choice or Boolean column that exists in the list.

What you need to do to prepare

No action is required to enable this feature. You may consider notifying users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.

A new authorization model is implemented for Planner plans, which will be a ‘shared container-based’ authorization model, where OneDrive and SharePoint Online files can be linked to plans to provide users with access to the plan if they have access to the shared container. This means that file-based authorization for plans will provide streamlined access to roster-backed plans that are connected to one or more SharePoint Online/OneDrive files. Note: Graph API is available only in beta 

For eg: A user with access to a Loop component or meeting notes that is linked to a plan in Planner will be able to access the plan without needing to be added as a roster member and thereby reducing any potential authorization errors that may arise owing to either roster limits or the absence of another user who can grant access.  

When this will happen: 

Standard Release: We will begin rolling out early April 2023 and expect to complete by mid-April 2023.

How this will affect your organization:

The users will have a revised authorization experience for the roster plans. The new authorization model allows users to access roster plans that have been shared with a file if they have access to the file (even if the user is not a direct member of the plan). 

Users of a Planner plan will see an informatory note as “People with access to these files can also access this plan”. 

Users who do not have access to the file (but are roster members) will be informed that a file is providing access to the plan but will not be informed what that file is. 

 What you need to do to prepare: 

There is no action needed to prepare for this change. You may want to notify your users about this change and update any relevant documentation as appropriate.

Message ID: MC537955

The post Plan sharing with file container appeared first on M365 Admin.

Join Steve and Paul for season 3, episode 20 of the Practical 365 podcast - this week we're talking licensing - and it i good news; plus the MTR Windows devices are getting a paint job. But why and how does this affect you? Teams meeting recordings are going to get some useful controls, plus Planner gets some really useful new features that we've both been testing out.

The post Exchange Online gets a useful new feature, Teams Rooms get a lick of paint, Meeting Recording controls improve plus more: Practical 365 Podcast S3 E20 appeared first on Practical 365.

Planner application proved to be a great task management tool for small and lightweight projects that do not need to follow a formal Waterfall project management approach. Of course, as you assign and update tasks on a plan you want to notify the recipients of their assignments. At the same time, when a given user is part of many plans, getting all these emails and notifications might be a bit too much. In this post, I would like to explain how Planner notifications work and how you can tweak them.

What is Planner?

If you are wondering what Planner is, I suggest you check out this article first.

Planer is part of a Microsoft 365 Group

To understand how some notifications work, it is essential to understand the relationship between Planner and Microsoft 365 Group. Planner is an integral part of the Group and does not exist out there in space. To understand this relationship further, check out this article.

Plan (Group) Notifications

If you are the owner of the Plan (Microsoft 365 Group), you can adjust a setting such that an email will be sent to the whole group (Group Distribution List) when a task is assigned or completed.

1. Once in the plan, click three dots > Plan settings
2. Click the Notifications tab, then check the box next to Send email to the group when a task is assigned or completed. Then click Save.
3. This is what the group email will look like (delivered to the Microsoft 365 Group Inbox). Those group emails are not delivered to user’s inboxes, even if the user opted to receive group emails in their Inbox – more on this below.

Personal Notifications

There are also some additional settings individual users (team members) can adjust for themselves as well. Unlike the section above, those personal settings affect just the user logged in.

Task Assignment Emails

1. Once in  a Plan, click three dots > Plan settings
2. The team member can check the boxes next to Someone assigns a task to me or A task assigned to me is later, due today, or due in the next 7 days

Comments on a Task Emails

Anytime someone leaves a comment on the Task, an email is sent to the Microsoft 365 Group Inbox.

Comment on a Task in Planner

Email received by the team members in the Group Inbox or Personal Inbox (if subscribed)

There is no way to disable those emails. However, the user may choose to receive or stop receiving those emails in their Inbox by adjusting the settings in Outlook. I described the mechanism in an earlier article.

The post How Planner Notifications work appeared first on SharePoint Maven.

The Teams meeting video gallery shows active speakers. Now you will be able to page the gallery to see more people with their camera on. Check to see if Serena is still in the meeting. Check if your camera-on audience is still engaged.
What else does this week have in store in the Message Center?

Microsoft Teams Paging on Video Gallery - #261

This week on the 365 Message Center Show

In this week’s show:

— Microsoft Teams Paging on Video Gallery — MC455894
 — Advanced Virtual Appointments in Teams Premium — MC454804
 — Delete or rename files in a channel and in your OneDrive folder in Teams — MC455193
 — Planner’s task assignment e-mail notification design update — MC455515
 — SharePoint admin center: Streamlining management of site information across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups — MC455520

Join Daniel Glenn and Darrell as a Service Webster as they cover the latest messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center.

Check out Daniel and Darrell’s own YouTube channels at:
Daniel — https://www.youtube.com/DanielGlenn
Darrell — https://www.youtube.com/modernworkmentor

Select a podcast app below to open our podcast on your favorite device!

Alternatively manually add our podcast via your favorite app:
https://www.messagecentershow.com/feed.xml

View ALL app options on our website: http://MessageCenter.show

See all the other 365 Message Center Show posts: #365MCS Recap Posts

Originally published at Daniel Glenn.

Microsoft Teams Paging on Video Gallery was originally published in REgarding 365 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently Nick commented on my “How to send an email and create a task in Microsoft Planner?” article, mentioning that I don’t have an article on how to add all email attachments to Planner, so today we’re going to solve that. The idea is simple. We get an email with attachments, and we want to add all of them to a Microsoft Planner as attachments to a task. Let’s see how to add all email attachments to Planner using Power Automate.

The trigger

In order not to process all emails that we get and add them to Planner, we’re going to add a prefix to the header of the email to indicate Power Automate that only those should be processed. Also, we’ll add a filter to the “When a new email arrives” trigger to ensure that the Flow will only fire for the emails we want to process. This way, we don’t need to add any more filters to the Flow, and we will save Flow runs that are important if you’re using a free account and stricter limitations on how many Flows can be run. Also, it’s a lot easier to debug since the history will only contain items we intended to add to the process and not all emails we received.

Here’s what the trigger will look like:

In our example, we’re adding the string “[task]” to ensure that only these emails are processed. Also, I’m checking the “Only with Attachments” to “Yes” because I only want to process emails with attachments. Still, in your case, you can process all emails you want to add to Planner and, optionally, add the attachments if they exist. It’s up to you how you want to do it.

Finally, there’s the “Include Attachments” tag. I will keep it disabled because even if you enable this feature, Flow (at the time of writing this article) won’t fetch the attachments correctly. I go into detail in this article, but you need to know that you need to fetch the articles separately using the “Get email” action.

Getting all attachments

Now that we have the trigger properly configured let’s look at how to get the attachments. As mentioned before, we get the attachments by using the “Get email” action, like this:

Notice that we’re using the “Include Attachments” as “Yes” to get the attachments’ contents.

Saving all attachments

Now that we have all attachments, we need to save them somewhere. This is because Planner won’t store the files, so we need to upload the files to a location (OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, for example). Although it looks like Planner has the files attached, what it will do is upload the files to the root of the SharePoint documents default library if the plan was created there, or if you created it in Teams, for example, it would upload to the root of the document default library there as well.

I don’t like this behavior, and it’s not consistent with Microsoft Forms , where it creates a new folder called “Apps” > “Microsoft Forms” and then creates a folder per Form. This way, things are nice and organized, and the files won’t pollute your root directory. Let’s look at one where I created only a few tasks and see what it looks like:

After a few hundred tasks, the document library would be unusable because it will have a huge number of files, so we’ll see in the steps below how to solve that.

As mentioned before, since the Planner won’t store the files, we need to save them somewhere to be referenced in the Planner’s task. We have two ways to do it:

1. According to Microsoft, the “correct” place is where you upload to the document library where the plan was created.
2. Your OneDrive for Business, where you can organize them properly but need extra action to ensure that the attachments are visible to everyone.

Let’s take a look at both approaches.

Save to the “correct” place

We can use a simple “Apply to Each” action and the SharePoint “Create file” action to save the file. Here’s what it looks like:

With this, we’ll save all files for that email in the default folder, defined in the previous example as “Documentos Partilhados”, but depending on the site’s language, you’ll see a different name.

Since we’ll be fetching a link, you can define the path that you want to save them. Take this opportunity to consider where the files should be to keep things organized. Think as well that no one should be able to remove them, to avoid issues in the task.

OneDrive for Business

We can do it with a simple “Apply to Each” action with a “Create File” action like this:

Notice that we’re using OneDrive for Business “Create file” action to save the files into a temporary location before we can add them to Planner. You can and should pick a better place for your files so that you can keep things organized.

Prepare the attachments

Now that we have the attachments uploaded, we need to prepare them to upload. We will use the data in future actions, but we must keep track of the attachments uploaded to add them to the task. We can use the same “Apply to each” action to keep track and an array variable to keep the data. But what data do we need? We can get that information from the action we’re going to use. The Planner “Get task detail” action, by adding some dummy data and using the toggle like this:

Now we know that, for each attachment, we need:

[
  {
    "alias": "alias",
    "resourceLink": "https://manueltgomes.com/",
    "type": "Other"
  }
]

Of course, the “resourceLink” won’t be my website, and the “alias” won’t be called “alias”. This is an excellent way to understand what we need. So let’s add a variable and when we get a new attachment, let’s add it to the variable. You can use the “Initialize Variable” action as follows.

Don’t forget to pick “Array” otherwise; it won’t work.

Now let’s update the variable. I’ll split it up into two subsections depending on your choice in the previous section:

SharePoint

If you picked SharePoint, then you can use SharePoint’s “Create sharing link for a file or folder” to get the link to the file like this:

Now let’s use the “Append to array variable” action to build the previous object like this:

We’re using the file’s name as the alias to display it in Planner’s task and the link to the file we got from the previous action.

OneDrive for Business

The OneDrive for business strategy will be the same, but the action will be adjusted to get the link from OneDrive for Business by using the “Create share link” like this:

Now let’s use the “Append to array variable” action to build the previous object like this:

We’re using the file’s name as the alias to display it in the Planner task and the link to the file we got from the previous action.

Create the task

Now that we have the files saved, let’s create the task. This is the most straightforward part of the Flow since we have a “Create Task” action. Here’s an example:

In the example above, I’m adding the subject as the title of the task, but you can use something else that makes sense.

Add the attachments to the task.

Now that we have a task let’s add all email attachments to Planner. It’s impossible to create a task with attachments in one step, so we need to use the “Update task details” action. As we’ve seen before, we can use the “References” to add attachments, but we need to prepare the array’s contents to add it as a reference. To do that, we need three functions. The JSON, concat, and join functions. Here’s the complete formula:

json(concat('[',join(variables('ATTACHMENTS'),','),']'))

It may look complex, but it’s not. Let’s explore each section from the inside out:

1. Join – will transform the array into a string separated by the character we define (in our case, “,”).
2. concat – will generate a string from multiple strings. We want the final result to be an array, so we need to add them to the string.
3. JSON – will convert the string to a valid JSON. We need to provide a JSON to the “Update task details” action , so we need to convert the string; otherwise, we’ll have issues.

Now we only need to add it to the “Update task details” action like this:

That’s it. The task will be created with all attachments.

Final thoughts

It may look like many steps, but it seems much more manageable when you break them down into smaller pieces. I like this approach because we can automate the process of creating tasks and, at the same time, add all email attachments to Planner. It’s a huge time saver for you and your coworkers in case they know where to send the emails and the format. 

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

This topic is dear to my heart as I am a huge fan of Planner Application. Planner was not necessarily spoiled with a flood of new features like we are accustomed to with Teams, SharePoint, and other applications. So any new capabilities/new features within Planner are welcome and celebrated. One feature we recently got was the ability to create recurring tasks in Planner. So let me explain how they work.

Background

Up until now, we could only create one-time tasks. However, sometimes you have tasks that need to be recurring (occur regularly). For example, you need everyone on the team to submit project updates/Project Status Reports to the Project Manager every Friday and want to make sure this task appears in a Project plan and is visible to all the project members. So in this post, I would like to explain how to achieve recurring tasks in Planner.

How to create recurring tasks in Planner

1. Create a task like you normally would in Planner
2. Once the task is created, click on it to edit it, and you will notice a new field called Repeat. Click on it and choose the recurring frequency. Your choices are: Does not repeat (default), Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, and Custom (where you can assign your own recurring frequency scenario).
3. Choose the desired recurring frequency (i.e., Weekly)

How Recurring tasks appear in Planner

Board View

In a Board View, the recurring task will appear with a “recurring” symbol next to it. It will only show one upcoming instance (next due date only, not all instances at once).

Schedule View

If you opt for the Schedule View, which shows the tasks overlayed over the monthly calendar, it will show all the tasks instances.

How to complete recurring Planer tasks

If you click on a recurring task and mark it completed, it will only complete the next upcoming instance, not the task series. For example, I had a recurring task set for every Friday, and the next Friday date was December 2, 2022. I marked it completed, and it left the task on the Board, and changed the due date to the following Friday, December 9, 2022.

How to stop recurring Planner tasks?

Since marking recurring tasks completed just completes the upcoming instance, how do we then stop them completely? There are two options available:

Option 1: Stop the recurrence

The first option to get rid of recurrence would be to set the repeat field to the “Does not repeat” option

Option 2: Delete the task

Another option you have is to delete the task.

Once you choose “Delete” above, it will ask you whether you want to delete just the next upcoming task instance or the whole series. If you choose “This and all future tasks in series,” it will only delete upcoming recurring tasks but will leave the completed instances from the past on a Board/Plan.

The post Recurring Tasks in Planner – how they work appeared first on SharePoint Maven.