Microsoft has announced several big improvements for Microsoft Planner that it has worked on over the last month. Three of the four improvements apply to its Project Manager agent, an AI-powered virtual project manager designed to streamline and enhance project planning and execution. It helps you to define goals, break goals into actionable tasks, and execute those tasks for you.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced real-time task notifications for the Project Manager agent in Planner in Teams. This lets you know when a task is finished and ready for review or when your input is needed for the agent to move forward. In this update, the Redmond giant is expanding this capability so that you get notified via email. This lets you keep up-to-date with what the agent is doing even when away from Teams.
Another new feature for the Project Manager agent, which is now in public preview, is the ability to generate status reports. For example, you can use this tool to auto-synthesize your plan’s progress, milestones, risks, and next steps, letting your whole team know what’s going on with the project. This is now available in public preview for English users, but additional languages will get it in the coming days.
The last Project Manager agent improvement is that it now supports more than 40 languages, bringing it up to par with Microsoft 365 Copilot - minus Arabic and Hebrew, until later this week. This will allow people outside of the English-speaking world to use Project Manager agent in their native language.
The final change to Planner doesn’t have anything to do with Project Manager agent, it’s a new bulk editing feature to help you boost efficiency. To use it just go to the Grid view of any basic plan and then set the tasks you want to update by selecting and dragging the tasks using the Ctrl + Up or Down arrows. You can use this to update multiple tasks at the same time, whether that be assign tasks, adjust priorities, update progress, or modify start and due dates.
Microsoft used this announcement to also remind users that from August 1, all users will be transitioned from Microsoft Project for the web to Microsoft Planner. Aside from retiring Project for the web, Microsoft will also retire the Project and Roadmap apps in Microsoft Teams. The company said no actions are necessary for this change as all licensing should carry over seamlessly.
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