Microsoft Rolls Out Planner Project Management App for Office 365 Users

office 2016 product key finder First announced in September, Microsoft Planner is rolling out to a wide swath of Office 365 users starting this week. Microsoft described the new application as a "simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork."

Designed for businesses, schools and other organizational users, Microsoft Planner lets teams create plans for new projects, manage tasks, share files and discuss progress all via a single interface. That puts it in the same category as other cloud-based team planning tools like Asana, Basecamp and office 2016 product key crack office 2016 product key activatio Trello. Microsoft Planner works across desktops, smartphones and other devices.

Microsoft Planner will begin appearing automatically in the app launcher of eligible Office 365 users over the next several weeks, the company said yesterday in a blog post. The new app will be available at no office 2016 product key generator extra cost to subscribers with Office 365 E1-E5, Business Essentials, Premium and Education plans.

User Feedback To Drive New Features

In its blog post, the Microsoft Planner office 2016 product key office 2016 product key card team said the company has been working with Office 365 users around the world to fine-tune the application since a preview of Planner became available in December. The team continues to invite ongoing suggestions through its Planner Feedback Forum, and already has plans to add new features to the tool in coming months based on user comments.

"Some of the new features we plan to introduce over the next few months include the ability to assign a task to multiple users, external user access, plan templates, customizable boards and apps for iOS, Android and Windows," the team wrote in a post on the Office blog.

Among the organizations that have adopted Microsoft Planner are the municipal government for the Portuguese town of Cascais and the public accounting firm Hancock Askew & Co.

"Planner makes use of Office 365 Groups -- so each plan is a group -- and when you create a plan it creates a group," Brian office 2016 product key free download Smith, an engineer for Microsoft Office noted yesterday in a post on Microsoft's project support blog. "The group then supports the collaboration features by providing storage for attachments and also a mailbox for group discussions."

That's likely why Microsoft has been so aggressive in the first place. Given a user demographic that rarely deviates from the default configuration, making Windows 10 anything other than an update that, by default, asks to be installed. This is why Windows 7 and 8.1 systems were shown the "Get Windows 10" advertisements and why the upgrade was promoted from an "optional" update to a "recommended" one. Doing this meant that users would at least be asked if they wanted to upgrade.

Microsoft may have been a little more in-your-face with this, but it's not unprecedented. Smartphone operating systems will similarly prompt when upgrades are available, and even OS X posts small notifications when a office 2016 product key free major new version has been released. Given the scale of Windows 10's changes and the unusual nature of Microsoft offering such an upgrade for free, the size of the in-Windows promotion is arguably warranted.

But automatic installs, if this is indeed what has happened, push things too far. Switching to Windows 10 is too significant and too error-prone for this to be acceptable. Changing the behavior of the X button is borderline malicious. This is the kind of stunt that you would expect of a spyware installer, not an operating system from a company that should know better. Windows 10, or at least its office 2016 product key free list installer, has become little better than malware, and that's something that Microsoft needs to very publicly apologize for and fix.