In fact, document libraries are technically lists, so therefore lists have actually been around in SharePoint since 2001. Similar to Planner, lists in SharePoint was introduced a lot earlier than people realise. Even posing a challenge for those of us who had moved on to Microsoft Teams, because we wanted to get back together with our ex. The difference is that Yammer finally came around and virtually re-invented itself, making up for lost time. Sure, the average user still thought the product was good, but those who scratched beyond the surface quickly realised the shortcomings.

Development and creation of new features was minimal. The product integration was heralded as the next big thing, people like me jumped on the bandwagon full of hope for the future… which never came.īecause the product stagnated.

But then, it started to become clear that this was becoming similar to when Microsoft made Yammer part of the Office 365 suite. But it was designed to be enough, that the average Microsoft 365 user (Office 365 back then) wouldn’t need to look for an external solution.įor a time, things were great. It was never intended to compete with Trello and its clones, never offer the same level of functionality. Microsoft unveiled Planner as an ad-hoc group-based task management tool for the new age. Agile was starting to emerge as a hero, and products such as Trello and Asana were starting to take the spotlight. The world was turning away from the “waterfall” view of managing projects. Microsoft Project was too expensive and difficult to use properly without training, Project Online was providing a cloud alternative but still provided the same challenges and lists in SharePoint had stagnated. We needed a new task management system back then. I’ve been working with Microsoft Planner for many years, since it was originally revealed to the MVP community as “Project Highlander” around 2016. (UPDATED 4th Feb 2022 with additions to the comparison table, removal of the Power Apps line in the table, link to Gantt chart JSON sample for list view formatting, link to a follow-up post showing how to migrate from Planner to Lists)

365 planner