Do I Use Planner, Project Online, or Azure DevOps?

On October 15th & 16th I participated in the aMS Southeast Asia 2021 event — my first time speaking at this event, which has, in the past, always conflicted with other travels. Excited to finally be able to participate and share some screen time with friends and fellow MVPs, including event organizers, René Modery (@modery) and Rico Ho (@webparts360). Presenting from the home office at 8pm Mountain on the 14th (10am Singapore), my session covered Microsoft’s task management strategy, and specifically addressed the differences between Planner, Project (desktop and online), and Azure DevOps — and scenarios where you may use one over the other. I shared my slides via Slideshare just after my session completed, but you lose a lot of their value without the presentation, so I am happy to share the recording provided by the aMSSEA team.

As I mention during the session, the idea for this presentation came from a customer question. He was trying to figure out whether Planner or Project Online was the recommended path from Microsoft, and then learned that his engineering team had started using Azure DevOps for their source code management, and was confused by the seemingly overlapping features. Microsoft’s official answer to this question is, of course, “it depends.” Hopefully this session helps people to understand the differences between solutions, and which might be the best fit for their task management needs.

Here’s my session abstract:

Do I Use Planner, Project Online, or Azure DevOps?
A review of the 3 primary project and task management platforms offered by Microsoft. We’ll take a look at Microsoft’s efforts to integrate the various task-based capabilities within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, reviewing what is available today, how tasks communicate (and don’t communicate) across workloads, and where Microsoft is going in the future. This session will review these three specific solutions, as well as the current state of task management across the entire Microsoft 365 landscape (Teams, SharePoint, To-Do, Outlook, and more) to help you understand where tasks are created, integrated, and managed end-to-end.

And here’s the entire recording:

 

For those who follow this blog, I penned a post a few weeks back to introduce a forthcoming blog series on all aspects of Microsoft task management (Understanding the Microsoft 365 Task Ecosystem)…and yet have not kicked off the series with my first article on Microsoft To Do. Don’t worry, it is still in the works. I have a ton of notes around the 10 (or more) posts in this series, and have the series blocked out on my content calendar for an early November start.