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Microsoft Planner vs. Project: Which Should You Use for Team Tasks? 

Microsoft News |

Microsoft offers two similar products in Microsoft 365 for managing team tasks. Which one will work best for your needs? Read on to discover the pros and cons of Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project. 

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Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner helps teams organize their work visually. Users create a plan that can include grid, board, chart, and schedule views to manage tasks, with file attachments stored in SharePoint Online. Each view provides different insights into managing tasks: 

  • Grid view - displays tasks assignable to team members in a log view. 
  • Board view – provides a Kanban view that organizes tasks into buckets such as status. Users can drag and drop tasks between team members and statuses. 
  • Charts - provides several graphs displaying the progress of your tasks. 
  • Schedule - shows a calendar view of your tasks by due date.  

Microsoft Planner Pros

  • Plans are typically created from Microsoft Teams, which makes setup easy.  
  • There are Planner templates available so you can hit the ground running. 
  • The user interface and process to manage tasks are intuitive. 
  • Microsoft 365 subscriptions include Planner, so there is no additional cost. 

Microsoft Planner Cons

  • Plans in Planner do not relate to “projects.” Instead, you can create plans in the app with a project name or from a team within Microsoft Teams with a project title, but Microsoft Planner is otherwise a stand-alone task-tracking application. 
  • There is no Planner rollup to see tasks across multiple plans. 

You can learn more about the app on the Microsoft Planner learning and support page. Or you can access Microsoft Planner on the web here if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. 

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Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project has two versions: Project for the Web (PFTW) and Project Web App (PWA). Check out this article to find out more about these two products. Since PFTW focuses more on task management and is the modern version of Project, we will compare this product to Microsoft Planner.  

When you sign into PFTW, you can create a new project or a roadmap. PFTW stores data in the Microsoft Dataverse as opposed to SharePoint (where Planner stores its data).  

A project in PFTW includes the following views: 

  • Grid – allows you to create a task, assign team members, add schedule information such as start date and duration, update % complete, calculate effort, define dependencies such as start to finish, and add custom columns. 
  • Board - provides a Kanban view that organizes tasks into buckets such as status. Users can drag and drop tasks between team members and statuses. 
  • Timeline – displays the traditional Gantt chart view where users drag and drop dependencies and update tasks from the bars. 
  • Charts - provides several graphs displaying the progress of your tasks 
  • People – shows a Kanban view by team members for managing the status of their tasks. 
  • Goals – provides a way to organize tasks into specific goals. 
  • Assignments – gives a view of team members’ tasks and their hours of effort planned and expended. 
  • Roadmap – shows one or more project tasks in a Timeline view. 

Microsoft Project Pros

  • Tasks reside in projects, giving you a consolidated view of multiple projects in the roadmap view. 
  • You can create projects or roadmaps from within Teams, making setting up easy. 
  • Custom columns can be added to projects to define and categorize tasks further. 
  • Dependencies are available so that you can add logic between tasks. 
  • Managing team resources and level of effort across tasks is easy and intuitive.   

Microsoft Project Cons

  • Microsoft Project might have too much functionality depending on the level of detail and controls you use to track tasks. 
  • PFTW is an additional cost to your Microsoft 365 subscription. 

Final Thoughts on Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project

Cost, quality, and time to market are all factors when evaluating products or services. If we use this criteria to compare and contrast Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project, here’s how they stack up: 

  • Cost – Microsoft Planner is free 
  • Quality – Both products are easy-to-use modern applications. Planner focuses on task management, while PFTW includes scheduling and resource management functionality. 
  • Time to Market – Updates by Microsoft to both products have been slow. 

Summary: 

Microsoft Planner may be the best option if you are looking for a simple task management solution that solely focuses on when a task is due and who is assigned.  

Microsoft Project for the Web (PFTW) might be a better solution if you don’t mind paying more for project-specific task tracking with scheduling and resource capabilities.  

The good news is that both products have a similar UI and can be added to Microsoft Teams, so you could start with Microsoft Planner and then move to PFTW later if you need the additional horsepower. 

Beware of Phishing Attacks This Holiday Season

How-To |

We are all somewhat distracted and more prone to rush to get tasks completed around the holidays as we focus on family and friends and the season. This year with the increase in working remotely and the rapid adoption of Office Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams, attackers are increasingly leveraging these platforms for phishing attacks.

We wanted to highlight a new type of threat occurring more, especially this year, in the hope we can alert you to the risks associated with using cloud services.

A New Phishing Threat to Cloud Services


With this new phishing threat, an attacker compromises a user's account, gains access to their contacts and sends malicious links from legitimate domains. The email may contain an invoice, voicemail, or similar legitimate communication that mimics regular business practices and misleads you into thinking the message has come from a colleague or partner.

After an attacker compromises a SharePoint or OneDrive account, they upload a malicious file and change the account's sharing permissions to "public" so that anyone can access it. This malicious link is then shared with the compromised users' contacts or other targeted individuals. Sometimes the link is a unique redirect URL and so it can be difficult to detect, as it would not appear on any URL reputation repository.

Some attackers have strategically placed malicious content in one compromised account while using a second account – perhaps one belonging to an important or credible individual that one might expect communication from – to send the link. Even if the second tenant's compromised account is discovered, the malicious file hosted in the first tenant would not be taken down. And so, the attack would persist.

Other similarly abused cloud-based services include Sway, Dropbox, Google APIs, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Box.

Be Careful of Phishing Attacks this Holiday Season


These types of scams are difficult to detect and even harder to block or mitigate. Please make sure to remain vigilant and question before trusting any communications, especially during this holiday season. If you have questions about phishing attacks or online security threats, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.

Is Microsoft Yammer a Fit for Your Business?

Microsoft News |

Microsoft Yammer is an enterprise social networking service in Microsoft 365 for internal communications within organizations. Think of it like Facebook, but for your company. Read on to learn more about this communication tool and how you can best use it at your organization.

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 for $1.2B when the frenzy around social media was taking off. The thought was this technology would change how employees would communicate and collaborate across the enterprise. Fast forward eight years, and Microsoft Yammer is still a little-known Microsoft 365 service, at least among construction organizations.

In my opinion, the reason Yammer has not had mass appeal or adoption has nothing to do with the technology lacking. Quite the opposite, the service is very robust and wholly integrated across Microsoft 365. Yammer provides a range of open APIs for integration, many plugins, and options for importing and exporting information. It also offers role-based permissions control as well as to-do lists.

The issue is more with a lack of understanding of what Yammer is and how it differentiates itself from other Microsoft 365 applications. Specifically, two Microsoft acquisitions appear to be in direct competition with Yammer: Skype and Teams.

Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5B. Both consumers and businesses use Skype for video and voice calls, as well as instant messaging. Many companies use Skype for Business (the precursor to Teams) as their primary messaging app, perceiving it to be like Yammer conversations (the core feature of Yammer). With the release of Teams, Microsoft is deprecating Skype for Business in favor of this new universal communications app. Teams also includes chat functionality and is fast becoming the “go-to for everything” application in Microsoft 365.

What Are the Best Features of Microsoft Yammer?

Yammer provides an organized way of communicating with your organization as a whole. You can create conversation (chat) groups for team members to participate in addition to private messages. It allows you to share files from SharePoint Online or those uploaded from your computer. You can create questions, polls, announcements, live events, and even publicly praise your group members. It is, in other words, a very well-designed communications tool. But what stands out for me is Yammer’s ability to easily organize, search, and share all these conversations across your organization. It promises to keep engagement high and conversations flowing.

Ideal uses for Yammer include:

  • Delivering company training sessions
  • Distributing organizational announcements
  • Listing lessons learned
  • Capturing employee suggestions

For construction organizations specifically, you might want to use Yammer as a project-centric chat application because of its robust search and retention capabilities. You could also take advantage of Yammer as an announcement area for project progress and critical milestones, safety goals, value engineering ideas, safety training, and team-building events.

How Does Yammer Fit into the Future of Microsoft 365?

Teams continues to grow in popularity and reach. More and more functionality that was only in Yammer is starting to make its way into Teams. So could Yammer be wholly absorbed into Teams?  I don’t think so because there are some use cases that Yammer addresses that Teams does not. For example, messages in Teams (even public ones) are not searchable or discoverable until you join a team first, making them virtually invisible to non-members. Also, there is no tenant-wide discovery feature for popular or trending conversations in Teams, and even org-wide teams have significant membership limits for many organizations. Not even the new modern SharePoint Communications sites deliver the power of the Yammer conversation model.

I talked about how to select between the various Microsoft 365 collaboration tools in a previous blog post. As I explained, Microsoft structures collaboration in Microsoft 365 around “Loops,” with each application serving a specific communication purpose. If you look at the collaboration applications in Microsoft 365, you can start to see why a user might want to use one tool over the other depending on how you approach your work:

  • Content-centric – SharePoint
  • Organized team-centric – Teams
  • Task-centric – Planner
  • Conversation-centric - Yammer

Ultimately, all of these apps could come together into one collaborative platform, like Teams or SharePoint, but Microsoft announced a new Yammer at the end of 2019; it is the most significant update to Yammer since it launched ten years ago.

The new Yammer, now in public preview as of June 2020, boasts a thorough overhaul of the product. Communities replace Groups. The user interface is fresh and uncluttered, and there are plenty of new features too, such as pinned posts, conversations that can be closed, and the ability to push notifications for polls, praise, and question posts. There are revamped mobile apps for iOS and Android and a new app for Microsoft Teams, called Communities, that brings the full Yammer experience into Teams.

I encourage you to try Yammer out and see if it fits with the other applications you are currently using in Microsoft 365.

Do More with Microsoft 365

Lydon Solutions offers a full range of managed services for Microsoft 365, helping organizations implement and take advantage of everything the productivity platform provides.

If you would like a fully featured Project Management Information System (PMIS) that supports Microsoft 365, check out our flexible Construction Viz solution. You can sign up for a no-obligation consultation and demo today.