Sharepoint Planner

Microsoft Planner for Office 365 is a sort of a “SharePoint Trello” solution. The planner utilizes a similar, but simplified structure to manage a SharePoint online task list. You create a plan, which is represented as a board with custom columns. Later on, you can rearrange the SharePoint tasks into buckets. SharePoint promotes the intelligent content service backbone that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – and is integrated with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Lists, Planner, Visio and much more. Jan 22, 2019 Aggregating Planner Tasks to SharePoint Using Flow by April Dunnam January 22, 2019 Microsoft Planner is one of the Office 365 Tools that I use pretty heavily. It’s a great lightweight project management tool that helps me organize and see my tasks in a nice Kanban style board. SharePoint Planner is a web part for Microsoft SharePoint. It provides a wall-planner or Gantt Chart type view of the data already in your lists - giving clearer presentation and more flexibility than the built in Calendar and Gantt views. Gantt Chart, Category Chart, and Classic Wall Planner styles.

“I have one SharePoint list with all the Planner tasks (which repeat) and a checklist for each, how can I avoid creating new task for each item with Power Automate?”

The previous post “How to create a checklist in a Planner task with Power Automate” already explained how to create a checklist in a Planner task. But it included only two simple template examples, a SharePoint list and an Excel table. What if you need more complex template? One SharePoint list with multiple tasks with various checklist items that should be created on a regular basis? Two columns, one with the task name (repeated) and the second one with the checklist items?

You can’t simply loop through all the items as it’d create multiple planner tasks, you must preprocess the data first.

The starting point is the ‘Get items’ action to get all the tasks and checklist items from the list. Don’t use any filter.

Get the unique task names

Once you have the items, you should filter out duplicate task names as you want each task only once. To continue with the example above, you don’t want 3x ‘Task_1’ and 2x ‘Task_2’, you want 1x ‘Task_1’ and 1x ‘Task_2’.

Add the ‘Select’ action to your flow, it’ll allow you to select only the task names from the items in the ‘Get items’ output. Put ‘value’ into the ‘From’ field, switch to ‘text mode’, and enter the task name column into ‘Map’.

The ‘Select’ output will be an array with only the task names, but it’ll still contain duplicates. To remove the duplicates you’ll need the union(…) expression. If you enter 2 arrays into union(…), it’ll return the overlapping values. If you enter the same array (in this case the output from ‘Select’) twice into union(…), it’ll return only unique values from the array.

The output of the ‘Compose’ action above will be an array with values ‘Task_1’ and ‘Task_2’ from the example above.

Create the unique tasks

Now, when you’ve got the unique task names, you can create the tasks in the Planner. Add ‘Apply to each’ with outputs from the ‘Compose’ action as the input. As already mentioned, the output will contain only the unique task names at this moment, no duplicates. Be careful to not use the original ‘value’ output from ‘Get items’.

You’ll see a new available dynamic content inside ‘Apply to each’: ‘Current item’. This dynamic content contains the currently processed value from the input array, in this flow the task name. Following the example, in the 1st loop it’ll contain ‘Task_1’, in the second loop ‘Task_2’.

Postgresql dbeaver connect. One use for the ‘Current item’ dynamic content is the task ‘Title’ field.

Get the checklist items for each task

The second use is to get the corresponding checklist items. At this moment you’ve got the array with all tasks/checklist items (output from ‘Get items’), and the current, unique task name. Combining this in the ‘Filter array’ you can filter from all checklist items only the ones for given task. Put the ‘value’ output from ‘Get items’ as the ‘From’ field, and filter only the checklist items where task name column is equal to ‘Current item’ (the currently processed task).

Then you can add another ‘Apply to each’ to process all the checklist items that fit the ‘Filter array’ condition. From this point it’s the same approach as in the original post.

There’re two more things to be careful about though. Firstly, ‘Filter array’ won’t give you dynamic content for the checklist item ID and Title. You can either get it back with ‘Parse JSON’ action, or you can get the values using the expression item()?[‘ColumnInternalName‘]. And secondly, don’t forget to always set the array variable to null expression before you start appending checklist items for the next task.

Full flow diagram

Summary

The Power Automate solution above will allow you to repeatedly create multiple Planner tasks including checklist from a SharePoint list.

The main part here is the work with the array(s). When you ‘Get items’ from a SharePoint list, they’ll be always stored in an array during the whole flow run. You can take some data from the array for further processing, e.g. to get the task names with ‘Select’. But you can always go back to the original full array to get a different part of it, e.g. only the checklist items for selected task in ‘Filter array’.

You should also keep in mind that every time you append data to an array in a loop, you must clear that array before the next loop. You don’t want a single array with all the data, each task in this solution has it’s own checklist.

And if you’re looking for a solution to create just a single task with a checklist, you can ‘lookup’ the desired checklist items instead. This flow will always create all tasks from the ‘template’ list, it doesn’t have any filter on the tasks.

SharePoint project management may be eating away your working time if not utilizing the OOTB SharePoint options, like task management templates, or specially designed third-party tools. The smart approach to this issue can incredibly shorten the whole project planning and production cycle.

In this blogpost, we will highlight some basic features of SharePoint task management.

SharePoint Personal Site

A personal site in SharePoint is the easiest way to keep tracking your tasks and manage them from within one place. You can see an aggregate view of all tasks assigned to you across the entire SharePoint farm, regardless of where a task resides. You can edit a task by clicking on it and being redirected to the site or SharePoint task list, that contains this task.

A timeline view allows you to display certain tasks in a Gantt chart style view, the most popular view for SharePoint task management. This is a convenient way to represent task list sequentially as tasks, subtasks, and milestones with dates. Also, you can designate specific colors and text styles to your tasks.

You can display your tasks in a timeline view by editing the web part properties and checking the “Show timeline” box in the web part settings.

Among the other SharePoint task management options available with personal sites are the following:

Click the checkbox to mark the task as completed.
Click the exclamation point to mark the task as important.
Make a task personal (visible to you only).

Project Site in SharePoint

A SharePoint project site displays every team member’s tasks so that one can view the workflows’ load and status across the whole team. There you might select a view according to your SharePoint project requirements. There available some default view types for a task list: Calendar, Completed, Gantt chart, Late Tasks, and others.

On a SharePoint Project site, you can manage your tasks or other users’ tasks in case you have the relevant permission. A useful option for SharePoint task management is the ability to create subtasks. This is an essential option if you want to display and track a large multi-stage project with many tasks.

Microsoft Project

If your SharePoint task management requires more flexibility, you can import a SharePoint task list to Microsoft Project by clicking the “Open with Project” option in the ribbon.

However, the SharePoint task list will be opened in Microsoft Project outside your SharePoint site. In case you want to perform your SharePoint task management in the SharePoint environment only, you have to search for other tools that enhance the default SharePoint abilities.

Microsoft Planner

Sharepoint Planner Vs Tasks

MS PLanner tasks can be categorized by status or by assigned users. The users assigned to a task receive email notifications. One of the remarkable features of this SharePoint task management tool is the possibility to leave comments and have a conversation with your co-workers right in the related task card.

Sharepoint Online Planner

Third-Party Solutions for SharePoint Task Management

Planner Sharepoint Integration

SharePoint OOTB functionality is not enough sometimes to satisfy multiple requirements from a full-blown project. Specially designed Kanban software might be installed in SharePoint to extend the task management abilities.

Sharepoint Planner Free

Virtosoftware has developed Virto Kanban Board for smart SharePoint task management. This solution was created to support classic kanban methodology, though it is highly customizable to provide extra abilities for rather complex projects.

Virto SharePoint Kanban provides the same options as, e.g. Trello: SharePoint user notifications, custom columns, task comments, task activity tracking, and even more.

Virto Kanban Board is available for SharePoint Online and the on-premises versions.

Sharepoint Planner Calendar

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