A decade of continuous innovation

Since its launch a decade ago, Office 365 has grown to over 300 million commercial paid seats. Along the way, we have continuously re-invested to meet the changing needs of our customers. Four years ago, we introduced Microsoft 365 to bring together the best of Office, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). That same year we added Microsoft Teams as the only integrated solution where you can meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes—right in the flow of work.

In fact, since introducing Microsoft 365 we have added 24 apps¹ to the suites—Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer, and Whiteboard—and have released over 1,400 new features and capabilities in three key areas.

1. Communication and collaboration. Microsoft Teams is the new front end across work, life, and learning for more than 250 million monthly active users. We launched Teams in 2017 as the only integrated solution where you can meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes—with the power of the Office apps—all within the flow of work. In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including Together mode, background effects, large gallery view, raise hand, live reactions, breakout rooms, live captions with speaker attribution, and Fluid components, just to name a few.

We introduced a new category of collaborative applications in Teams, empowering people and organizations for hybrid work through deep integrations with Power Platform, Whiteboard, Lists, Planner, Shifts, Forms, and SharePoint. Companies like Adobe, Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday have built apps that deeply integrate with Teams, bringing business processes and functions directly into the flow of work.

We continue to innovate on both real-time and asynchronous collaboration. We introduced real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint desktop apps while a growing set of capabilities like @mentions, assign tasks, modern comments, and auto-save have streamlined the collaboration experience. We’ve added and expanded OneDrive cloud storage and the Exchange Online mailboxes.

2. Security and compliance. The cybersecurity landscape is more complex than ever. With the accelerating volume, sophistication, and scale of cyberattacks, security and compliance are a priority for every organization. Since we first introduced Microsoft 365, we have added new attack surface reduction capabilities to help organizations defend against ransomware and other threats. We have added capabilities like data loss prevention (DLP) for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption to help keep important data within the organization. And we have added powerful compliance capabilities that help organizations reduce risk and respond to increasing regulatory requirements such as Content Search, eDiscovery, and core Litigation Hold. Built-in mobile device management (MDM) and other management tools like Microsoft Endpoint Manager help admins support remote and hybrid workforces.

3. AI and automation. Over the past decade, we have infused AI capabilities across our productivity and collaboration applications to help everyone achieve more. Across Microsoft 365, we have introduced AI-powered innovations to help users be better writers, designers, and presenters. Cloud-powered AI now automatically creates maps, charts, and tables in Excel, and sorts email and removes clutter in Outlook. And AI-powered real-time translation, captions, and transcription make collaboration and communication more accessible and engaging for everyone.

Extending audio conferencing capabilities

And today, we are announcing that we will add unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings across our enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites over the next few months. Even as cloud connectivity increases, we know that people join Teams meetings while they are on the go or struggling with a bad internet connection. Currently included with Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, we have come to see dial-in as an important part of the complete Teams experience. Available with subscription in over 70 countries and with interactive support in 44 languages and dialects, unlimited dial-in provides peace of mind that users will be able to join their Microsoft Teams meeting from virtually any device regardless of location.

New pricing

The pricing changes we are announcing today will go into effect in six months. On March 1, 2022, we will update our list pricing for the following commercial products: Microsoft 365 Business Basic (from $5 USD to $6 USD per user), Microsoft 365 Business Premium (from $ 20 USD to $ 22 USD), Office 365 E1 (from $8 USD to $10 USD), Office 365 E3 (from $20 USD to $23 USD), Office 365 E5 (from $35 USD to $38 USD), and Microsoft 365 E3 (from $32 USD to $36 USD). These increases will apply globally with local market adjustments for certain regions. There are no changes to pricing for education and consumer products at this time.

As leaders around the world look to empower their people for a more flexible, hybrid world of work, it’s clear that every organization will need a new operating model across people, places, and processes. We’re committed to building on the value we’ve delivered over the past decade to continuously provide innovation that helps our customers succeed and thrive today and well into the future.

¹At launch in June 2011, Office 365 included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Lync, Exchange, and InfoPath. We’ve since expanded to add other apps – in whole or in part – and entirely new capabilities including: Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, Teams, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard, and Yammer.

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Here’s a look at what’s new in May.

Updates from Microsoft Build to help develop people-centered experiences with Microsoft 365

At Microsoft Build this month, we announced several new capabilities in Microsoft 365 to help developers create people-centered, cross-platform experiences.

Tap into your organization’s collective knowledge with Microsoft Search—We announced the general availability of Microsoft Search, an intelligent enterprise search experience that delivers a unified, consistent search experience to help you discover relevant people, content, commands, and activities across all the Microsoft 365 experiences you use daily. Wherever you’re working across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Search can help to complete a task, pick up where you left off, or discover answers or insights. The new Microsoft Search experience is available to all Microsoft 365 users now. To get started, try searching for me in Office.com or my documents in Bing.com.

Derive deep insights about effective work patterns with Microsoft Graph data connect—We also announced the general availability of Microsoft Graph data connect, a service that helps organizations bring together productivity data from the Microsoft Graph with their own business data and derive deep insights about effective work patterns. Microsoft Graph data connect is available through Workplace Analytics.

Modernize your command-line app experience with the new Windows Terminal—In addition, we announced the preview of Windows Terminal, a new feature-rich terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells, including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming and styling, and more. You can get started with the open source code on GitHub; public previews will be released to the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 this summer.

App updates to help people do their best work

This month, we introduced capabilities to help you get more done—including updates to SharePoint and the OneNote, Yammer, and Microsoft To-Do apps.

Deliver an intelligent intranet and build employee engagement—This month at the SharePoint Conference, we announced several new app updates coming this summer. SharePoint home sites deliver a new way for you to bring together news, events, content, conversations, and videos to deliver an engaging “landing page” experience that reflects your voice, your priorities, and your brand. With the upcoming Yammer question and answer feature, you can ask a question and then you or a group admin can mark the best answer. And soon you’ll be able to securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app.

Reduce eye fatigue with Dark Mode in OneNote for Windows 10—OneNote for Windows 10 now offers Dark Mode, giving you a darker canvas and adjusted color scheme to reduce eye fatigue or simply have a change in (screen) scenery. Dark Mode is now available for Office Insiders. Additionally, you can now send an email in Outlook directly to your OneNote for the Windows 10 app. To get started, get or update your OneNote for Windows 10 app.

Improve your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration with MyAnalytics—A new MyAnalytics experience delivers outcome-oriented insights to help you make progress in four key areas: network, collaboration, focus, and wellbeing. For example, insights that previously showed you the hours you spent on email, chats, calls, and meetings outside your working hours over the past week now show you the number of days you successfully disconnected after work over the past month. That way, you can set goals and build habits that help you achieve more quiet days. This new experience is generally available to Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Office 365 Enterprise customers who have MyAnalytics as part of the E5 plan, as an add-on to E1 and E3, or with Workplace Analytics.

Add data to Excel directly from a photo with your iOS device—Using the Excel app on your iOS device, you can now take a picture of a printed data table and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This image-recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter that data. This capability works across 21 languages and is now available for the Excel app on both Android and iOS.

Create engaging videos with Microsoft Forms in Microsoft Stream—You can now seamlessly add quizzes, forms, or polling directly into Microsoft Stream videos. The Forms integration into Microsoft Stream helps presenters interact with their audience and gives them a way to solicit feedback and measure participants’ comprehension. To get started, click Add a Microsoft Form on the Interactivity tab in Microsoft Stream. In addition, you can also now securely record, upload, and share video from the Microsoft Stream mobile app. Download the latest Microsoft Stream mobile app for iOS and Android to get started.

Make tasks more visible across Microsoft 365 with Microsoft To-Do and Planner—This month, we announced that To-Do integrates with Planner. Now, you can see all your tasks across Microsoft 365 in To-Do, including flagged emails in Outlook and tasks assigned in Planner. View your tasks, deadlines, and details, and plan to get more done throughout your days. To get started, update your To-Do app and click Show List when prompted to Track tasks assigned in Planner.

Streamline records management and access control

New privacy controls allow you to meet compliance obligations and efficiently manage access requests at enterprise scale.

Streamline records management and monitor inappropriate conduct—Several new Advanced Data Governance capabilities help you streamline compliance requirements. You can now use native connectors to import non-Microsoft 365 data—such as data from Facebook and Twitter—into the Microsoft cloud for archival purposes. A new records management solution helps you easily manage business, legal, and HR records in a single location. Lastly, a new machine learning classifier helps you automatically identify offensive language across Exchange email, Microsoft Teams, and select third-party sources. For subscribers of E5 or Advanced Compliance add-on licenses, explore the new capabilities in the Office 365 Security & Compliance center today.

Govern access rights with powerful compliance and auditing controls—We recently announced the public preview of Azure Active Directory (AD) entitlement management. This new solution helps remove barriers to internal and external collaboration by automating employee and partner access requests, approvals, auditing, and review for Office 365, thousands of popular SaaS apps, and any line-of-business app integrated with Azure AD. The feature is available for preview today for users who have Azure AD Premium P2 or EMS E5 licensing. To get started, visit the Azure portal.

Other updates

• The Yammer conversations web part for SharePoint is now generally available, enabling you to integrate conversations from any Yammer group, topic, user, or home feed with your SharePoint pages, news articles, or SharePoint site.
• OneDrive differential sync now supports all file types, helping you accelerate sync and reduce network utilization by only syncing the part of files that have been changed.
• Microsoft Authentication Libraries .NET is now generally available, making it easier than ever for developers to securely sign in and authenticate any Microsoft identity, from your own APIs to Microsoft Graph.
• Windows Hello now has FIDO2 certification, furthering our journey to eliminate passwords. Developers can now leverage standards-based protocols and devices to enable easy, secure authentication to online services using face or fingerprint.
• A new app registrations experience in the Azure portal is now generally available, improving the developer experience and making it simpler to configure and manage all your apps that sign in to Azure AD accounts and personal Microsoft accounts.

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The gig economy, which includes freelancers, consultants, contractors, and solopreneurs, is on the rise. According to Staffing Industry Analysts, the total spent on gig work in 2015 was $792 billion. Experts believe that within 10 years a larger proportion of the U.S. workforce will participate in the gig economy. In addition, according to Field Nation, 86 percent of independent workers intentionally choose freelancing.

The implications for enterprise companies are profound. To thrive in a highly competitive environment with rapidly changing technology and customer needs, enterprises must be agile and adapt to new business models to get work done with external talent. While adding on-demand freelance talent to the mix offers measurable results in speed and efficiency, the path to transforming existing policies and processes is largely undefined.

Our launch partner for this toolkit is Upwork, one of the largest online global marketplaces with over 375,000 freelancers in over 180 countries. We specifically are partnering with Upwork Enterprise, their end-to-end compliance and freelance talent sourcing solution.

The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit offers solutions for the main friction points enterprises encounter when deploying a freelance program, including: internal communications and awareness, team-wide collaboration, data analytics, and workflow automation.

Internal communications and awareness

One of the major challenges of launching an enterprise freelance program is driving awareness and education among internal stakeholders and adopters. Employees need a place where they can get started to learn how the program works, access required training, and review best practices for engaging with freelancers.

Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit solves for this with the SharePoint communication site template—a “one-stop shop” for program details to help accelerate freelance adoption and onboarding, including:

• Repository for relevant documentation and presentations about the program.
• Use cases to show employees the kinds of projects they can get done with freelancers.
• FAQs seeded with the top questions from enterprise employees.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the SharePoint expert talent pool.

See our SharePoint communication site infographic to learn more.

Team-wide collaboration

The nature of enterprise freelance projects requires team members to collaborate on multiple files, manage varied tasks, and communicate across time zones. To keep cross-functional, multi-geographical teams moving in the same direction, the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit provides guidance around using Microsoft Teams as a powerful hub for teamwork that brings chats, meetings, calls, files, and apps into one shared workspace.

With Teams, enterprises can manage their freelance communication and collaboration needs, specifically through:

• Communication—Public and private teams for members to engage in discussion.
• Task management—One place to track progress and align each team member’s workflow via integration with project management tools like Microsoft Planner.
• File storage—One place to store shared files and retrieve them through intelligent search.
• External guest access—The ability for external users worldwide to collaborate in all aspects of freelance projects through the free version of Teams.
• Security—External guest access to project-specific teams keeps your information safe without giving wholesale access.

See our Teams infographic to learn more.

Data analytics

A major challenge in scaling an enterprise freelance program is capturing, tracking, and communicating performance KPIs. The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit leverages Microsoft Power BI, a business analytics service that deliver insights by collecting real-time data from multiple sources, simplifying data prep, and producing customized, easy-to-understand reports and dashboards.

Power BI helps enterprise program managers to:

• Make data-driven decisions.
• Compare freelance program results to conventional staffing solutions.
• Identify the teams within your organization currently leveraging freelance talent by discipline type to help identify future opportunities within your company.

To enhance the core functionality of Power BI for a freelance environment, the freelance toolkit offers:

• A Power BI template with sample visualizations.
• A Power BI connector to pull data from disparate sources into dashboards.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the Power BI talent pool.

See our Power BI infographic to learn more.

Workflow automation

An enterprise freelance program requires provisioning, compliance, and monitoring, all while providing a frictionless process for your employees. To reduce the need for manual completion of repetitive tasks, Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit uses Microsoft Flow to create automated workflows between apps and services that send notifications, synchronize files, and collect data.

For example, Microsoft Flow can help business decision makers automate the following scenarios:

• Employee training and compliance. By visiting the freelance program SharePoint communication site, employees can sign up for the pilot by completing a compliance training video supported by Microsoft Stream.
• Internal community signup. After an employee completes the compliance training video, the employee is automatically added to an internal Teams channel where employees can collaborate with others who are part of the program and share experiences.
• Upwork account creation. After the employee is added to the Teams channel, their account information, which includes their name and email address, is sent to Upwork for account creation on their platform, so they can start posting jobs on the platform.

In addition to core Microsoft Flow functionality, the freelance toolkit offers:

• Case studies to show how you can use Microsoft Flow within an enterprise freelance program.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the Microsoft Flow talent pool.

See our Microsoft Flow infographic to learn more.

Our journey and what we learned

Like many of our customers, Microsoft is also in the process of navigating how to responsibly weave freelance engagements into our enterprise environment. Over the past year, we completed over 2,000 freelance projects across writing, research, video editing, translation, design, and data science—spanning 25 internal teams and hundreds of employees.

But getting to this point was not easy—we had to internally transform ourselves, and we needed to build an infrastructure that could support the complexities of an enterprise freelance program. This led us to develop the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit, which combines our leading enterprise productivity apps with curated tools, templates, and best practices to address the specific needs of enterprise freelance programs. The work has paid off. To date, we’ve seen measurable cost and time savings.

Get started

Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit is available for no additional cost as part of an Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription. Learn more about Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit and a Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription.

Please note: Each enterprise will need to evaluate and determine its own needs—including such things as data handling and compliance requirements—and should use their existing Microsoft 365 investments they determine appropriate.

Learn more about the freelance toolkit journey with Upwork.

The post Introducing Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit—a solution to launch and scale your freelance workforce appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Over the last few years, the basic organizing concept for work—the project—has changed significantly. Once a well-defined set of tasks, people, and milestones, today’s projects take on many shapes and sizes. They can be formal or ad hoc. They can last a few hours or go on for years. They can be assigned to a small group or cut across many large organizations.

As a result, whether we realize it or not, we have all become project managers. And to stay on top of the ever-shifting requirements of our day-to-day jobs, we need tools that are simple enough for anyone to use, flexible enough to support any project type, powerful enough to handle initiatives of any size, and transparent enough to provide visibility across the organization.

Modern work management

Introducing modern work management with Microsoft Project. It all starts with Home, a new service that allows you to see and manage all your projects in one place. From Home, you can easily create projects using the new project management service. Versatile by design, this new service is designed to support any role, skill level, or project type. These new Project services are born in the cloud, so teams can always access the same data—no matter where they are or what device they’re using. And they include a comprehensive set of capabilities, including resource and financial management and time and expense tracking. Future releases will allow customers to connect the full power of the Project desktop app to the service.

Work is happening across your organization all the time, and it can be hard to keep track of the details. The new Roadmap service will give you a cross-functional, big picture view of all the work in process. With Roadmap, it doesn’t matter whether your teams are using Microsoft Project or Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS). You can create timeline views of multiple projects—complete with key dates and milestones—so that all the work is visible. And in future releases, we’ll add support for Planner and third-party services like Jira, making Project your one-stop-shop for managing work across the organization. Roadmap is the first capability of Portfolio, a set of program and portfolio management services designed to be simple, visual, and intuitive.

The power of the Microsoft platform

We’ve built these new Project services to take advantage of the strengths of the broader Microsoft platform. In fact, all three new services are built on the Microsoft Common Data Service for Apps platform. This solid foundation provides a long list of benefits, including access to PowerApps and Microsoft Flow for custom business solutions and integration with Power BI for advanced analytics and reporting.

What’s next?

These new services will be introduced in a series of releases. Home is generally available today, the first release of Roadmap will be available early next year, and the first release of the new project management service will be available in the first half of next year. All three services will be packaged as a part of the Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions, so current subscribers can take advantage of the new capabilities at no additional cost. And while these new services will become our primary project management services over time, customers who are already using Project Online can continue to do so with confidence. We are committed to your success no matter what Project service you choose to use.

We’re very excited to see what individuals, teams, and organizations will achieve with these new services in Microsoft Project! If you have questions or want to learn how to get more out of your investment in Project, you can find more details in this Tech Community blog, or contact your Microsoft representative.

The post A new vision for modern work management with Microsoft Project appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here is an overview of the four new features.

• Schedule view—Meet deadlines, plan ahead, and understand project status with the ability to view your task schedule. In addition, weekly and monthly task views allow drag-and-drop scheduling. Read the support article for more details.

• Group and Filter options—The Group and Filter options in Planner give you deeper insights into your tasks to help you meet key deadlines. For example, filter your tasks by due date to better understand approaching deadlines. Or use the Group feature to view tasks that have not been started, so you can prioritize your work.

• Due date notifications—Receive an email notification summarizing tasks due in the coming week—and stay on top of your approaching deliverables.

• iCalendar format feed (coming soon)—Make better scheduling and time-management decisions by publishing tasks to your calendar. By adding your tasks to your Outlook calendar, you’ll never lose track of current and upcoming tasks—helping you meet your deliverables.

These features have been among the top requests on the Planner UserVoice forum. Schedule view, Group and Filter, and Due date notifications are now available to all Office 365 subscribers. Outlook calendar integration via the iCalendar format feed is rolling out soon. We look forward to your comments and feedback. Feel free to submit feedback through the Planner UserVoice forum. Visit Planner now!

New to Planner?

There’s never been a better time to start using Planner! With these new capabilities, Planner is a complete solution for task and work management. Planner is part of the Office 365 productivity suite and is fully integrated with the other Office 365 applications. And if you’re already using Microsoft Teams, you can host a Planner Plan inside your Teams workspace, so everybody can collaborate in one place. You can also link a Planner Plan to a task in Microsoft Project Online, so your team can track tasks and work details in Planner even when that work is part of a larger Project plan being tracked in Project Online. Visit Planner to learn more.

—The Planner team

The post Conquer time with new features in Microsoft Planner appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

You can now include content from apps—like a news article—directly in a conversation.

Use your favorite apps in new ways in Teams

Teams brings together everything a team needs in one place. You can integrate the apps and services you need, including Office 365 apps like Excel, and ones from our partners, including Trello, InVision, and SurveyMonkey.

Today, we’re introducing new ways you can use apps in Teams:

Include information from an app in a conversation—Now you can have a conversation about content from an app without the need to include a screenshot or a hyperlink to the information. In the same way that you can add an emoji or GIF, you can now bring information from apps into a chat or channel message with a simple click. For example, you can search for a specific task in Trello, a work item in Wrike, or a weather forecast, and include an interactive card with that information into a message.

Include information from an app, like Wrike, in your conversations.

Access a personal view of your apps—The new personal apps space makes it easy for you to access the apps you care about and see all the items that you have been assigned to across apps, like tasks in Planner, issues in Jira Cloud, or your filters or pull requests in Bitbucket Cloud. You can also easily see items you have recently accessed, such as OneNote notebooks or videos from Microsoft Stream.

Here you will also find Who—a new app powered by the Microsoft Graph—which allows you to search for people in your organization by name or topic. To access your personal apps space, click the … in the left navigation menu.

Access your personal apps space in Teams.

Add Microsoft Stream to your personal apps space to watch videos uploaded by your coworkers.

Discover apps for Teams in the new Store—We made it easier to search and discover apps and services available in Teams in the new Store. Now you can search for apps by name, category (such as Project management or Analytics and BI), or integration type (such as Bots, Tabs, or Connectors), and then choose to surface in your personal app view or in a specific channel in Teams.

Discover apps and integrations in the new Store.

Command apps, take quick actions, and search—all from the command box

Search is one key way people navigate Teams to get to the information they’re looking for. We integrated commanding with search and moved the command box to the top of the screen, so you can now command apps and take quick actions right from the box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files, and apps.

Command apps from the command box—We’re rolling out the ability to query or command an app right from the command box. Starting today, you can search for information in an app, such as an image in Adobe Creative Cloud or a news article, and easily insert a specific result into a chat or channel conversation. Over time, we’ll add more command functionality, like the ability to create a task in your project management app or start a build in Visual Studio Team Services. Simply type @ into the command box to display the list of apps you can query and command.

Take quick actions with slash commands—Slash commands are shortcuts you can type in the command box to quickly perform tasks or navigate Teams. For example, you can use a slash command to set your status to “away,” add a user to a team, or call a coworker. To get started with slash commands, type / to see the list of commands currently available.

Use slash commands to take action quickly in Teams.

Let us know what you think!

These features are rolling out starting today, and you can expect to see them in your Teams client shortly. Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your ideas via UserVoice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make Teams even better.

—The Microsoft Teams team

The post New ways to use apps and get more done in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

How can your company or department support different work styles without losing the power of a centralized project management system? With agile in Project, project managers and teams can choose the methodology that makes sense for the project at hand, including: agile, waterfall, hybrid, or task-oriented. The integration of Project with Microsoft Planner lets you connect Project tasks to a Planner plan and track detailed work in Planner.

Use agility in your Project portfolio

With agile in Project, you can use agile methods to track your projects in Project Online Desktop Client. You can create new agile projects or apply agile views to your existing waterfall projects. You can track your projects using Scrum and Kanban methodologies, including viewing task boards, creating backlogs, and tracking sprints, as well as viewing reports on agile statistics.

For more details, see “Use agile in Microsoft Project.”

Manage Project task work in Planner

With the new integration between the Project Online Desktop Client and Planner, task owners can track granular task details in a lightweight tool. Project managers retain control over the project’s work breakdown structure and can easily view the detailed work being done against a task.

This capability may also be used to reduce complexity of project plans in Project, enabling the project manager to control a smaller number of tasks while task owners can further break down the tasks in Planner. Teams that manage their work in Project Online can better streamline work with teams that use Planner.

For more details, see “Streamline cross-team work with the newly integrated Project Online Desktop Client and Microsoft Planner.”

We are excited to be adding agile functionality to Project and integration with Planner. Both are available now through Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. We look forward to your comments and feedback—feel free to submit feedback through our Project UserVoice and Planner UserVoice sites!

Frequently asked questions

Q. How do I get the features included in agile in Project?

A. Agile in Project is available for Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. The feature works with Project standalone .mpp files and with Project Online. It does not work with Project Server 2016—if you open Project connected to Project Server 2016, the agile in Project feature won’t show up. If you open an .mpp file with agile data in a previous version of Project, you won’t see the agile fields, but the agile data won’t be lost.

Q. How do I get Project and Planner integration capability?

A. To get the integration capability, you need to subscribe to either Project Online Professional or Project Online Premium. For Planner, you need to subscribe to Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1-E5, or an Education plan.

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