it is true but both trello and this app is based on Kanban, which tons of other productivity tools like Jira implement so I guess it can't be blamed too much
This. Trello is the most visible, but there are many others that are similar. Feels natural to follow what works rather than reinvent the wheel as a pentagon.
Based on the video on the page, looks like Microsoft Trello with Office 365 file sharing integration. More tools for basic project tracking... and I just can't wait to meet clients who will use this instead of (heavier) TFS/Visual Studio Online for the same purpose, complicating work of our teams even more (I work at an offshore software house). Duh.
Someone who feels my pain! Nothing like going into a client meeting and being called old-school (I'm 26!) for using Redmine and pushed to use Trello. I work at an offshore/onshore shop as well, and getting our dev teams set up in client systems (that usually have user limits because the client uses the free version) is a huge pain in the arse.
Looks like they remade Trello. It also seems to have a certain "sterileness" to it, or perhaps classiness; I can't tell. The colors look good though and product brand looks good.
I hope they have some cool new features that inspire competition and improvements from Trello. Competition is always good if it makes Trello better!
But since I don't like where Microsoft is going with their privacy and advertising policies, I probably won't use this.
Skype is one good historic example of the shift that OP is referring to. Leaks have shown that, since purchase, Microsoft has been unusually cooperative with the NSA with regards to Skype. [1] They also removed the P2P aspect of Skype infrastructure and replaced it with a traditional server model, coincidentally around the same time that NSA docs describe intercepting skype messages with PRISM... [2]
The move from P2P to a client-server model, is a sensible change, considering the fight to stay relevant on mobile devices, for instance considering the impact that Skype used to have on battery consumption.
But it does compete with free. It's included in all of the office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions. So this is effectively free to a large set of business customers.
Yeah I wish they would focus on making a good OS. I guess since people have to use Windows for compatibility reasons MS doesn't care. They see the desktop market as dwindling so they're trying to get into new markets. I just wish if they were giving up on the desktop they would at least open source their closed source software to allow it to run on other platforms so people aren't forced to use a neglected OS.
Maybe you didn't get the memo but MS is not an OS company anymore (at least their top priority isn't). Everyone knows desktop platform has been commoditized by the Web--you can do pretty much anything through the web interface, and increasingly so as the computer processing powers go up.
They've been pretty clear about this new direction if you read the articles, MS is a productivity company. That's why they're building all these productivity apps on iOS and android.
Microsoft used to create compelling new upgrades: consumers wanted the new features. Now users are compelled to upgrade because they failed to or were unable to opt out.
Not entirely related, but I'm getting an ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID on Chrome for Android but not Chrome or Firefox on Windows. Same SHA256 reported in all three browsers. The certificate was issued on May 4th, did Microsoft recently change their SSL certificate chain?
Certificate issuer "Microsoft IT SSL SHA2" is via Baltimore CyberTrust Root [1], which exists in Firefox's CA store, as well as /etc/ssl/certs. It also exists in Android (Settings -> Security -> Trusted Credentials). So, I'm not sure where Chrome-on-Android looks for certs.
Is anyone using gantt[1] charts? I've been using them for product planning for years. I know the kanban style planners are all the rage but I like the proceduralness of having the entire project laid out in front of me.
Agreed although we typically ensure we have plenty of tasks in parallel so one missed item doesn't throw off the whole schedule. Our Gantt charts are therefore ugly. :)
Some of my coworkers use them. They aren't helpful tools for actual planning, but they look organized and that appearance helps sell projects to internal and external customers.
Gantt charts are tools for planning and scheduling. It got Hoover Dam done two years ahead of schedule. It'll probably be useful for your Rails app, too.
Yes, they work well in operations that have many parallel steps which must be performed once, correctly, and in the correct time and order, and where the effort is quantifiable. While Hoover Dam was constructed on an unprecedented scale, the project planners could still do reliable man-hour calculations for many parts of the project.
Most software development projects lack those properties. Many software projects live or die by how well the "last 90%" of development goes (as opposed to a public works project which has much more critical initial work), but a Gantt chart usually represents that entire effort with one bar.
It's a bar chart; you're free to plot whatever subset of data you wish. If you're working with a team and you can't represent at least the next few weeks on a Gantt chart you're not engineering--you're playing software bumper cars.
Having team members sign up for brief work items (2-3 days max), charting it out, then watching where it strains is useful and often humbling.
Yes, they are useful. I like the ability to use TaskJuggler, a Ruby program, where you can edit the project info via your favorite text editor, then run TJ against it to produce various reports.
The nice thing about Gantt is that it can show up your expectations as being too optimistic, very quickly.
One thing that caught my attention on the video is that people are expected to curate each of their teams. Sounds a lot like G+ circles, it's a lot to ask of users
Microsoft is trying to deliver the entire white collar productivity experience and I have to say I appreciate the vision but I hope a closed platform and single value chain doesn't win this battle.
There's little bits of Trello (the main Planner functionality), Google Drive (MSFT competitor Office365), and Slack (auto notifications).
I want the diverse value chain to thrive to increase innovation and extensibility on each link in the space.
I'm not sure what you want Microsoft to do in that case. When a new product (Trello, Slack) appears and it turns out tons of workers and enterprises like it, Microsoft has 3 options:
1. Ignore it, and hope it turns out to be a fad.
2. Buy them and rebrand it
3. Try to launch their own competitor version
1 isn't really an option, and between 2 and 3, I'd rather Microsoft did 3, so we can have more competition. The fact that it's a closed platform and tied in to all their services is just kind of unavoidable; it would be kind of silly of them to launch a new product and not tie it in to O365.
There is a fourth choice, not mutually exclusive with 3: offer integration between their services and the other tools. They're doing this with Dropbox to an extent, for instance, while still competing with Dropbox.
The problem is that enterprise doesn't want 10 different services/apps that innovate and increase extensibility. Innovation means change. Far simpler to have one vendor with a reliable time table of updates, one product suite that can be installed and administered remotely. Why go through the trouble of having X different vendors with X different support chains, when you can have one help desk that's always there and will never change, with a massive legal and contracts team that speaks business the way you do?
Aesthetically and morally I agree with you. It's ugly and bad to have one company holding all the links of the chain. However, I don't think it's likely the open innovative ecosystem you're talking about will come into being because all the selling points are for the benefit of the software user, not the entity employing those users.
We've been using the preview for a few weeks, and while it's nice to have an in-built option for lightweight planning, Planner still pretty rough around the edges.
It's missing features one might expect from something tied into 365 (of course subjective):
1. Weak outlook integration (e.g., can't send a card as a task, email, or calendar invite)
2. Weak sharepoint integration (e.g., can't browse for links to attachments). It supports onedrive, but just for the logged in user.
3. Limited (read: one) reporting or charting options. Maybe Gantts are a bridge too far, but there are many useful visualizations beyond who has outstanding tasks.
4. Can't move cards to new boards (just new buckets)
5. Can't clone/copy cards
And it's just plain buggy:
1. Many links aren't actually links, but rather click handlers on divs, breaking common UI like "right-click, open in new tab".
2. Icons and previews have busted caching behavior, whereby "correct" icons show for a while (sometimes seconds) before being replaced with old versions
3. Cards will duplicate or disappear while editing, usually fixed with a refresh
4. and cetera.
There's potential for new features leveraging the 365 ecosystem, but its as yet unrealized, and it has a long way to go before matching its most obvious competitors in polish (UI and code quality, not necessarily style).
Pardon my ignorance, but is this Windows-only, or what? I have an Office 365 subscription at work for Mac Office, but I barely ever use it. I can't figure out how to access this, so I'm assuming it's not available on Mac? It wasn't clear to me if there was a web component, or what...
It is getting phased roll out, so you should get it in few weeks. MSFT should improve its roll outs, It is getting all the PR today, but I can't access it. By the time I'll get access, would have already forgotten about it. This wastes PR effort.
“With Planner, we improved collaboration by about 20 percent..." The units aren't mentioned, so I'm assuming it's the just standard units (collabotrons)
Man, that quote jumped out at me instead. You'd think they could apply some rigor and add a few decimal places rather than saying "about". Or that perhaps the marketing manager who wrote the release would realize how stupid that quote sounds.
...too bad a ton of people are going to completely write this off because of the recent goodwill-burning Microsoft has been participating in. I wonder how their internal departments feel about this?
We use Trello business account. It is highly opinionated. It gives only one view of cards. If I want activities sorted by time, there is no filter. Cards by user view can also be improved. Graphs/Charts are also good tools for understanding and presenting the projects.
Different task grouping (e.g. by users) -- that's smart. I wish Trello could do this. Filtering via charts -- another smart feature. I like the product concept.
If anyone on the Microsoft Planner team is reading this: I haven't used it yet, but did watch the video on the landing page. I'm impressed how you made solutions that will work well with both touch and nontouch screens, along with the ways users can filter and visualize their team's progress. These aren't easy challenges to overcome so effectively, and I really enjoyed seeing your solutions. Congratulations on your launch!
Interestingly enough, we are using Office365 at work but "Planner" didn't show up by default; I'm guessing that someone in our organization has to opt-in to it. However, going to this link allows me to work with the new application as if it were installed in my Office365 portal. Now to check to see if I can collaborate with other people in my organization. :)
Immediately, I noticed the usage of doughnut charts to display project status. Suboptimal visualisations significantly impede the adoption/market differentiation of task and project management solutions and hamper their usability, once adopted. I thought about what I might want in such an 'at a glance' widget.
I suggest a vertical stream chart with a top legend (keeping the legend to one line, abbreviating the status labels to save horizontal space if needed but expanding them on mouse-over). In order to emphasise the present status, a stacked horizontal bar chart placed immediately before the stream chart but after the legend emphasises the current state. The inclusion of a stream graph along with a stacked horizontal chart maintains the square overall shape of the widget and the design's present temporal focus. Colour variations can use the second dimension to represent changes in velocity on a per category basis further increasing the information economy of the design, without cluttering its appearance.
However, usage of space in the suggested design is much improved. In using the same quantity of space as the presented widget, the presented design communicates the current state, as well as, a large chunk of the projects history with an emphasis on the near past.
Increasing the interactivity of the visualisation is a natural thought. Such additions might include a contextual (mouse over or fade discover) highlight on the chart (milestones/releases, key dates). Perhaps a forecast feature allowing you to mouse over the chart and using the (mouse wheel nudge or touch drag) into the future. If you (pinch zoom or mousewheel) a past area the graph could rescale to emphasise that point in time.
In short, a bit more attention to the visualisation design would yield a much more substantial and powerful widget without increasing cognitive load and complexity on the user's part of the interaction. I think that, with a bit of focus, a well designed information retrieval and processing platform for project planning and management could easily differentiate itself in the marketplace even in the presence of gratis competition.
Not sure why they couldn't just create these functionalities inside Microsoft Project. (Probably because it might be harder to implement on an older code base?)
87 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 83.0 ms ] thread[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
"I heard you want to use Trello? Here, our business plan includes this thing called Planner. Use it."
Creating a tool and adding "Office!" to its name makes me want to stay away from it.
I hope they have some cool new features that inspire competition and improvements from Trello. Competition is always good if it makes Trello better!
But since I don't like where Microsoft is going with their privacy and advertising policies, I probably won't use this.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/files/2015/01/28/20141228-spiegel-guide_...
(August 2012)
[2]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
(May 2012)
http://markmail.org/message/exc3srjkx3uu66bz
http://blogs.skype.com/2013/10/04/skype-architecture-update/
They've been pretty clear about this new direction if you read the articles, MS is a productivity company. That's why they're building all these productivity apps on iOS and android.
Same word, different meaning.
This is a valid question.
[1] https://ssl-tools.net/subjects/26102266b387fb8b911bc6d37b35b...
Indeed SSL checker[2] says that "this certificate is not trusted by all browsers". Intermediate cert probably missing.
[2] https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=blogs.o...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
That's at odds with the more agile way people develop software today.
Plus they almost never match up to reality. Good for planning the sequence of things, but don't expect them to be accurate over the long term.
Most software development projects lack those properties. Many software projects live or die by how well the "last 90%" of development goes (as opposed to a public works project which has much more critical initial work), but a Gantt chart usually represents that entire effort with one bar.
Having team members sign up for brief work items (2-3 days max), charting it out, then watching where it strains is useful and often humbling.
The nice thing about Gantt is that it can show up your expectations as being too optimistic, very quickly.
[1] https://troop.space
There's little bits of Trello (the main Planner functionality), Google Drive (MSFT competitor Office365), and Slack (auto notifications).
I want the diverse value chain to thrive to increase innovation and extensibility on each link in the space.
1. Ignore it, and hope it turns out to be a fad.
2. Buy them and rebrand it
3. Try to launch their own competitor version
1 isn't really an option, and between 2 and 3, I'd rather Microsoft did 3, so we can have more competition. The fact that it's a closed platform and tied in to all their services is just kind of unavoidable; it would be kind of silly of them to launch a new product and not tie it in to O365.
Aesthetically and morally I agree with you. It's ugly and bad to have one company holding all the links of the chain. However, I don't think it's likely the open innovative ecosystem you're talking about will come into being because all the selling points are for the benefit of the software user, not the entity employing those users.
It's missing features one might expect from something tied into 365 (of course subjective):
1. Weak outlook integration (e.g., can't send a card as a task, email, or calendar invite)
2. Weak sharepoint integration (e.g., can't browse for links to attachments). It supports onedrive, but just for the logged in user.
3. Limited (read: one) reporting or charting options. Maybe Gantts are a bridge too far, but there are many useful visualizations beyond who has outstanding tasks.
4. Can't move cards to new boards (just new buckets)
5. Can't clone/copy cards
And it's just plain buggy:
1. Many links aren't actually links, but rather click handlers on divs, breaking common UI like "right-click, open in new tab".
2. Icons and previews have busted caching behavior, whereby "correct" icons show for a while (sometimes seconds) before being replaced with old versions
3. Cards will duplicate or disappear while editing, usually fixed with a refresh
4. and cetera.
There's potential for new features leveraging the 365 ecosystem, but its as yet unrealized, and it has a long way to go before matching its most obvious competitors in polish (UI and code quality, not necessarily style).
...too bad a ton of people are going to completely write this off because of the recent goodwill-burning Microsoft has been participating in. I wonder how their internal departments feel about this?
TL;DR: https://i.imgur.com/hFpftp7.png
I suggest a vertical stream chart with a top legend (keeping the legend to one line, abbreviating the status labels to save horizontal space if needed but expanding them on mouse-over). In order to emphasise the present status, a stacked horizontal bar chart placed immediately before the stream chart but after the legend emphasises the current state. The inclusion of a stream graph along with a stacked horizontal chart maintains the square overall shape of the widget and the design's present temporal focus. Colour variations can use the second dimension to represent changes in velocity on a per category basis further increasing the information economy of the design, without cluttering its appearance.
However, usage of space in the suggested design is much improved. In using the same quantity of space as the presented widget, the presented design communicates the current state, as well as, a large chunk of the projects history with an emphasis on the near past.
Increasing the interactivity of the visualisation is a natural thought. Such additions might include a contextual (mouse over or fade discover) highlight on the chart (milestones/releases, key dates). Perhaps a forecast feature allowing you to mouse over the chart and using the (mouse wheel nudge or touch drag) into the future. If you (pinch zoom or mousewheel) a past area the graph could rescale to emphasise that point in time.
In short, a bit more attention to the visualisation design would yield a much more substantial and powerful widget without increasing cognitive load and complexity on the user's part of the interaction. I think that, with a bit of focus, a well designed information retrieval and processing platform for project planning and management could easily differentiate itself in the marketplace even in the presence of gratis competition.