Task list finally modernised
The Task list within Outlook has been tweaked over the years but it now has a new incarnation in two new features, Office 365 Planner and Gigjam.
Office planner is based on Wunderlist, an acquisition from June 2015 that enables users to organise their personal and work tasks with due dates, statuses, dashboards and even email notifications from task progress. It will be available for preview in the next quarter but can be sampled from the original company site for those who want to have a look at what might be in store.
The second new feature is Gigjam, which is available in private preview now and will be part of Office 365 in 2016. It is a task allocation and work sharing platform that has been in development for several years and could be one of those features that companies who engage with it properly find they gain a substantial productivity boost.
Easier to use
In their search to make Office even easier for people to use Microsoft has listened to the feedback about menus being a maze and have included a few features that will help many people. “Tell me” allows you to type in and quickly find the right menu item to change something that might have been buried several menu choices down previously. There is also a Smart Lookup function that brings information from the web into a document. Both of these features were available with Office 2013 online but they are now integrated into the core offline app too.
Delve is available to all the Office platform, enabling a search functionality that goes through Sharepoint files, the exception being for Windows Mobile, but one assumes that this will be added soon.
(Next: What about Outlook and Excel?)
