There's a brand new Microsoft Office app: Office 365 Planner

By Justin Pot Published December 14, 2015

There’s a brand new application in Microsoft Office: Office 365 Planner. Think of it as Microsoft’s answer to cloud-based coordination tools like Trello, allowing teams to organize tasks with visually arranged boards full of cards.

It’s not out for everyone yet, but Office 365 First Release customers can start using the app if administrators enable it.

Recommended Videos

Saying the tool helps teams organize their work visually, Microsoft explained their product in a blog post, saying “each plan has its own Board, and within each Board, each work item or task is represented by a Card that can have due dates, attachments, categories, and conversations associated with it.” All of these features will sound familiar to Trello users, as will some of the screenshots.

But there are some things unique to Planner, including integration with other Office products. Attached Office documents can be edited quickly, online or off, for example. There’s also integration with OneNote — every plan has a notebook created for it.

The Hub view lets teams track how many tasks are assigned to individual users and how much progress they’ve made. It comes complete with charts.

Not everyone can user Planner: it’s currently offered only to Office 365 First Release customers; that is, to customers who have opted in to early releases of Microsoft software. Even then, the app is available to users of the following plans:

Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E4 and E5
Office 365 Education
Office 365 Education E3 and E4
Office 365 Business Essentials
Office 365 Business Premium

Note that this leaves out some Enterprise plans, all Home ones, and all Government ones. Even if your plan offers the app, an administrator needs to enable the app before users can start playing with it. So if you don’t see the app offered, this is why.

Presumably the app will be more widely distributed after this trial period, during which Microsoft is asking users for feedback. It should be interesting to see how the new product evolves.

Former Contributor

Justin's always had a passion for trying out new software, asking questions, and explaining things – tech journalism is the…

Topics

Computing

Microsoft 365 Copilot gets an AI Researcher that everyone will love

Researcher agent in action inside Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

Microsoft is late to the party, but it is finally bringing a deep research tool of its own to the Microsoft 365 Copilot platform across the web, mobile, and desktop. Unlike competitors such as Google Gemini, Perplexity, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, all of which use the Deep Research name, Microsoft is going with the Researcher agent branding.
The overarching idea, however, isn’t too different. You tell the Copilot AI to come up with thoroughly researched material on a certain topic or create an action plan, and it will oblige by producing a detailed document that would otherwise take hours of human research and compilation. It’s all about performing complex, multi-step research on your behalf as an autonomous AI agent.
Just to avoid any confusion early on, Microsoft 365 Copilot is essentially the rebranded version of the erstwhile Microsoft 365 (Office) app. It is different from the standalone Copilot app, which is more like a general purpose AI chatbot application.
Researcher: A reasoning agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
How Researcher agent works?
Underneath the Researcher agent, however, is OpenAI’s Deep Research model. But this is not a simple rip-off. Instead, the feature’s implementation in Microsoft 365 Copilot runs far deeper than the competition. That’s primarily because it can look at your own material, or a business’ internal data, as well.
Instead of pulling information solely from the internet, the Researcher agent can also take a look at internal documents such as emails, chats, internal meeting logs, calendars, transcripts, and shared documents. It can also reference data from external sources such as Salesforce, as well as other custom agents that are in use at a company.
“Researcher’s intelligence to reason and connect the dots leads to magical moments,” claims Microsoft. Researcher agent can be configured by users to reference data from the web, local files, meeting recordings, emails, chats, and sales agent, on an individual basis — all of them, or just a select few.

Why it stands out?

Computing

Microsoft is working on something new, but it’s probably not Windows 12

The Surface Pro 11 on a white table in front of a window.

Microsoft appears to be working on a new major update, but if you're hoping for Windows 12, I wouldn't hold my breath. The company has confirmed that it's testing new content via the Insider program in the Dev Channel, and those changes might lead to a patch that's set to be released later this year. However, we're most likely looking at the successor to the current 24H2 build -- namely Windows 11 25H2 -- and not a whole new operating system.

This was first spotted by Windows Central. The publication cites its own sources as it claims that Microsoft is backporting some platform changes to offer better support for Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X2 chip. Those changes will allow devices that house that chip to run Germanium-based Windows 11. Germanium refers to the platform release that the current Windows 11 build is built on, and it looks like the upcoming 25H2 build might also be based on Germanium -- but nothing is fully clear at this point.

Computing

The new Windows app is officially replacing Remote Desktop

A person compares Bitdefender and Norton antivirus software pricing on a Windows PC.

Microsoft is ending support for Remote Desktop, requiring users to switch over to its new Windows app. From May 27, the Remote Desktop app will no longer be available for download and Microsoft recommends current users uninstall the app.

The replacement, the Windows app, launched in September last year and is designed to give users "unified access" to a range of formerly separate Windows services.