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Benefits of Office 365 as a Project Management Tool

Office 365 Project Management

Microsoft Office 365 is amongst the most used internet service enterprise applications on which companies rely on their everyday operations, with over 100 million monthly users participating. We also explored several Office 365 Project Management tool for working in the cross-departmental, squads and interacting with the external customers. In addition to teamwork, Office 365 enables the staff and various departments for more effective handling of their activities and initiatives.

In this post, we will guide you on how Office 365 can be used for Project Management and is driven by a range of resources. With our consultancy experience in Office 365, we can clarify how the method handles multiple tasks and project management problems besides exploring the possible aspects to finally getting that enable you to build an effective project and application development toolset.

Control of Office 365 activities and projects: The main resources for access to many career and software development programs is required for Office 365 users. The list currently contains the followings:

  • Planner
  • SharePoint tasks
  • Project Online
  • Outlook Tasks
  • To-Do

1. Planner

Microsoft Planner in Office 365 Project Management tool
Microsoft Planner

The plan requires private, public, and mission buckets to be handled by the teams. Users can build, track, and prioritize different tasks and plans, get immediate reporting through board views and map views.

The planner also offers team participants with an opportunity to communicate on the project papers to use a virtualization repository as part of the Office 365 Communities, feedback on the project activities in Outlook Teams, organizing development events in the Planner team, and taking project noticed in the Evernote Planner squad. 

Abilities: Users will take a simple view of their job to see how the project goes as expected with a good simulation. Plans and projects are well planned and simple to navigate. The planner can also be implemented in a broader collaboration setting with Microsoft’s divisions.  

Vulnerabilities: Seasoned project managers discreetly handle the planners. While they agree that the tool perfectly manages smaller tasks, they claim that it is inadequate for the big projects with huge systems to handle.

2. Share-Point Tasks

SharePoint Online Office Project mangement

Share-Point Online will also be used to organize the project via Shared-Point Work Lists by Office 365 users. The tool helps the users to build task and subtask lists and to see the allocation in a project calendar.

In addition to these basic features, users may handle the activities, distribute resources and access a range of tasks, including Gantt charts, R charts, X charts, and so on. Project Lists frequently allows the staff to take advantage of an Outlook schedule and talks, maintain documents in a specific SharePoint library, and to utilize a project portfolio. 

Abilities: The tool simply shows a mission and its activities. Work Lists provide many more functionalities if related to other features of SharePoint.  

Vulnerabilities: Several schedules cannot be added in a common task list by design, meaning the teams would require external development activities to put together more than one plan. Additionally, customization would be essential to include analyses, which are invaluable for the larger ventures.

Also Read – SharePoint As Project Management Tool

3. Project Online

Microsoft Project Online

Project Online is another Office 365 Project Management platform. The application is technical and contains three viable plans for venture investment management: Essentials, Professional, and Premium.

Each strategy aims at the various users including project managers and resource managers and involves complicated tasks. This framework provides the most effective project management platform in the entire Office 365 series. This software includes project preparation and activities scheduling, management of personnel, monitoring, and more. 

Abilities: Project Online is a complete project management platform for Office 365, capable of managing multiple tasks and fulfilling the expectations of everyday workers and professional software engineers. 

Vulnerabilities: Project Online includes the expertise of staff to operate it as a technical instrument. It’s challenging to work with new team members. End-user instruction is strongly advocated and the adoption may sometimes be a problem in this case.

4. Outlook Tasks

Outlook Logo Office Project Mangement

Office 365 customers will benefit from the customized work scheduling in addition to project management software. Outlook Activities arrive first in this case. They are ideal for the workers and teams who choose to handle their tasks in their email program.

Outlook helps you to monitor the activities in a large variety of attributes. The users will also track and communicate their assignments with the teammates on the planner grid. 

Abilities: When paired with Outlook Classes, Outlook tasks may be much more successful. Groups enable people to work together with the same App on their projects. This tool may be an outstanding way to handle intermediate tasks. 

Vulnerabilities: The User Interface of the tool leave a great deal to be wanted. Users must attempt to organize and explain all activities, which could entail further preparation. When there are more entries, tasks may be chaotic especially if they are mixed with others.

5. To-Do software 

To do Logo

To-Do is a platform to tackle the activities that replace Microsoft’s Wunderlist acquired in 2015. The software helps the users to do all forms of activities, whether private or corporate. Users will build work lists, plan and alerts, merge activities and make minor improvements to the graphical user interface.

To-Do should be merged with Outlook Activities as part of the Office 365 suite to ensure workers synced their to-dos to their mailbox activity management processes. 

Abilities: An easy-to-use method for handling personal activities. Employees may use it to organize the tasks separately from other staff members, as a confidential test automation region.

Vulnerabilities: The tool remains unfinished and tends to lag behind the Wunderlist’s parents. Employees cannot build or exchange activities with other users to create reports. They cannot create tasks. The smartphone interface is indeed significantly poorer than that of the Mobile application because Mac OS does not have the latter.

What’s Extra in It?

Your next specialized project manager after SharePoint Work Lists will be a SharePoint website. As the groups don’t just need to see and monitor their assignments, they also need to add to articles, posts and notifications, express their views and raise concerns, SharePoint On-line’s completely project platform can cover all these requirements well.

Unit schedules, newsfeeds, mission, and problem monitoring elements, standardized project paper collections are just some of the stuff that you will get on your platform. In our immersive presentation, you will see an overview of a SharePoint project website. 

Microsoft Teams is a valuable platform for yourself. No wonder Microsoft has made the Office 365 suite a core contact center, which was revealed throughout Microsoft Ignite 2017. To improve the productivity of Microsoft Teams in project management, you can first introduce the Organizer tab for the working teams.

This allows you to double all strategy expertise on one framework and teams’ shared strength.

Why Should You Opt Office 365 As Project Management Tool?

Office 365 Project Mangement Tool

Office 365 provides both task management and project monitoring as a project management tool thus provides us with all we need to understand the processes which lead to our team’s achievements. The job perks for Office 365 include: 

1. Regulation of Visual Functions 

Visual objects are interpreted differently; 60,000 times quicker than the text. For teams who handle a vast volume of data, this is particularly beneficial. It would not be successful merely to call the records and not to grasp the similarity of details at the first sight.

2. Task Completion 

In a single project, there will be multiple projects. So, it is interesting to see how our teams operate and how we can support them. With a tool like Project Central, functions such as project fitness, completion and project status will offer you even more functionality. 

3. Collaboration

The slogan of Office 365 is, “Leave a chaos together,” and it delivers exactly the same. Microsoft Planner has the greatest openness because team members realize who focuses on what. Team members may bind some activities in the Planner to folders, photographs or connections. This is highly beneficial if we have the SharePoint 365 Office Suite.

4. Reporting by Stakeholder 

In Office 365, guest access may be given to the clients or external collaborators who aren’t expected to access the project 24/7. This functionality is highly useful for the managers who have to communicate to the clients since Office 365 displays performance and improvement. 

5. Progress Monitoring 

Management of procedures is particularly necessary and can be carried out conveniently in the Microsoft Planner. Tables of success of our strategy can be seen depending on the considerations like Expiration Date Loading jobs to assign duties and working maps as the extremely helpful ones. 

Conclusion

Our incorporation with Office 365 helps you to monitor your tasks and results. Project Central shows you how many distances to the North Pole you travelled so that you can get back to it. You can check the progress of your project(s), achieve your objectives and also visualize your initiatives across several tasks.

After the preview landed, Microsoft has “worked closely with many customers from Office 365 around the world.”  In the future, the organization requests all the Planner consumers for input on its UserVoice program. We at EPC group are providing the best strategies to the employee as the desired plan for the required projects.

Errin OConnor

Errin OConnor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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