Ask Paul: September 14 (Premium)

Happy Friday. Here's another round of questions and answers. Including one that might have solved a problem for me too.
Podcast interviews
Shane asks:
Early on with First Ring Daily when Brad was away you had guests on the show which your had tell about themselves.

Over time I've thought that I would love to see you and Mary Jo interview Leo. He seems to have had an interesting career and there is a lot to know and understand about him. I'm sure this would be a great show.
That's a neat idea, thanks.

Regarding interviews in general, it's a bit of work to set up, but I agree it's nice to do when possible. I'll mention this to both Mary Jo and Brad and see what we can do.
Duplicate Microsoft services
chrishilton1 asks:
I note your update on Microsoft To-Do this week. I've noticed these seems to be many duplicate/conflicting tools in Office 365 [like] Planner/Tasks/To-Do, Stream/Video, Teams/Staff Hub/People. I think some consistency and pooling of features would help users understand all these tools, or is the onus on me as admin to disable certain ones. If it is, which are recommended?
Ah consistency. :) Perhaps my number one complaint about Microsoft (if you include this, as I do, in the broader context of "finishing the job.")

So this type of issue has historically been a big problem at Microsoft. Just last week, someone asked about the various versions of Outlook (apps and services) that Microsoft now maintains and why they are all so different, both functionally and from a look and feel perspective. I often point to Microsoft's multiple sync clients from a decade ago (one of Ray Ozzie's few mistakes) as another classic example.

Related to this, not all of these tools offer the same integration across Microsoft's ecosystem. For example, let's say you really like Microsoft To-Do, as I do, and you wish to use the underlying service as elegantly as possible no matter which device you're currently using. Well, To-Do doesn't even integrate with Cortana on Windows 10. So you can't use Cortana to create or edit tasks by voice, or otherwise, on your PC. That Cortana does integrate with Wunderlist, yet another to-do/task solution, which Microsoft acquired three years ago, is beyond frustrating. (Wunderlist is the predecessor to To-Do and will be phased out at some point, Microsoft says.)

As to your actual question, it's hard to say. Just looking at tasks/to-do, you have a lot of choices (which is a nicer way of saying "the onus is on you," though that is quite accurate). And the good news is that this isn't something particularly hard to switch away from. If you're managing hundreds of to-do's, you're doing it wrong. So while I may feel like Microsoft To-Do has a future (and I do), should Microsoft suddenly kill this thing one day, moving to another solution should be relatively easy.

Also, the answer may be as simple as understanding how you work. If you use Outlook.com regularly, you may just want to use the Tasks feat...

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