Asana and Office 365

@Julien_RENAUD I typically use Chrome for Asana so I keep trying it on that browser and I just can’t get it to work. I’ve clear all of my cache and I’ve made sure that third party cookies are allowed as well. When I sign into Microsoft 365 the box disappears and nothing else happens. I’m wondering if this is on our end how we have OneDrive set up.

Thanks,
Katie

@TonyC is there any way to add a ‘search’ box? Would be incredibly helpful especially on some MS Sharepoint sites where there is a gigantic nested folder structure.

HI @Ben_Brenner, unfortunately we’re loading the interface for the picker via Microsoft’s SDK so they are in control of what is available on the UI there. It does not look like search capability is currently available, hopefully this will make it into a future version of the picker!

That’s a bummer, wonder if there is a feature request with Microsoft to improve that SDK.

We are also doing this. Thanks for sharing!

I am trying to use the attach One Drive/SharePoint, and it says it needs an admin to grant permissions to this app. Can anyone provide more information on this?

Hi Kristen,

To my knowledge this integration hasn’t been fixed. @Marie can you confirm this? I believe Asana was working with Microsoft and it was on the Microsoft end. My workaround has been to paste the Sharepoint url of the file or folder into an Asana task space.

Katie

It looked like back in June, @TonyC and @Julien_RENAUD were saying it worked…? I was trying to figure out if that is the case or not.

It is still working well today. When I want to add an attachment, I click on the paper clip and have access to all OneDrive or Sharepoint documents. This saves us from putting a link and the file remains on Sharepoint.

1 Like

@Julien_RENAUD and @Kristen_Adams,
I think this also has to do with how your Onedrive is set up, if you are at a business. Mine still doesn’t work.

Katie

We’ve been working on rolling out MS Teams to our company and, during that process, we were testing Planner. Planner wasn’t quite up to snuff for some of the folks testing so we’ve been doing a test with Asana as well, but as this is being driven by the adoption of Teams, the integration between the two is a fairly important piece.

In addition to a lot of the feedback provided, I’ve been struggling to find a way to control what sort of notifications the Asana-bot pushes to the Conversations tab in Teams. This becomes an issue for tasks that have a lot of subtasks, such as a Data Entry task with a subtask for each user that must be entered. As these sort of tasks are often completed in batches or in a quick succession, the bot has a tendency to spam the channel.

Are we able to control how and what notifications the Asana-bot puts in the Teams chat or is that another feature that should be thrown into the ring?

I should specify, this is in regards to the Connector once that has been installed. Is there a way to modify how often or for what sort of tasks the Connector posts to Teams?

Hi @David_Dalton,

If you can’t control what the Asana-bot pushes into the Teams conversations, individuals can turn off notifications from the Asana-bot in Teams to cut the burden a bit. How many Teams do you have in the Team space? We implemented Teams over the past year and realized once our Teams began to proliferate that we didn’t need all of those Team spaces. It also caused more issues with the proliferation of the Teams because it created an Outlook email group for each as well as a Power BI space for each. We’ve actually pulled back a bit and only create a Team when all the rest of the infrastructure that it creates is necessary. One thing to note is only one Asana project can be pulled into a Team space.

Katie

1 Like

After more digging it seems it’s the Asana connector which is pushing the updates for every single task. Part of the reason it’s so spammy is if you complete/update a single task it pushes a notification to Teams chat for every single project that task is a part of (So if I complete a task that is assigned to two projects, it pushes two notifications to chat for the 1 task completion).

We only have 3 teams using Asana currently, and only one of them has the connector set up as we are still doing an internal test to decide whether we’ll commit to rolling it out to the entire company, but having to disable notifications completely/severely limit them just to keep the connector from spamming the chat box seems like a less-than-ideal solution.

1 Like

Hi @TonyC – Do you know if there’s a way to get the file picker to use Document ID for SharePoint files? (That way, the link for attached file in Asana would be durable even if the file changed titles or locations in SharePoint.) I don’t know if this would be something determined by Microsoft’s SDK or if there’s anything on Asana’s side that could enable use of Document ID.

Sorry to be late to the party. It would seem that the O365 Planner as of 2020 is far more suitable for integrating with an existing Teams instance:

  • Does not require a separate login, and you don’t need to configure AD SSO with Asana
  • While the boards/tasks view is still limited like Asana, Planner has colored flags you can add to tasks to suggest the idea of sections/categories, so the board can still be used for following tasks through the process
  • The description field can contain lists and checkboxes, and the field can be displayed in the card view for easy lookup

If you’re already using Teams, I’d stick with Planner, because many IT departments like all apps to fall under one vendor solution and are hesitant to integrate with independent (although often superior) products.

That said: Since MS Planner looks and works SO MUCH like Asana, has Asana contacted MS about a potential breach of copyright? Planner wouldn’t even exist without Asana. And if MS invested money into upgrading Asana and integrating seamlessly with it, then they wouldn’t need their own development team.

I should also add that Asana is far better for managing independent project teams outside of Teams, because the communication features are already integrated into Asana. These features are largely redundant if you are already using Teams.

Hello,
Happy to share that we’ve released a new Microsoft Teams integration: New, improved Microsoft Teams integration!
The new integration is a brand new Asana bot that provides functionality to unfurl Asana links shared in Teams, creating tasks and adding teams messages to Asana tasks, as well as the ability to set up notifications where you can control the types of notifications that are sent to Teams to control the noise.
We recommend using this new integration for notifications instead of the O365 connector and using it to share more context and visibility on Asana tasks for colleagues living in Teams.

@TonyC thanks for sharing.

Is Asana and office 365 compatible? Are there any problems or errors that the community should know ?