When a task board is not enough
Nelli leads a global events team at a cybersecurity company. Like many teams inside Microsoft 365, they work in Microsoft Teams and plan in Microsoft Planner, with some work in ClickUp. For product teams that may be enough. For marketing and cross-functional event work, it felt too limited.
An event isn't only a list of tasks. It's a brief, a run-of-show, a list of vendors, people from design, finance and other teams pitching in for a few weeks, and a budget that has to be tracked as decisions are made. In a task-board tool, a plan is mostly cards in columns, so the rest ends up in documents and spreadsheets somewhere else.
What Nelli's team needed was planning, task assignment and budget in one place. The fit turned out to be an event-management template in xTiles.
Microsoft Planner vs xTiles for event work
- Microsoft Planner: a plan is a board of task cards grouped into buckets, with assignees and due dates. Good for tracking who does what.
- xTiles: a project holds pages side by side: notes and documents in tiles, task lists, and collections, which work like small databases for things such as the budget or vendors.
- Microsoft Planner: context such as the brief or the budget usually lives in other Microsoft 365 files.
- xTiles: the brief, the schedule, the tasks and the budget sit in the same project, so whoever opens the event sees all of it.
- Both: tasks with an owner and a due date, and a board view to move work through stages.
Step 1: one project per event, from a template
Create a shared space for the events team; anything created in it is shared with the team automatically. Then add a project for each event, starting from the Event Agency template, which gives you a structure for event scheduling, task tracking and documentation that you can adapt.
A useful set of pages per event:
- Brief: goals, audience, format, key dates and links, laid out in tiles.
- Schedule: the timeline up to the event and the run-of-show for the day itself.
- Tasks: everything that has to happen, with an owner and a date.
- Budget: a collection with one row per cost line.
- Vendors and contacts: venue, catering, AV, speakers.
Step 2: assign tasks across teams
Give each task an assignee and a due date, and it appears in that person's planner on that day, next to the rest of their work. For a designer or someone from finance who joins only for one event, invite them to that event's project and set view or edit access for it, instead of adding them to the whole space.
For the team's overview, open the event's tasks as a board and drag them through stages as the event gets closer.
Step 3: keep the budget next to the plan
Add a collection page for the budget. Give it a number property for the planned amount and one for the actual cost, a select for the category (venue, travel, swag, production) and a status such as estimate, approved or paid. Because it's a collection, you can switch the same rows between a table and a board grouped by status.
Once one event project works for your team, save it as a template. The next event starts with the same brief, schedule, task and budget pages already in place.
Optional: let an AI assistant do the updates
If your team uses Claude or ChatGPT, connect it to xTiles to cut the admin after planning calls: hand it the meeting transcript and the link to the event's meeting page, and it fills in the notes and adds the action items as tasks. Here's how one prompt fills a meeting notes template.