Most folks in the system admin life, or even the software dev world, are familar with the Kanban framework. These days, every project planning or Scrum tool has a Kanban feature. Kanban has been drilled into my brain so much over the past 10 years or so that I find myself wanting to use it outside of my 9-5. For the past three or four years I have been using in my homelab environment as well. It started with literal sticky-notes; quick scribbles of something I came across online or heard about in a podcast. Sometimes I would even create a calendar event for one of my nights with a link to whatever product/project I had overheard. In search of some sort of organization, I landed on Trello (FYI, Trello was purchased by Atlassian, the makers of Jira, in 2017). While I never loved my time with Trello, it was free and easy to setup. It gave me my basic To Do, Doing and Done columns that I needed. However, the mobile app was pretty ugly and with Atlassian now at the helm, it was pretty obvious that Jira would get any development time for new features or fresh coats of paint. So off I went in search for a better Kaban board for my homelab brain to use…

Staying in the Loop

In late 2023, Microsoft released Loop to the general public. It is their everything-in-one tool that meshes OneNote (heavily), ToDo, Project/Planner and bits of many other Microsoft products. Not only does it wear a lot of hats and integrate with seemingly everything else in the Microsoft suite, but it also ties into a whole load of third-party software out there. Best of all for me, it has a built-in Kanban template.

2024-05-18

Keeping it Simple

By default, Loop has four columns (To do, On Hold, In progress and Done), but for my personal setup I like to hide the On Hold column. This is the simplest Kanban board I have ever used, and I like it especially for that reason.

Get (in the) Loop

More Info: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop

Loop for Home: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products

Loop for Business: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compare-all-microsoft-365-business-products

Copilot in Loop: https://copilot.cloud.microsoft/en-US/copilot-loop