How to use Microsoft To-Do, even when there is no option of activation in the O365 tenant

Microsoft recently announced that its newest task management app “To-Do”, which shall be the successor of Wunderlist, will soon be available. I’m not going into detail about the functionality, because this is described here: https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-now-available-in-preview/ and https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-to-do-list-app

But as Microsoft announced the preview of To-Do, many people downloaded the app and tried to synchronize their Outlook tasks into the To-Do list - without success. The problem in most cases is that you can’t even login with a work or school account in the app. Most probably you’ll receive one of the two error messages, which are shown below:

However, if you take a look on the comments in https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-now-available-in-preview/ you’ll notice, that almost everyone has the exact same issue. Digging a bit deeper, this link may help: https://todosupport.helpshift.com/a/microsoft-to-do/?s=account&f=administration-of-to-do-in-office-365&l=en&p=web

The point is that the support guys advise you to look at the O365 admin portal under Settings - Services & add-ins where you should see the option of activating To-Do. In my case, there is no To-Do option available:

But there is a hint, how you still can use To-Do with a work or school account. It’s a matter of the right license. Because there are two important cases, where To-Do is not available yet:

• On-Premise installations of Exchange Server and Microsoft accounts that are not on Exchange Online.
• Office 365 Pro Plus, Business, Kiosk K1, Enterprise E5 without PSTN, Office 365 DE plans and Education accounts.

And in my case I had an E5 license assigned. So after assigning an E3 license to my user, To-Do login with my O365 user succeeded and To-Do started working like charm. It instantly imported all my Outlook tasks and the synchronization between To-Do and my tasks in Outlook works great, as you can see below:

Unfortunately, the screenshots of my To-Do app are in German, as I can’t change the language of the app. I hope this helps you activating your To-Do app with your O365 account. Have fun managing your tasks!