This document sheds light on how out-of-the-box SharePoint task lists can be used for project management. Among the topics covered:

• The default SharePoint task list
• Available views
• Customizing the task list
• Tools to make the project managers life easier

Project management has been around a long, long time. So too has collaboration. With the business world's whole-hearted adoption of the internet, a real opportunity exists to merge these two with an environment that works for the project manager, the people working on the project and the manager's responsible for the outcome.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 finally gives us a collaboration tool robust enough to handle the tasks thrown at it and ubiquitous enough to justify its investment. Though MOSS 2007 may seem like a generic collaboration platform unsuited toward 'real' project management, the marketplace suggests over 50% of collaboration systems are used for just that. In fact, Groove Networks (a collaborative solution Microsoft bought in March 2005, and which we did project management solutions for) did a survey on their customer base, found well over 50% of Groove users needed project management and the Groove Project Edition was born.

As a result, while MOSS is a great collaborative solution for your workgroups, its also a capable project management solution as well. Chances are you're running it as such right now (at least over half of you want to). And while there are a few missing pieces at the moment, because Microsoft is making SharePoint a cornerstone offering, more tool vendors and providers are, in classic Microsoft partner fashion, stepping in and filling in the gaps.

The Default SharePoint Task List

Everyone knows that projects have a natural affinity with collaboration, and so MOSS 2007 provides a default task list to cover the very basics for managing an activity. This task list is a web part you can add to a site and offers a surprising amount of features. By default, however, it looks like the following:

The default fields are what you might expect.

• Title -- Every task needs a name
• Assigned To -- Most tasks need a responsible person
• Status -- Whether a task is Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Deferred or Waiting on Someone Else
• Priority -- High, Normal or Low
• Due Date -- Most tasks have deadlines
• % Complete -- The estimate (guess) on how far along the task is

There are additional fields not shown in this view, but editable with every task:

• Description -- Which gives you a rich text field to describe the task
• Start Date -- This gives you a simple schedule and, implicitly, a length of time (or duration) for the task

With this task list you can certainly create a SharePoint site, invite members, populate tasks and run a series of tasks everyone see (and share) the progress of. But what all can you do with a Task List? Happily, the SharePoint designers anticipated people would want to work with tasks in different ways and separated the raw task data and how you view it. For example, you've probably heard that MOSS 2007 supports a 'Gantt' view. How can you activate it?

Available Views

If you've been around project management, you've probably heard of the Gantt Chart-- named for its inventor Henry Gantt. It's a graph of sorts showing a series of tasks on a timeline. A bar representing the start, finish and the time in between is overlaid on the timeline for each task. In MOSS 2007 it looks like this:

The steps to create a Gantt view are straightforward, once you know how. I get this question a lot so here is a description how to enable the Gantt view in MOSS 2007.

Another popular view that effectively communicates when tasks are due is the Calendar view.

The other views are more data-centric: the Datasheet and Access views that let you see raw task data in a grid. There are even more views available in addition to the views we added to the task list. Some views are personalized such that, when selected, the logged in SharePoint users sees only tasks assigned to them. This is very powerful for it gives the user a quick heads up on what tasks are assigned to them and reduces the 'clutter' of everyone else's assignments. Any view can be turned in to the default view for a task list, and is always accessible by clicking on the 'View' dropdown to the upper left of the task list.

Customizing the Task List

This works the other way too. Just as you have different views for your task list, you can also have different data fields too. For instance, it's not obvious at first, but the visible fields of the default task list are just a sample of what's available. If you drop down the 'View' list and select 'Modify This View' you will recognize the visible fields and see additional fields. A checkbox to the left of the field makes it visible or not. The 'Position from Left' dropdown box on the right lets you order the fields.

This is all well and good, but the thing that distinguishes real project management from a science experiment is the ability to capture your business process. While you may find 'Created By' to be useful, what you really need is an additional text field that captures data for 'Client Codes'. While this field isn't available by default, MOSS 2007 lets you create it to your specifications and extend the default task list! For example, we can add a 'Client Code' text field, a 'Client Number' number field and a 'Client Cost' currency field for starters.

First you will create a column. We will do the text-based 'Client Code' first.

The area highlighted in the red square in the image above will change depending on what type of field you select. You can specify currency formats, number ranges and many other attributes specific to the field type you want. Here is a picture of our customized task list, with some values, able to handle more specific business processes.

Though powerful, you may have noticed a bit of clicking involved to make it all happen. Thankfully tools are coming out that make life easier for MOSS users.

Tools to make the project managers life easier

Here are two tools to make life easier, one for all the end users, and one for the project manager working with these task lists. First up is Microsoft Outlook 2007. If you are using MOSS 2007, then there is an excellent chance you are using Microsoft Outlook 2007 as well. If so, then you can take advantage of an extremely powerful feature that will let members of a workspace report on their progress from within Outlook. It takes three steps:

Step 1: SharePoint members can click on the 'Actions' dropdown and select 'Connect to Outlook'.

Next, a dialog pops up in Outlook that looks like the following:

Finally, once the user clicks 'OK', Outlook establishes a link with the SharePoint Task List and makes them available within Outlook:

The most important things about this task are:

• You can update them within Outlook
• You can update them while offline and let Outlook synchronize
• You will receive updates within Outlook as well

Finally, here is a tool that makes the project managers life easier. Though the SharePoint Tasks list can show what is going on, it is not a scheduling engine. In order to update the schedule in SharePoint the project manager could change all fields manually via the web browser. Or, the project manager could connect Microsoft Project to the task list similar to MS Outlook, use MS Project's powerful scheduling ability and update everything with one click. MS Project does not support connectivity to SharePoint task lists natively, but an Add In from TeamDirection does.

Using these tools in combination with SharePoint gives the Project Manager the ability to manage a schedule, the team members to collaborate on their tasks and the flexibility for everyone to work online or offline in the productivity apps that make sense. It may have taken a few years, but it looks like collaboration platforms are finally up to the task of solving your project management requirements.