In the next version of SharePoint, you can add task management capabilities to enhance any team site so you can get organized, plan and track tasks, and communicate deadlines, all in the same place you store documents and notes.  Just click on the “Working on a deadline?” tile on the main page of your new site.  

 

The Tasks list is great for the person driving the project but everyone else that visits the site (team members, stakeholders) need an at-a-glance view of the project status. For this, we have the Project Summary on the home page of the site which makes it easy to communicate how the project is going, calls out the next upcoming milestone, and shows a couple of display modes.  The first is the timeline (from the Tasks list), which gives casual stakeholders a high level overview of where things are heading.  The second is a list of upcoming task deadlines and calendar events, which gives folks who need specific details a good picture of next steps.  So anyone who goes to the site will have a good high level picture of how things are going and what people should be working on.  At Microsoft, we love using our own tools – we call it dogfooding (or eating our own dogfood). We have a lot of new sites cropping up within Office with the Project Summary on the home page. The feedback has been great. People tell us that having this Project Summary on their site makes them look and feel organized and keeps the team in sync.

The Tasks list is a great place to get organized around the team’s work, but sometimes the scope of a project will grow into something larger that needs a greater level of control, structure, and reporting.  In these cases, you can open a task list in Microsoft Project 2013.  Click the “Open in Project” button in the ribbon to get great reporting features and an even higher level of organization to track your project schedule and deadlines, and saving in Project will synchronize changes directly back into the list for everyone to share.  

On average, people work on five to seven projects at a time.  For example, the wedding planner may have several clients that she is planning weddings for, with a task management site in SharePoint for each. In this case, she’ll have tasks assigned to her from several different places, in addition to tracking personal tasks outside of those projects.  

  

To get to My Tasks, go your Newsfeed Hub and click on “Tasks” in the quick launch.  When you first go there, we’ll bring in all your tasks and show them to you grouped by project so that you have context of where they came from.

 

My Tasks provides a special view called “Important and Upcoming” to help you pick what’s next from everything that’s asked of you. It gives you a personal timeline to visualize of all your tasks due in the next few weeks, all tasks that you’ve marked as “important,” and a list of upcoming tasks that are due in the near future. This is a self-cleaning view, meaning that it continually changes content to prevent your task lists from becoming overwhelming.  As important tasks linger, they gradually lose prominence in this view so that old tasks that you haven’t gotten around to but aren’t really important anymore don’t clutter the list.

Last but not least, you can synchronize tasks with Outlook.  Not only will you see these tasks in Outlook or Outlook Web App, but also in your favorite Outlook tasks app for your phone, such as the Calendar hub on the Windows Phone or the Reminders app on iOS. Just go to the ribbon in My Tasks and click “Sync to Outlook” to turn it on and we’ll sync tasks on a regular basis.