Tasks and Time Management with Outlook and Sharepoint

苍天有泪

　　We can connect five of the most popular types of SharePoint Lists to Outlook 2007: Calendars, Contact Lists, Tasks, Discussion Boards, and Document Libraries. What follows is a little bit about how SharePoint and Outlook work together for better team and project collaboration.
SharePoint and Time Management
　　For many of us, there is a world of information outside of Outlook that is essential for managing our time. For example, intranet sites with team vacation schedules, group project calendars, and lists of action items that all impact what we need to do and when we need to it. Does this sound familiar? Starting with the Microsoft Office 2007 release of SharePoint, you will be able to connect specific SharePoint Task Lists and Calendars to Outlook, bringing all of your intranet time management information into one place - Outlook. These lists are read/write, which means you can make changes to SharePoint Tasks and Appointments through Outlook 2007 tools like the To Do Bar and Task Well and have those changes upload to SharePoint automatically.
Putting it together
　　Let's start with a real-world example. I'm organizing a fundraiser in the next two weeks and I have asked Melissa to help me. To be successful, there's a whole slew of actions Melissa and I will have to complete. To manage this project, I created the "Bowl-a-thon Fundraiser" Task List in SharePoint, pictured below. I assigned one task to Melissa (she needs some serious help bowling) and assigned one task to myself. Since Melissa and I will be working on this together, we can use this list as a single place to track our tasks and to monitor each other's progress.

　　By clicking on the "Actions" menu, and then "Connect to Outlook", as shown below, I can ask Outlook to connect to & download this Task List.

　　In Outlook, I will see the task "Send e-mail to recruit…" show up in my To-Do Bar because it is assigned to me. Outlook filters out tasks assigned to others in order to prevent the To-Do bar from becoming cluttered with work that isn't for you.

　　The To-Do Bar shows all of my tasks, not just my SharePoint tasks. To see just the tasks in this project, I can click on "Tasks" in the Navigation Pane and go to the "Team Site – Bowl-a-thon Fundraiser" folder and see the same view as I do on the SharePoint site because the entire list is synchronized into Outlook. As changes are made to the list, my synchronized list will update, so I can watch as Melissa makes progress on her bowling tasks and I can add new tasks and assign them to her (more on that below) – all without leaving Outlook.

　　Updating and re-assigning tasks is easy. If I find a task that needs to go to Melissa, I can double-click on it to open a familiar Task Inspector window. Here are a few key differences:

• SharePoint Tasks include an Assigned To field. Just like a task request, a SharePoint task has an Assigned To field. Unlike a task request, the owner of the task is posted to the SharePoint site, so everyone knows who is doing what.
  
• The body of a SharePoint Task is a shared, unstructured, space. One big difference between SharePoint Tasks and Task Requests is that SharePoint Tasks can be re-assigned by anyone, rather than just the person who requested the task. As the task travels between different people they can add comments to the body in whatever style they like. In the screenshot below, Melissa's updated the task to let me know she's waiting on a delivery, By the time the task is completed the body will have become this rich record of the decision making process. That record will also be more accessible to my peers because it's stored on SharePoint rather than just in my one person's mailbox.
  
• SharePoint Tasks come with context. At the bottom of a task you can see who last owned the task ("Last modified by:"), when it was changed, and a link back to the SharePoint site.
  

　　For example, I can assign the task "Watch "Essential Keys to Better Bowling" to Melissa by filling in the Assigned To: field and I can add a note in the notes field of the task, as shown above.  As soon as I click "Save & Close" the task will disappear from my To-Do bar, but I will still be able to see it (and keep track of it) in my "Team Site – Bowl-a-thon Fundraiser" folder in the Tasks Module. Checking it later on I can see Melissa updated the task on March 14th.
　　
　　Hope you enjoy using SharePoint 2007 and Outlook 2007 together for your next project.