Arrow-Tip #46 Options for Managing Assigned Tasks Part II
In Arrow-Tip #45 I discussed managing tasks using the Outlook and Exchange task assignment features. In this Arrow-Tip I’m going to discuss how we use SharePoint in combination with Outlook to manage tasks as an organization for one of my clients Gulf Coast Welding Corp.
Each week at Gulf Coast Welding Corp (GCW Corp.) we hold a staff meeting where we review the company production schedule as well as open tasks assigned from previous meetings. We use SharePoint to manage information for these meetings like the agenda and minutes (topic for future Arrow-Tip), but we also like to use SharePoint to manage the tasks that come out of those meetings so that everyone can see their status and download them to Outlook.
SharePoint Tasks Area
One of the standard lists available for SharePoint team websites is the Tasks list. We’ve added this list to our shortcut bar on the left side of the All Site Content view in SharePoint (see thumbnail to the left). This is the area we use to house and manage our group tasks.
During our weekly production meetings, we normally keep our minutes document up on a computer with the display screen projected onto a whiteboard so we can all see information as it is posted. Ideally we would toggle to the SharePoint Tasks area to review
and update tasks right there in the meeting (see thumbnail to the right). Unfortunately we don’t have interent access in our conference room so I usually just download active tasks into an Excel spreadsheet (Actions menu>Download to Spreadsheet) and then paste that data into a table in our Minutes document.
I find editing SharePoint tasks in the Datasheet view is much easier – to get to this view select Edit in Datasheet from the Actions drop down menu. This view allows the user to update all columns row by row in SharePoint.
In Arrow-Tip #47 I’ll discuss synchronizing SharePoint tasks with Outlook tasks. In the mean time I’d be interested to hear about your experiences using SharePoint tasks.
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