Sharepoint 2013 : Understanding project sites (part 2) - Managing tasks

Managing tasks

Because most of us work on more than one project at a time, SharePoint 2013 now provides an aggregated view all your tasks called My Tasks. This includes tasks from team and project sites, Outlook tasks, and Microsoft Project tasks. This pulls all your tasks into one view and allows you to organize and manage both personal and assigned tasks from team and project sites. You will find your tasks by going to your Newsfeed and clicking Tasks in the navigation on the left side of the page. As shown in Figure 5, your tasks are grouped by source and by project so that you have context of where the tasks are coming from.

Figure 5. Users’ tasks are shown in their Newsfeed.

On the My Tasks page, you can click the exclamation mark next to any task to mark it as important and add it to the Important And Upcoming view, which is a useful way to look at what is most urgent for you to get working on. This view provides a personal timeline to visualize all your tasks that are due in the upcoming weeks and any tasks that are marked as important. An example of this is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Important and upcoming tasks are shown in a user’s Newsfeed.

If you need to work with a task in Project, you can select the task and then click the Open With Project button on the List tab of the ribbon, as shown in Figure 7. (Note that this is the same ribbon where you can opt to synchronize items to Outlook.) If you choose to synchronize your tasks to Outlook, they can also be displayed in your task app for mobile devices, such as the Outlook calendar hub on the Windows Phone or the Reminders app on iOS.

Figure 7. The options to open a task with Project and Sync To Outlook are on the ribbon.