SharePoint® 2007 Collaboration For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Managing Tasks, Issues, and Workflows in SharePoint

In This Chapter

• Understanding Tasks, Project Tasks, and Issue Tracking lists

• Using the Tasks list that comes with SharePoint and switching its views

• Adding the Gantt view to the default Tasks list

• Creating and maintaining an Issue Tracking list

• Automating the business process in an Issue Tracking list

Dividing your collaborative projects into discrete tasks and then assigning them to teams or particular team members and tracking their progress are frequently important functions of a SharePoint site. To that end, SharePoint supports three types of task-oriented lists:

• Tasks: Provides a simple Tasks list with Title, Assigned To, Status, Priority, Due Date, and % Complete fields as its columns. Typically, when you start a new SharePoint site, the site contains a Tasks list (simply called Tasks) that you can start using to assign tasks to your team members and keep track of their progress.

• Project Tasks: Tracks the exact same information as a Tasks list except that a Project Tasks list comes with a special, graphical Gantt chart display (simply called Project Tasks) as its default view. The Gantt chart uses bar graphs to give you a visual sense of where project tasks overlap in time and when their due dates are coming up. Note that you can create a custom view for the default that gives you this Gantt chart display of the tasks you track in a regular Tasks list. (See "Creating a custom Gantt view for your site's Tasks list," later ...