Creating a SharePoint Tasks List for Use As a Web Part
Published 09/18 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions Community
By way of providing background, I'm in the process of managing a major editorial initiative for Bamboo Nation, and one aspect of that project is assigning articles to colleagues based on their area of expertise. Another aspect of the project is tracking the progress made on those assignments. As a writer, my natural environment is Word, so I initially drafted the assignments in Word and then created a wiki in our SharePoint portal to host the content as a living document. Many of you, particularly any project managers out there, have probably already recognized the missing component in my wiki-based approach: there's no built-in way to chart a given assignment's progress in a wiki (also: it's easy to ignore a wiki).
Having realized that a change was needed, I began poking around our portal, and realized that a simple and effective solution was staring me in the face right there on the home page of the site dedicated to the larger project of which my editorial component is just one piece. That solution was what appeared to me to be a Tasks Web Part. This "Tasks Web Part" appeared to have everything I needed, as it featured such columns as title, assignee, status, due date and percentage complete.
Once again, I expect many of you are already way ahead of me, and have realized that what I just described is a basic SharePoint list. What can I say? It looked like a Web Part and it quacked like a Web Part, so it seemed reasonable to conclude that it was a Web Part. And you know what? As it turned out, it kind of was...
I created my new list from the home page of the project site by clicking Site Actions -> Create -> Tasks hyperlink under the Tracking heading on the Create page, which rendered the following form:
As I was filling out the form, I realized that I got an added bonus for "free": the ability to choose to Send e-mail when ownership is assigned or when an item has been changed. In my role as de facto project manager, I most definitely chose to do so.
Once I had clicked Create on the form, my new list rendered immediately (empty of contents, of course). Once I had populated the list with all of the assignments, I wanted to place it front and center on the home page of the site, as I had seen the "Tasks Web Part" presented that I mentioned earlier. Accomplishing this was as easy as clicking Site Actions -> Edit Page and then locating my list (by name) under the Lists and Libraries section of the Web Part gallery, placing a check in its box, and clicking Add.
And with that, I had a shared tasks list in place as a Web Part on the home page of the project site. And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to hook up Bamboo's Alert Plus Web Part to the list so that I can arrange for regular email reminders to go out to the lucky assignees on that list.
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