Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A

Hi Christophe! Thanks to you and Mark for a great session today.

What I was asking about in the session chat at the end is this. Our division at the college currently has an Events Calendar (private to the division) where we track all of our meetings, fund raisers, events. As the Marketing/PR division, many of these events require weeks (or months) of planning prior to the events. With many new team members (division has expanded from 3 people to 8 people), not every know what planning steps go into each event.

SO we thought that having some project management (for lack of a better term) where we can visually track the progress of our "projects" would be helpful. Right now we just have the day/days of events on the calendar. We'd like to include some project management tracking (what needs to be collected, created, gathered, purchased before the event; who will be responsible for which task in the preparation, start and end dates for each event) and where we are in the process. We see this as an "electronic white board" of sorts. Since we are spread out over several counties geographically, just having a white board to mark everything on isn't enough. Not really even sure where to begin from the simple calendar we have now to a true project management solution.

Suggestions, thoughts, case studies, anything to point me in the right direction would be helpful. WIll be happy to provide additional details to get this going.

Needless to say I want to do this without Visual Studio (not a programmer), but do have MOSS2007, Designer 2007, and some basic HTML/CSS/jscript knowledge at my disposal.

Thanks in advance for any advice on how to proceed.

Robin, as your team is still small, even if it is growing fast, I would recommend to start with only a couple major milestones. One risk in such situations is to be too detailed, and then people will waste time updating the status (and eventually will stop doing it), and your calendar/tasks list will become useless.
Using a tasks list could help if you want to assign tasks and have notifications sent out.

Thanks, Christophe.

Is there a way to connect that tasks list to the calendar?

I've been specifically asked to do that so I'm trying to figure out how. I (and the backup person I'm training as we go) will be responsible for updating this information.

Since I'm the SharePoint admin for the college's site as well, if I can get a solution working for our small division, it could be repurposed for the larger divisions. Already working on that with the color calendar solutions.

My VP sees this "task solution" (yet to be created) as an excellent way to keep up with whether or not our team members our on track with their projects and a way to encourage collaboration and teamwork (we can step in and help each other when we know there's a deadline looming and we're behind schedule with tasks).

For now, I'll start with the task list and get something started there. Thanks for your input and insight on this.

What you can do is create a separate calendar view for the tasks list (and if needed migrate your existing events to the new list). If you use Oulook you can also connect it to both calendar views.

Knowing whether you are behind schedule (i.e. comparing dates with today) is not easy in SharePoint. You can use filters in view, and also take a look at some countdown solutions on my blog.

Thanks, Christophe.

Taking a little down time this weekend - my youngest is graduating from high school tonight. So I'll tackle this again on Monday.

I appreciate the pointers. I'll be looking closer at your blog for the Countdown solutions.

One question, am I understanding right that we can connect the both the task list (calendar view) and the actual calendar to Outlook? I wasn't sure if you meant each individual could connect their Outlook calendar to these SharePoint lists or if you were referring to a departmental Outlook calendar (which we are not using).

-Robin

I was indeed referring to the ability for a user to display calendars that are maintained on SharePoint in his/her personal Outlook.

Christophe, You caught my attention with your comment: "If you use Oulook you can also connect it to both calendar views."

How is this done? We can easily connect all enteries in a portal calendar to Outlook, but not calendar views. This discussion is similar: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1500&start=10

Thanks

-Jack

You can display SharePoint Calendar lists as calendars in Outlook. You can also connect multiple Tasks lists to Outlook, they'll be displayed in the Outlook Tasks menu (but AFAIK not as calendar).
This is done via the Actions > Connect to Outlook menu.

Yes, we've done that but it displays all the events, not a view of the portal calendar. We have a few portal calendar views for some teams so they can see just what they are intereseted in. We'd like to display just one of the portal calendar views in Outlook.

We have tried to create a filtered view in Outlook to match up with the portal calendar views:
- It's not easy and has to be done in each person's Outlook
- It filters the portal calendar & the person's Outlook calendar
- An all items-type view also needs to be created in Outlook to be able to easily jump back to seeing everything.

- Jack