Wednesday, March 14, 2007

SharePoint/Project Use Case

As we've been enriching our integration with SharePoint and Groove, a use case is coming up that is neither wrong nor right-- it's just expectations.

Currently in IntelliGantt Plus, if you publish a project to a SharePoint workspace, IntelliGantt will be selective in how it updates. For instance, if a GUEST logs into the workspace, obviously SharePoint will not allow them to edit tasks. But what about a contributor?

We've designed things such that, if you are a contributor in SharePoint, you must be assigned to a task in order to update it. We can't tell SharePoint to disable those fields as if you were a guest. Rather, when IntelliGantt Plus synchronizes with the SharePoint task list, it examines who made the change to the updated task.

If you are not a manager, not a guest, but in fact a contributor, then IntelliGantt checks for task assignment. If the contributor is not assigned to the task, the updates will be tossed and IntelliGantt will reinsert its view of the task. If the contributor is assigned to the task, then the changes are reflected in the IntelliGantt project.

This works well for the project manager monitoring the project. They don't want to let just *anybody* update tasks. However, what if team members wish for a less restrictive approach. For example, maybe there are no task assignments. Everybody has the ability to change any task. This is in fact how our Internet Workgroup works, but with SharePoint we wanted to make use of permissions.

Perhaps we need a less restrictive mode? In talking with project managers, no-one wants to give up our current assignment enforcement. However, we do look to be inclusive-- and if some people would like to have more of a 'free-for-all', we are listening.

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