The IntelliGantt Web Part Within SharePoint

While a great looking and full-featured Gantt Chart has many merits on its own, if you're going to call something a Gantt Chart for SharePoint it's probably a good idea to actually show it within SharePoint. Not that I don't appreciate a good developer view now and then, but here's a screen capture of the IntelliGantt Web Part for SharePoint within SharePoint 2010.



The most important thing to note: This is not photoshopped!

I'll cover how to drop our web part within a SharePoint page in a separate post, but rest assured we're making it very easy for anyone to give the IntelliGantt Web Part for SharePoint a test run.

What I wanted to point out in this post is how this web part gives you a full visualization of the entire hierarchy. In this image you see six total items from the SharePoint site called 'SubSite 1', the task list called 'SubSite 1 Tasks' and the actual task items in the task list: Container, Chew Gum, Look and Walk. So far so good.

Since IntelliGantt gets its data from a SharePoint Task List, you can of course see the same data using just your web browser. However, when you navigate to the SharePoint Task List notice that only the three top-level items are visible: the Container folder, Look and Walk. The Container folder does indeed still contain sub tasks, but what you see in SharePoint is the following:



If we switch to the Gantt View for this list, we still just see the folder and 2 tasks:



IntelliGantt, on the other hand, gives you a complete view of your task hierarchy.



And naturally, the values roll up, like Start Date, Due Date and Percent Complete-- all reflecting the collection of child tasks. With this web part you can see all the tasks in your project just like you can in MS Project or IntelliGantt on the desktop.

Finally, we took this ability to its logical conclusion-- if you would like to see all the tasks in your project, then it stands to reason you might want to see all the tasks in your sub sites too. Just click the arrow next to the 'Views' dropdown (yes, that will be covered in another post) and IntelliGantt will discover the task lists lurking in your subsites and gather everything into one view.



Ah, I see that a few tasks we pulled in are behind. Looks like we have more work to do!