Merging SharePoint Events and Tasks in One View

In our last post we saw how we can publish a specific set of tasks from MS Project 2010 to a SharePoint Calendar list using our IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project 2010. In this post we will publish the rest of the tasks from MS Project to a task list located in a sub site to where we published our calendar events. The idea here is to parcel out tasks from MS Project to targeted destinations that are tailored for audiences (or SharePoint members in this case).

Here is the current state of our MS Project plan:

We will now send all the tasks under the 'Tasks' summary task to a separate SharePoint list. I highlighted the current settings selection to make sure it's changed back from the 'Calendar' settings we created in the last post. These settings are tailored for the rich information of task lists.

Make sure the 'Tasks' summary task is selected since this establishes our data source in MS Project and the set of tasks we will send to SharePoint. Once selected, the 'world' in the 'Sites' ribbon group lights up for you.

The steps to connect the 'Tasks' summary task to a SharePoint task list are the same as before. Provide a URL to a SharePoint site and select a task list. Notice that we are connecting to a sub site of our Demo site (where we shared the Calendar events) called Agency1. Agency1 could have completely different permissions tailored for a working group or an external resource.

By double-clicking on the selected task list IntelliGantt performs the inital share operation and, as a result, the tasks in MS Project now have hyperlinks pointing to their corresponding tasks in SharePoint.

The next question you might be asking is 'I can see the entire plan in my MS Project, but how can others see the entire project just in SharePoint?'. Great question! For that we bring in our IntelliGantt Web Part. We can place it on any SharePoint page within our demo site to see all of its tasks.

But this isn't exactly what we want. We need to see our events from the Calendar and our tasks from the Agency1 subsite. No problem. We can configure the IntelliGantt Web Part to do exactly that. Edit the web part and find the 'IntelliGantt Initialization' category. In here we will include the template ID for a calendar and define which SharePoint lists we will be using. As we remember from the last post, the template ID for a calendar is 106.

Next, we will update the 'Selected List Names' to reference both the Calendar from our current site and the Task List from our Agency1 subsite. Below is the image for both customizations:

Now when we view the IntelliGantt Web Part on our SharePoint page, we see a unified view of our Calendar events and our Agency1 tasks.

The default view for the calendar shows only the events in the current month. If you would rather see all events in the calendar, we need to change the default view to be 'All Events'. To do so, go to your SharePoint Calendar, change the view to 'All Events' and modify it so that 'Make this the default view' is checked.

Now when we view the web part we will see all the events and all the tasks: