Integrating with Azure Active Directory and Accessing SharePoint Office 365 Tasks

We are very pleased to announce IntelliGantt now supports Azure Active Directory authentication services, which makes it even easier for IntelliGantt to visualize and interact with your task lists across your sites in SharePoint. By using your current Azure Active Directory, IntelliGantt will require the same security your IT department expects when accessing tasks in the Office 365 cloud. For example, if your policy is set to two-factor authentication, then that is what IntelliGantt will require as well.

There is an initial setup required of IT that identifies IntelliGantt as a consumer of Office 365 data for you tenant. We've outlined the steps in detail here using the latest Microsoft portal user interface. Once this has been configured, you're done. All users defined in your Azure Active Directory will now be able to goto IntelliGantt, login with the normal credentials and easily rollup their tasks and view them in a rich, interactive task list and gantt chart.

IntelliGantt is licensed per tenant. This means all the users in your Azure Active Directory tenant can access IntelliGantt after it's been licensed. Furthermore, as you prune your Azure Active Directory membership, so too will you update the users who have access to IntelliGantt.

Finally, whenever Microsoft issues updates to Azure Active Directory, we will be right there with you to ensure safe, secure and stable access for all your Office 365 tasks.

Using Azure Active Directory authentication will also open up many more data endpoints for IntelliGantt that we are excited to bring to you in the coming months, such as Outlook, Planner and other integrations!

Finding SharePoint Tasks

IntelliGantt for SharePoint has powerful search tools you can use to quickly find important tasks based on any available column. You can search Text or Numeric (ie. Number, Currency, Percentage, Date and Duration) columns using operators appropriate for the column type. For example, you can search text with 'contains' or search numers with '>'.

You can also pass in the find parameters as a query string to the IntelliGantt url so that important searches can be created ad hoc and shared real time to people.

But let's start with the basics, first. The Find tool is located in the upper-right of IntelliGantt for SharePoint. By default 'All Columns' is selected with 'Contains' as the operator and an empty string for the value. This means every task is shown within IntelliGantt for SharePoint.

'All Columns' uses a text based approach to finding values, so you will see the text based operators available-- Contains, Starts With, Ends with and Matches.

When you type in more than two characters in the Find Value text box, IntelliGantt immediately performs the find action and updates the displayable list of tasks, both in the grid and the gantt. Because this is the 'All Columns' field, every column value for each task is searched to match this value. Numeric fields in this case are treated as strings for the matching.

Dates are supported as a Numeric type to search by. For example, if you select the 'Due Date' column, you can then use numeric operations like '<' or '>' to find dates in the past or the future, depending on your requirement. Pay special attention to the date format when searching with date columns. IntelliGantt lets you choose the date format via the configuration tool. The date you enter into the 'Find Value' must match the selected format.

Purely numeric fields like 'Cost' work as you'd expect, except as just number values. No need to prepend a Cost with the currency symbol. Note in the picture below that the 'Show in Gantt' selection is 'Cost', but we see a 'More Tasks' for task item 2. This is because 'More Tasks' is a Task List that lacks a Cost column name.

Finally, you can pass any column name, operator and value into IntelliGantt for SharePoint by specifying them on the url as a query string.

activeFindName -- defines the column name to use

activeFindOp -- defines the operator to use

activeFindValue -- defines the value to use

Text Operator query string options

• contains -- text containing the find value
• startswith -- text that starts with the find value
• endswith -- text that ends with the find value
• matches -- text that completely matches the find value

Numeric Operator query string options

• gt -- greater than
• gte -- greater than or equal
• lt -- less than
• lte -- less than or equal
• eq -- equal

Some examples

• ?activeFindName=AllColumns&activeFindOp=contains&activeFindValue=Hello
• ?activeFindName=DueDate&activeFindOp=gt&activeFindValue=11/11/2015
• ?activeFindName=Duration&activeFindOp=gt&activeFindValue=2d