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

Running Projects with Office 365 SharePoint Inside and Out

First we focused on building a tremendously rich and ridiculously easy project management aggregation tool for SharePoint online (part of Office 365). We had a few languages to choose from but eventually decided on HTML5 + Javascript since it's the way of the web. As a result, installation can be done via drag-and-drop and context is immediately established by the SharePoint site. 

As we expected, Microsoft brought forth Windows 10 Universal Apps, which can also be built using HTML5 + Javascript. As a result, we are pleased to offer the first line of business Windows 10/Office 365 product which can run outside and inside Office 365. Or inside and outside Windows 10, depending on your point of view. 

The project manager can install IntelliGantt for Office 365 from the Windows 10 App Store, connect to any sharepoint.com instance and begin selecting sites, tasks lists and combinations thereof in order to build and schedule projects. At any time the project manager can 'publish' what they are working on to SharePoint for all the world to see in exactly the same environment with exactly the same look and feel. Here is our video showing just how difficult it is-- you need to click a button. Once. That's it. 

SharePoint team members can then see the aggregated sites and projects the manager wished to highlight, the fields they deemed important with the column names they set and report on their progress-- all via their web browser on any platform using any device (that has a modern web browser. Any device still being created without a modern web browser?). 

Whether inside the Windows 10 IntelliGantt for Office 365 App or within the IntelliGantt for SharePoint page, all team members get a rich gantt chart with aggregation, costing, scheduling, filtering, document attaching, discussion enabling, timeline scaling, multiple undoing environment that runs the same on both platforms. 

Because we've invested in the Windows Universal App technology, we will continue to rapidly develop new features for both platforms-- desktop and SharePoint page-- and customers will benefit from rapid deployment of two products absolutely in sync with each other. In fact, IntelliGantt will run on any Windows 10/Office 365 device combination, and make it look easy so you can focus on what's important-- your projects.

Now Supporting SharePoint Online in Office 365

Just a quick note that we have validated our IntelliGantt Web Part for SharePoint Online in Office 365. The folks at Microsoft we're kind enough to let us work with the beta and, after a couple hops and a skip (but no jumps!) we had the sandbox version up and going.

We could even put the web part into the Project Management category, which we are excited about:




And here it is running within our teamdirection.sharepoint.com site, which is 100% fully SharePoint Online within Office 365.




The really cool thing is you get complete web part editor backpage support so configuring the IntelliGantt Web Part is a snap. And for consultants setting up Office 365 sites for their clients, don't forget about our branding features.