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

Task Colors, Ordinals and Printing

We've updated IntelliGantt for SharePoint to enable color options for the task list, gantt chart and even task rows. Pick your exact color from a rich chooser control. The IntelliGantt framework colors can be changed on a per instance basis, which can be helpful in quickly identifying which group of sites and tasks in your selection. Individual task rows (and optionally  their children) can also be assigned a foreground and background color to bring highlighting to important tasks.

We've also made it very easy to change the position of a task by changing its ordinal value, just like you would any other number value. Simply select the Ordinal cell and type in the ordinal value of where you'd like to see it moved toward. IntelliGantt will quickly place it there (as long as its in the same task list) and even change parentage if needed. And remember, if you change your mind just click the 'Undo' button.

Finally, we enhance printing by giving you a WYSIWYG preview before sending the task list/gantt chart to the print service. This image hides the other screen elements so you can focus purely on the tasks at hand. Choose landscape layout and the print driver of your choice for beautiful charts (especially with your own colors!).

Visit our help page for the minimum installation or the full installation bits.

Choose a Color for Look and Feel Change Task Ordinals   Color Your Tasks and Backgrounds

Extra Costing with SharePoint Currency Columns

Earlier we showed you the basics of IntelliGantt for SharePoint costing with respect to assigned resources and their hourly rates. Now we would like to show you how IntelliGantt will recognize other currency columns in your task list and roll these values into your estimated Cost value.

When you add a Number Column to your SharePoint task list and format it with the Currency option, IntelliGantt will both rollup the column values and add it to your overall Cost column. 'Cost' is a reserved word in IntelliGantt and it represents all your estimated costs rolled together. Additional currency columns are treated as estimates also and, as a result, are added to the overall cost. In the near future you will have 'Actual' values that will roll up all your actual costs in the same manner (basically all currency columns starting with 'Actual'), but that is a future blog post.

For now, let's look at how the estimated cost rollup works. Starting with this example we see two tasks that have assignments and associated assignment costs with them. Additionally, there is an 'Extra Cost' field that is either blank or zero.

Remember you can see how IntelliGantt calculates an assigned cost by either looking at the particular assignment and seeing the Work, Hourly Rate and Level of Effort values:

Or by looking at the 'People' form and seeing the general setting for all a resources work, their standard hourly rate and effort.

This assigned cost goes right into the Cost column that IntelliGantt recognizes as the aggregated estimated cost field and rolls it up for you. Now let's add a value to the 'Extra Cost' column and see what happens. Let's first look at task 'Two', which has neither assignment nor extra cost values.

When we added $10 to the 'Extra Cost' field, two things happened. One, that extra cost was rolled up within the 'Extra Cost' column and two, it was also sent over to the 'Cost' column to be added to the sum estimated cost. We've highlighted all the affected calculations for you.

Similarly if we add $10 to the row right above which has an assignment, first we see the value added and rolled up in the Extra Cost column and also added to the estimated Cost column (and rolled up).

In this way IntelliGantt helps you keep track of both overall and individual costs. At a glance you can see what the entire, total estimated costs are but still see sub sections like assigned costs and 'extra costs' defined by you to help track your business processes.

Change Your Calendar Working Days and Time

In our previous post we introduced how you can give everyone a level of effort and hourly rate so that a cost per task assignment may be calculated. Of course, there are more components to computing this cost, and they are your working day and working time values within a calendar, or many days per week and how much working time per day. By default IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 uses Monday through Friday as working days and 8 hours per day of working time (a morning period from 8:00am to noon and an afternoon period from 1:00pm to 5:00pm). This results in a simple project cost as shown below.

You can change both the working days and time via the configuration.js file. This is usually located with your IntelliGantt_Online.aspx or IntelliGantt_Inhouse.aspx file within the Site Assets library. Or it can be in a centralized spot, depending on how you've set up all your SharePoint projects.

Here we see the default working days as defined in an array called 'WorkingDays' within the 'Calendar'. The array is a collection of 7 flags, with the first position representing Sunday. If we want to make Wednesday a non-working day, then we switch 4th flag to '0'.

Now when we see IntelliGantt notice that Wednesday is rendered as non-working time. This also affects the cost calculation as you can see the task costs and rollups have changed as well.

The other piece we can change is the working time per day. Back in configuration.js IntelliGantt has a 'periods' parameter where you can define one or more working time periods per day, their start time and their finish time (in seconds). We can either adjust the 'morning' and 'afternoon' periods by changing the start and finish times, or we can introduce a new period altogether like 'evening'.

Once again we refresh IntelliGantt and see that the cost values have changed again as the new working periods are calculated.

This calendar feature will address issues where countries have different working days and/or working times. We will also be introducing holidays and other special days that are either fully non-working or have distinct working periods.

Simple Assignment Costing with SharePoint 2013

IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 enhances basic task list assignments by adding effort and hourly rates for each person and rolling up cost values in a 'Cost' column. There are two main pieces to this feature that we will work through in this blog post.

First, add a new currency column to your task list and name it 'Cost'. IntelliGantt is programmed to look for this 'Cost' column and will store its computed cost values there. IntelliGantt will always compute a cost value, but in order for it to show up in the tool the 'Cost' column needs to be in the active view. Otherwise, if you just have a personal view that shows the 'Cost' column but the other views do not, then in effect you will be the only person able to see the cost values and other people will not.

Second, you will need to supply the effort and hourly rate for each member of the site you want to track this information for. This is done via the 'employee_rates.js' file your IntelliGantt aspx page includes. If you do the basic, minimum installation, then this will be located with your IntelliGantt_Online.aspx page. 

You can co-locate this file with the aspx page as we do when first installing, OR... because we are using all the power of the web, you can also reference a 'global' employee_rates.js file located at a root site that everyone has access to. The benefit of this approach is the file only needs to be generated once. 

One other word about generating the employee_rates.js file. While only you can provide effort and hourly rate information, IntelliGantt can generate the inital employee_rates.js file simply by not referencing one. If IntelliGantt cannot find the employee_rates.js file it will create one using the membership information of the current site. Everyone will then be listed in the 'employee_rates.js' with an Effort of 1.0 (100%) and an HourlyRate of 0.0.

Once we have the 'Cost' column and our employee_rates.js file set up, we can start seeing what things will cost. For example, if you click on the 'Assigned To' cell for a specific task, our rich editor appears that not only lets you adjust the assignments, but also see exactly what each assignment costs.

Here we see that the resource assigned to this task has an hourly rate of $100 and their level of effort is 100%, which in turn means the cost for this 32 hour task is $3200.

You can see everyone's resource information (as defined from the 'employee_rates.js' file) in the 'People' view. Click on the 'People' image at the upper left of IntelliGantt to show this information.

The very first time you open it nothing is selected, so while you see a list of people in the 'All People' selection box, you don't see any values. Simply click on one or more people to see their costing information.

Given the selected person, IntelliGantt will fill in the computed Duration, Work, Effort, Hourly Rate and Estimated Cost values. (Actual Cost as well, but that is a future blog post!).


Notice also that the visible task list in IntelliGantt changed! When you selected a person in the 'People' display, it filters the task list to show only their tasks. This makes it easy to see both their cost and their tasks on a timeline. You can close the 'People' display and it will remember your selection so you have a full view of the filtered Gantt chart.

One more nice little feature is you can collapse tasks and it will show its sub tasks on the same horizontal row, like a swimlane.

Return to the 'People' display to see what your current filter is and the associated costs.

Minimum IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 Install

Earlier we provided detailed instructions for installing all the IntelliGantt pieces you need to run solely on your 'In House' SharePoint servers. Now we'd like to provide an incredibly simple set of instructions for running IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 as an 'Online' service. This installation will work for SharePoint Online (ie. company.sharepoint.com) or on your internal SharePoint servers provided your client browsers have access to the internet. We think you'll be up and running IntelliGantt for SharePoint within 60 seconds.

Step One -- View your Site Contents and find your Site Assets library.

Step Two -- In the root directory of Site Assets create a new folder named IntelliGantt.

Step Three -- Download this miniscule IntelliGanttOnline.zip file (just 5kb of data. When is the last time you downloaded anything 5kb or less?). Unzip and copy the three files to the IntelliGantt folder you created.

Step Four -- Add a Page Viewer web part to your site and make the URL point to the IntelliGantt_Online.aspx page you just added.

Step Five -- Manually set the Page Viewer web part's vertical height so things show up correctly. Maybe give the web part a nice title too.

Final Step -- Save the page and check out IntelliGantt for SharePoint! By default it will find all the task lists in the current site, but that's really just the beginning. Tons of configuration options and features are ready for you to use.

Because we linked this installation to the 'latest' directory, end users will see updates to IntelliGantt for SharePoint automatically. If you'd rather use a specific version, then you would simply use a build version directory. For example, instead of 'latest', you would pull the IntelliGanttOnline.zip file from '1.0.0.139' and your clients would always run this version of IntelliGantt for SharePoint regardless of how often we update the 'latest' directory.

Coloring Tasks, Subtasks and Backgrounds

One of our more popular features is the ability to custom color a SharePoint task. We took it a bit further with the latest release of IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 by also letting you color the task row background and giving you the option for children to inherit the color settings. We store the color settings with the individual task in a text column called 'Color'. Therefore in order to use this feature the SharePoint Task List settings must be edited with the new 'Color' text column.

Once the Color task column is available, simply click or touch within the Color cell for the task you would like to change. The simple color editor appears.

A color value is a 6 character hexadecimal string you've probably seen on the web. Lots of tools online to help with this. As soon as a 6 character value is entered you will see the task color change.

When a color value is set, IntelliGantt for SharePoint shows it in the Gantt chart and in the grid. This let's you know the specific task color has been set.

You can also set the background color for a task row. Again a 6 character hexadecimal value is used, but IntelliGantt also takes the color and applies 33% opacity to it so as the background color doesn't mask everything out.

The color setting can also be applied to all the sub tasks of a task by clicking the 'Give children the same settings' checkbox. This lets you easily highlight a group of tasks.

Like the foreground color, the background color is shown both in the Gantt and Grid plus an additional circle in the task Color cell so you know where it has been set. This can be helpful when applying the color to children as well (which is designated by the checkmark).

You can try it out yourself today with these installation instructions for SharePoint 2013 Online or Inhouse.