you have ever tried to track tasks in SharePoint, lists or pieces of paper, you are going to love the new Work Management capabilities of SharePoint 2013. Come along to this session to get an understanding of these exciting new capabilities and how quickly you can start using them in your organisation for project and work management.
5. But it had some problems …
Hard to see the relationship between tasks
Impossible to aggregate all projects together
Could be linked with Outlook, but painful
6.
7. Site improvements…
• Timeline view • Resource from
• Upcoming tasks SharePoint users
• Calendar view • Proper Gantt chart
view
• Easy task entry
• Saves actual
• Simple status schedule
updates
• Team mailbox
• Sync with Project
• + newsfeeds
• Click to run
• + simple document
uploads
11. How does it work?
• New ‘Work Management’ Service Application
• No configuration required
• Uses a provider model, easy to add additional
systems
12.
13. To review…
Incredibly functional
A real option for managing small projects
Massive mobility story
Integration with Project Server
Simple to use
Part of SharePoint Server
14.
15. Call to action..
Learn more
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
Download the evaluation and experience
Work Management for yourselves
http://office.com/preview
Check out epmsource.com
For links and an overview of this presso
Work management is about getting work done - whatever that work is.Now when I say work, this can be:Your to-do listA shopping listA list of trouble tickets that need to be completedTasks to do an office moveTasks to implement a new version of SharePointPretty much anything that you need to manage, you can do within SharePoint.What I want to do today is show you the new work management capabilities of SharePoint 2013 and hopefully make you leave this session thinking ‘damn I want to use that now’
TO DO : FIX UP THE ORDERSo is this Work management thing new… well the answer is no, not really. SharePoint has always been able to support the management of work in one way or another.2003 – We had task lists.2007 – The Gantt view was introduced, this was the first real stab at ‘work management’ enabling you to see your tasks, track the effort against them and visualise them using a Gantt chart. It worked but it was clunky, you needed to enter your tasks manually, they were independent and painful.2010 – Some real advances in SharePoint 2010 – New Task list view that enabled you to get your tasks in quickly and easily. However the real power came in when you started to use Project Professional and a new feature called Sync to SharePoint. With S2S, you could use sophisticated scheduling software to build out a schedule as a project manager and push it out to resources to work on. They could then update the status of the work items and the PM could pull that info back in.Sounds pretty cool and it is. But it had a couple of limitations…
Don’t get me wrong, the task list is a very effective tool for small projects, reminders. But you can quickly get out of your depth when you need to do a little bit more. Relationship between tasks - Very hard to see the relationship because of the folder / item concept employed by the list. Users really would suffer if they wanted to see the cross task dependencies / driversAggregate – If you started to make heavy use of these sites, the onus was on you to go to each of them to see what you were meant to do and enter your status info. There was no single entry point.Outlook – could link the tasks lists together, but needed manual connections to outlook to be set through filters etc. Also if there were more than one assignee then it wouldn’t work. Also if you weren’t using the Outlook client, then you were stuffed.
So in 2013, MS have introduced a raft of new features to make the management of work inside SharePoint quicker and easier.What your seeing here is a new team site with some of the new features to assist in work management turned on. Notice the handy timeline across the top and cues to remind you when work is due.Now I am I not going to sit here taking you through a heap of slides, instead we are going to dive in and have a look ourselves…So let’s take a look…. (Demo)Create a new site called ‘Rollout SharePoint 2013’Activate deadline features – show the task list and calendar items that are added. Demonstrate the new timeline that is added on the front page.Click to add a new taskEnter the task info and click SaveAdd a couple of tasks, highlight the ‘i’ with the additional keyboard shortcutsAdd the task to the timelineConnect to Project, Show the sync wizardAdd extra tasks to the scheduleAdd some tasks to the timeline and change the format / colour etcSync the schedule back, notice that the timeline has been replaced / updatedSync to the listShow the timeline populated with the values of the timeline from the scheduleShow the full featured Gantt chart view (not there in 2010)Show the calendar view.Update a task status (highlight the cool animation)Sync it back to ProjectShow task list, change the view to the Gantt chart view – much easier to see than in 2010Show the apps – provision a team mailbox app and explain what it can do.
Recap of what we saw…Timeline / upcoming tasks / calendar view – provided when we activated the Deadline capabilities in the team site.Easy Task entry / simple status updates / sync with project – get your tasks in quickly and reduce the barrier to retrieve and manipulate that info.
So you may be saying… This is great. But I want to use it across all my workAbsolutely, and this was one of the biggest limitations with using the task list capabilities of previous SharePoint versions, you would need to go to the various sites and look at the tasks assigned to you, or rely on alerts to know what work items you had assigned to you. So MS realised this, and introduced another key feature into SharePoint 2013 called My Tasks..
My Tasks provides an aggregation of all your tasks across SharePoint task lists that are assigned to you. As you can see you can filter what you see based on when it’s due / it’s importance. If it’s active or completed.Any changes you make like updating the status will be synchronised back to the underlying list in the siteYou can choose to add these to you personal timeline to see the things that matter to youSearch is there… So let’s have a look…DemoNavigate to My Tasks in the My Site – state this is a feature of My SitesShow the Task Roll up – The tasks from the other site should have appeared.Show the grouping, ability to mark tasks as importantShow private tasks – tasks I might not want to share with other people or are private to me.State that private tasks from outlook can be synched back and forthAssign the private task to someone. Show that it goes back into the underlying siteAdd tasks to the consolidated timelineShow the task configuration optionsShow a task being completed.Remind that you can get completed tasks back again…Show the settings, ability to customise what you can see etcNumber of tasks / daysCreate a task in Outlook and see that come back in to the Feed.Show the Sync with OutlookShows the tasks in Outlook so you can sync them with OWA
The new work management capabilities have also been extended to have a killer mobile experience. The sites themselves when viewed through a mobile web browser can be seen showing task information and the timeline itself which is pretty cool.A benefit of the Exchange integration means that the tasks are available to any device that can connect to Exchange and render tasks, in the case here we have WP7 showing the tasks, and native iDevice support, which is pretty cool. Again, in any of these scenarios, updating the task status will result in the task being updated in the underlying SharePoint site.
So how does this work?First click1. All tasks are aggregated in SharePoint Server, and that’s an important distinction, the work management bits are not available in SPF.2. SharePoint calls out to external system including Exchange to read any tasks and to push out any tasks we may have created.3. Users can then use clients such as Outlook / OWA or mobile device to interact.4. And of course, you can add in other systems The aggregation is done by a new ‘Work Management’ service app. The service app does not require any configuration, just provisioning.Uses a provider model that you can hook into to add additional capabilities and sources of information.
I love the sound of this. but we use Project Serve How is it going to work…. Is anyone here thinking that?If your organisation uses Project Server to manage projects through tasks and timesheets, users can link through to PS to enter the data…You may think, this work management is nice and easy, I want to use this over Project Server for smaller and simpler projects, but I can’t get some of the other PS benefits such as risk / issue and integrated reporting.Well that’s ok, because the work management stuff is fully integrated with PS2013 and it’s an awesome story. Lets have a look…DemoShow the My Tasks – options for Project Server at the top, no direct integration to enter them.But we can add these task list sites to Project Server and get the benefits of PS. Go to PWA Settings, choose to add to PSThe project can now be edited from the site but will show up in Project ServerAvailable in Project Server reportingAdds the Project Server Risks / IssuesFull on enterprise reporting of these work management sites in Project Server, will keep the PMO happy
Incredibly FunctionalWe saw the capabilities of the new sites, the timeline, easy access to put in tasks, sync to Project, the aggregation to my tasks in your my site. All there out of the box.A real optionThe capabilities, simplicity of use and power makes work management a real option for managing small projects. Given its availability in SharePoint Server its certainly an opportunity for organisations who want to provide a more powerful option for work management.MobilityWe saw the mobility story, not only native SharePoint web access, but also the powerful view of aggregated tasks through your mobile device to be truly on top of you work and update the status of those tasks wherever you are.Integration with Project ServerFor those organisation that use Project Server, we saw that you can still have a single point of data entry across your tasks and project server projects. But more importantly if you feel these simpler task based projects would be a good fit, you can integrate them with Project Server and incorporate all those enterrise features you love including reporting , risks / issues etc.Simple to useThe whole thing is incredibly easy to use. Part of SharePoint ServerNothing special is required to use this, it’s out of the box, and requires no configuration other than your 2013 My Sites being setup. But no SPF.
SO I have to ask the question, given the title of the session, do you love it?