Introduction

One great feature of SharePoint is the ability to extend and customise the built in List types (such as Announcements, Contacts, Issues and Tasks) to meet your requirements. In this series of articles we will give you some ideas on how you can modify a task list to meet the needs of business processes you have in your organisation.

We will be using a fictitious example of the Credit Control department of a company using a SharePoint Team Site. The Credit Control department is responsible for reviewing the financial details of the companies suppliers and customers, setting and reviewing credit agreements and enforcing credit control. They currently use a standard SharePoint Task List to allocate and control work to the departments Credit Analysts.

In this article we will look at how to add extra fields to the list, and how to generate views to filter and view the same information in different ways.

This article assumes that you already have a Task list setup and have the appropriate permissions to modify the list – if not, see your SharePoint Administrator.

Adding a column

There are several different types of work in this department, such as reviewing credit agreements or enforcing credit control. It would help management to be able to record what type of work each task is. In this example we will be adding a column with a drop down list of work types.

Select “Modify Columns and Settings” on the bottom right of the task list.
Under the Columns section select “Add a New Column”
Enter a name for the column, here we have called it “Type” and specify that its a Choice type field
Enter the different choices the user will have (Credit Review, Supplier Review, Credit Control, Other) and leave the other options to the default values.
This new field will be edited using a drop down menu and will be added to the default View (more on Views later)

Think about other fields that could be useful for your organisation – perhaps in this example we could add a field to show if it is a customer or supplier, the hours of work expected or completed – whatever fits in with your business process. Remember though, the more information you record the longer it takes to enter that information and the more cluttered the display will become.

You can also delete fields if they are of no use (you can’t delete the default fields such as Priority/Status etc – but you can hide them from a view if they are not relevant).

Creating a View

Select “Modify Columns and Settings” on the bottom right of the task list.
This screen lets you edit an existing view or create a new view. Select “Create a New View”
Select “Standard View”
Enter a name of “Overdue Tasks” and set the View Audience to Public View as we want other people to be able to use our view.
We want the most overdue tasks (the ones with the earliest Due Dates) at the top of the list, so select to sort by Due Date and Ascending.
We only want to see the overdue tasks – those that have not been completed and have passed their due dates. Set a Filter to show only those records where the Status is not Completed and the Due Date is less than [Today].Note – [Today] is a special marker that SharePoint understands as the current date.
Save the view. Overdue Tasks now appears for all users. You could even add this view to a web part zone on your departments main page – giving a quick view of any overdue tasks that need immediate attention.

Views are very powerful – here are some further ideas, some of which will appear in future articles.

• Provide different views of the same information to different groups of people showing only those records, and only those fields that are relevant.
• Use Grouping to list tasks together by the person its been assigned to or perhaps the work type.
• Use calculated fields. For example if we recorded the estimated time to complete each task then we could have a field showing the estimated time left by using a sum of Estimated Work – (Estimated Work * Percentage Complete)
• Use totalling to sum fields in the records. For example if we summed the Estimated Time Left field for all Overdue tasks this would give Management an immediate indication of how much of a backlog the department was dealing with.

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