9 things you may not know about Sync to SharePoint
By blurg64
The Project Team wrote a while back about the Sync to SharePoint feature of Project 2010. This past week, the beta of Project 2010 has been released to TAP and MSDN / Technet and I have had a chance to play around with it.
Since hearing Microsoft’s positioning of the Sync to SharePoint feature, I have been keen to try it out and see how useful it really will be. So here are 9 things you may not know about this awesome feature:
1. Manual Scheduling
If you have a project schedule that you are syncing with SharePoint that is automatically scheduled, Project 2010 will automatically convert it to Manually scheduled, which makes sense when you remember that the tasks are going to be sync’d with a vanilla SharePoint task list.
2. Resources
If you sync a schedule that contains named resources, those resources need to exist in SharePoint for the assigned to field to be synchronised. If the resources don’t exist, the tasks will keep the resource name in Project 2010, but not in the synchronised task list.
3. New Columns to Sync
You can easily select which columns you want to sync with SharePoint by choosing the Backstage > Info > Sync Tasks to List > Manage Fields option. When you choose this you will get a dialog showing you the fields in Project and their corresponding SharePoint fields they will sync with.
If you click on Add Field, you will get the option to choose new Project fields to sync.
Don’t worry if you don’t know what type they are, the other column will be created automatically when you sync.
4. Baselines
If you have a baseline in your schedule, you can sync it up to SharePoint by choosing to add the project fields as per the item above.
5. Summary tasks
Summary tasks will be synchronised, but are transformed into a folder, which when you click into, you will see the subtasks:
Inside SharePoint, you will see the following:
and when you click through, you will see:
Each of the summary tasks will also show roll ups of the children tasks.
6. Only one project schedule per task list
You can only sync one project schedule with a task list, if you try more than one, SharePoint will let you, but warn you that it’s going to merge the projects:
7. Predecessors
Only the Finish to Start predecessor is supported, so sorry, no FF, SS or SF. In parallel with this, there is no lag or lead supported.
8. Gantt Chart View
By default the task lists seem to show a standard view, however you can create a Gantt chart view and see you sync’d list in a much easier to understand view:
9. Inactive Tasks
If you have inactive tasks in your project schedule, when you sync, those inactive tasks will NOT be reflected in the task list.