If you started using Project for the Web to manage projects within your organization, I am sure you encountered the mysterious Quick Look column that appears on every project schedule by default. In today’s post, I would like to explain the purpose of this column and what it does.

What is Project for the Web

Project for the Web is a web-based application that allows teams to manage tasks. Unlike its cousin Planner, Project for the Web allows teams to create more sophisticated task schedules, set dependencies on tasks, and manage effort and resources. To read more about Project for the Web and some of its capabilities, read this post.

Sample Project for the Web Schedule in Project for the Web

Quick Look Column in Project for the Web

When you create a new schedule within Project for the Web, you get to see the Quick Look field available within the task plan by default. It is a Read-only field that a user can’t fill out. So what is it? Let me explain.

The Quick Look field shows whether or not a given task has additional information not displayed on a task schedule. Here is the additional information you can fill out on a task and shown as an indicator in the Quick Look column:

• Task Notes
• File Attachments
• Checklist

By default, when you create new tasks, these fields will obviously be blank. However, if you click on the “i” Project Details panel and populate a task with some task notes, attach a file or utilize a checklist option, it will show you the appropriate indicators within the Quick Look column. Otherwise, the users reading or completing the task might miss this important additional information and might not even know it even exists.

In the below example, I added some notes, attached a file, and added a few items to the checklist within a task.

And this is how the task grid looks to the users once the information is populated.

The post The purpose of the Quick Look Column in Project for the Web appeared first on SharePoint Maven.

In today’s article, I would like to continue to familiarize you with the Project for the Web application. Specifically, I want to explain the difference between subtasks and task checklists.

What is Project for the Web?

If you are new to Project for the Web application, I suggest you check out this post first, where I explain the relatively new application at a high level and tell you about its major features and capabilities.

Project for the Web Subtasks

One of the biggest advantages of Project for the Web compared to the Planner application is that you can organize tasks into multiple levels of categories and subcategories, just like you would see such an arrangement on a Gantt Chart Schedule. Below is an example of what I am talking about.

To achieve this level of organization, you would choose the parent category and create a subtask using the task below. You can create multiple levels of subtasks/categories/nested structures. So in other words, a subtask is a manageable effort/task that can be recorded, executed, and tracked on a project schedule.

Project for the Web Checklist

We never really had Checklist capability in the past, at least with the desktop version of the MS Project. However, now that we have Project for the Web, we can break down a task into smaller increments by using the Checklist functionality. This was probably copied from Planner, where we had this capability for quite some time.

If you click “i” on a given task in Project for the Web, it will open up a task details panel where you can create a checklist inside of a task.

Checklist Limitations

• The checklist does not show up in the schedule (unless you display the Quick Look column indicator)
• A checklist can’t be assigned resources, dates, duration, or effort (like a task)
• Hard to track the status
• Any given task can only have a max of 10 items in its checklist

Checklist or Subtasks?

From my experience, a checklist might be handy for really small tasks that do not require much tracking in terms of effort, resource assignment, or dates. It might be an excellent way to break a single task into smaller steps, without “polluting” your schedule/timeline. The only thing I want to clarify is that the checklist items should belong to the same individual(s) as those appearing on the task itself. If this is not the case, the checklist items should be their own task with their own user assignment. Otherwise, there is a really good chance those checklist items will never be completed 😊

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There are a few ways to create a new schedule in Project for the Web application. So in today’s post, I would like to summarize them all.

What is Project for the Web?

Project for the Web is a Microsoft web-based application, one would use to manage projects. It is meant to be more sophisticated in terms of task management/project management capabilities and is intended to be a step up from the Planner application. Check out this post to learn more about the app.

Example of a schedule in Project for the Web

How to create a schedule in Project for the Web

There are several ways to create a new schedule in Project for the Web. To access all the options, first, navigate to https://project.microsoft.com/ or click on Project for the Web from the Microsoft App Launcher.

Option 1. Create from Blank

The first way to create a new schedule is to start from scratch.

1. From the Project for the Web Homepage, click New project
2. Next, click Blank project
3. A blank project schedule will then be created
4. You can then click on the title of the Project to change its default name from Untitled Project + change some other parameters about it (i.e., Start Date)

Option 2. Create from Template

Another way to start a new schedule is to create one from a template. Just like in Lists, we have the option to create a list based on a certain business use case, we do have the same capability in Project for the Web. Microsoft has a few templates available to give you some ideas about tasks/dependencies based on certain use cases. For example, there are sample schedules for construction projects, software development, etc.

1. From the Project for the Web Homepage, click New project
2. Next, on the pop-up that appears, choose a template from the ones presented on a screen
3. Once you choose a given template, it will show you a preview of it. Click the Use template button.
4. The schedule with sample tasks will now be created in the Project for the Web. You can change it/customize to your process from there.

Option 3. Import from MS Project .mpp file

This option is great if you have used MS Project (the desktop version) in the past and have some schedules already created there. This option allows you to (almost) seamlessly import a desktop .mpp file to Project for the Web. I blogged about this method in this article a bit earlier. The article mentioned above also discusses some of the limitations you will encounter with the import process.

Option 4. Copy from existing schedule

Finally, we have an option where you can take an existing schedule and copy it over to a new schedule. This option is great when you or someone else has already created a Project Schedule in Project for the Web, and you need to copy it for a similar project.

1. On a given project, click three dots in the upper-right-hand-corner, then choose Copy project
2. This will create a copy of the Project. You can then change its name and customize it further.
3. It is important to note that if the original Project you copied was already part of a certain Microsoft 365 group, the copied Project would not be part of that same group. You will need to manually associate that new schedule with the same group or another group.

The post 4 Ways to create a Schedule in Project for the Web appeared first on SharePoint Maven.

At Rapid Circle, we utilise a framework known as the Enterprise Operating System (EOS), and to help achieve this we use a tool called Bloom Growth (formerly known as Traction Tools).

I won’t get into the specifics of how it works, but one of the things that comes out of our weekly “L10” team meetings is tasks get allocated to people. (This isn’t rocket science, and is possible with many other systems, but Bloom Growth is what we and many organisations use.)

The Challenge

The only issue with tasks being created in Bloom Growth is that they stay in Bloom Growth. If you want to update them or mark them as complete — you need to log into Bloom Growth to do that. Additionally, the only way you’re reminded of the tasks is a daily email — which for many people gets lost in their sea of other reminder emails.

Effective users of the Microsoft 365 platform will use To Do for managing their tasks as it does a great job of individual task lists, shared task lists, and synchronising tasks with Planner.

So how do we connect the two together?

The Solution — v1

As soon as I started using Bloom Growth and was assigned a task, I immediately looked for any form of integration to be able to bring the tasks to where I work — in Microsoft 365. Unfortunately nothing existed that I could find.

A quick search online yielded a positive result — a Bloom Growth v1 API swagger.

The initial solution I built was for myself only using two workflows.

Flow #1

1. Triggered based on a daily schedule
2. Connects to Bloom Growth with my account
3. Checks for any open tasks under my account
4. Checks to make sure the tasks don’t already exist in To Do
5. Creates tasks in a specific To Do task list with the Bloom Growth ID appended to the task title (required for Flow #2)

Flow #2

1. Triggered when a task in the specific To Do list was updated, using a trigger condition to only run for completed tasks
2. Connects to Bloom Growth with my account
3. Looks for a task in Bloom Growth that matches the ID in the task title
4. Marks the task as complete in Bloom Growth

While a few of my colleagues made copies of these workflows for themselves, I heard some of the managers lamenting that their staff were not completing tasks on time for the reasons mentioned above. And while I could go with the approach of walking people through setting it up, ultimately it’s a lot of separate solutions, running under each employee — which can be challenging to support.

Enter…

The Solution v2

While discussing this with one of my colleagues who was using a copy of my two flows, we wondered if there was a way we could do this at scale.

At the time, the Graph documentation for Microsoft To Do did not reflect that application permissions were supported for the endpoints, but I thought I’d try it anyway… and it worked.

So, without further ado, here is how to synchronise tasks from Bloom Growth with Microsoft To Do for large amounts of staff.

This solution utilises 3 workflows:

• Create a “L10 Tasks” folder for users
• Check for tasks assigned to them, add them to To Do
• Check for completed tasks in To Do, mark them as complete in Bloom Growth

Solution Requirements

There are 3 requirements we need for this to work:

Requirement #1: Bloom Growth access

For this solution to work, we need an account with administrator-level access in Bloom Growth, so that it can see the tasks of every single member.

Requirement #2: Azure AD App Registration

In order to be able to read/write everyone’s task lists, we need an Azure AD App Registration with the following permissions:

Create a client secret, and that’s it!

Requirement #3: Table to store user-specific information

For my solution, I used a SharePoint list out of convenience. However, you could use a Dataverse table or something else if you like.

All we need to store in this list is:

• User Principal Name (UPN)
• Bloom Growth ID
• Task list ID

Workflows

Workflow #1: Create the “L10 Tasks” list in To Do

This workflow runs on a regular basis and performs the following functions:

1. Get members of a security group (so we only apply this to valid users)
2. Find their Bloom Growth user ID
3. Create the task list in To Do
4. Record the details in a table

Of course we need some basic error checking to handle if they already have an existing task list, and secondly whether they actually exist in Bloom Growth.

Sure the workflow is not necessarily as elegant as it could be, but it only takes about 2–3 minutes to run for about 80 users, so I don’t feel the need to optimise it at this point.

Workflow #2: Check for new tasks in Bloom Growth and create them in To Do

This workflow is timed to run after the first workflow, and performs the following functions:

1. Get the users to run the sync against
2. For each user, find tasks assigned to them in Bloom Growth
3. Check if those tasks already exist in the “L10 Tasks” list (using the Bloom Growth task ID as a reference)
4. If not found, create the task in To Do with the Bloom Growth task ID in the title (used by the previous step, and the next workflow)

Again, this workflow could be more elegant, but it also only takes a whopping 2–3 minutes to run for the 80 users.

Workflow 3: Check for completed tasks in To Do and update their status in Bloom Growth

The first part is the same as Workflow 2, but what it does within the Apply to each is different.

Within the scope we retrieve the Bloom Growth ID of the task from title of the To Do task:

Then we check if the task is still open in Bloom Growth or not (as someone may have already marked it as complete directly in the web portal, and we don’t want to get an error):

The Final Result

Here’s what my tasks look like in Bloom Growth:

And in To Do:

So let’s mark one of these tasks as complete in To Do:

And presto:

You can download the full solution from my PowerThings repository on GitHub.

Appendix — Graph endpoints used

This blog post is already long, so I’ve put the breakouts of the To Do specific API calls down here.

Originally published at Loryan Strant, Microsoft 365 MVP.

Synchronising tasks at scale between Bloom Growth and Microsoft To Do was originally published in REgarding 365 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are several different ways to create a new Project Schedule in the Project for the Web applicaiton and one of the options is to import an existing Microsoft Project file. I would like to explain how to do just that in today’s post.

What is Project for the Web

If you are new to Project for the Web, it is a task management application available within Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Unlike Planner, which is an informal, Kanban-style task management tool, Project for the Web allows you to set dependencies on the tasks, populate tasks with effort, and create custom fields. I introduced you to this wonderful application in an earlier article of mine.

An example of the Project for the Web application

How to import a Microsoft Project schedule into Project for the Web

Suppose you are considering switching to Project for the Web. In that case, the chances are, you probably already used a desktop version of the Microsoft Project and happen to have some schedules created in that application. Luckily, Microsoft made the transition of switching to the cloud version of the application easy, by allowing us to import a desktop version .mpp file into Project for the Web. So in today’s article, I would like to explain how this works and explain some limitations associated with the import process.

For this post, I will use the simple schedule I have in MS Project below.

Existing MS Project schedule

To import an .mpp project schedule to Project for the Web, do the following:

1. Navigate to Project for the Web application by clicking Microsoft 365 App Launcher > Project
2. Click New project Button
3. Then, choose the Import project button
4. From the next pop-up, click Choose .mpp file button
5. Browse to the location of your .mpp file and click Open
6. It will then go ahead and import the file and provide you with a summary of unsupported items that were not imported (more on this later in this post). Click OK.
7. Your schedule will now appear in Project for the Web! Mazel Tov!

Limitations on the .mpp project schedule import to Project for the Web

1. You can only import an .mpp file into a new Project for the Web Schedule, not an existing one.
2. You can only import an .mpp file into a schedule once. If you made a change to the .mpp file after the initial import, you would need to import to a brand new schedule
3. Since Project for the Web is a lightweight version of the desktop application, some fields and information that exist in the desktop version of the application will not be imported to Project for the Web. Some examples include: Assigned Resources, custom fields, and certain types of dependencies. For a complete list of the columns that are not supported/imported, check out this Microsoft article.
4. Currently, Project for the Web only supports a maximum number of 500 tasks. So if you have a sophisticated and extensive schedule in MS Project, it will not be imported to Project for the Web. Check out this post for a complete list of Project of Project for the Web limitations.

The post How to import a Microsoft Project schedule into Project for the Web appeared first on SharePoint Maven.

Pisząc mój poprzedni post dotyczący pracy z zadaniami w Power Automate, zdałem sobie sprawę, że w tabeli Flow Approval istnieje kolumna o nazwie Flow Notification URI, której do tej pory naprawdę nie doceniałem. Pokażę teraz, jaka drzemie w niej moc!

Do dziś byłem prawie pewien, że nie da się automatycznie ukończyć zadania w Power Automate/Microsoft Teams, a także wznowić procesu, który czeka na zatwierdzenie. Okazuje się, że naprawdę się myliłem.

Trochę podstaw

Za każdym razem, gdy przepływ pracy zawierający akcję, która przypisuje zadanie i czeka na jego zakończenie, jest wykonywany, nie tylko tworzy wpisy w tabelach Approval i Approval Request, ale także w Flow Approval. Co więcej, każdy wpis w tej ostatniej tabeli zawiera wartość w kolumnie o nazwie Flow Notification URI, który po wywołaniu z żądaniem POST po prostu kończy oczekiwanie i wznawia przepływ:

Adres URL jest zbudowany z następujących składowych (większość z nich pochodzi z innych kolumn tabeli Flow Approval):

https://[instancja].westeurope.logic.azure.com/workflows/[Flow Id]/runs/[Flow Run Sequence Id]/actions/[Nazwa akcji czekającej na zakończenie]/run?api-version=2016-06-01&sp=%2Fruns%2F[Flow Run Sequence Id]%2Factions%2F[Nazwa akcji czekającej na zakończenie]%2Frun%2C%2Fruns%2F[Flow Run Sequence Id]%2Factions%2F[Nazwa akcji czekającej na zakończenie]%2Fread&sv=1.0&sig=[klucz podpisujący żądanie]

Co dalej?

Wiedząc, że wysłanie żądania POST do tego adresu URL kończy oczekiwanie i wznawia przepływ, otwiera zupełnie nowy zakres scenariuszy, które można zbudować wokół podstawowych zadań akceptacji, na przykład przy użyciu niestandardowych aplikacji Power Apps. Wyobraź sobie tylko niektóre z nich:

1. Zatwierdzanie w imieniu innej osoby,
2. Oczekiwanie na większość odpowiedzi, nie wszystkich,
3. Kończenie zatwierdzania w dowolnym momencie,
4. I wiele, wiele innych!

Celem jest, aby najpierw zapisać i zaktualizować dane we wszystkich innych tabelach, z których korzystają Approvals (o których mowa w moim poście tutaj), uzyskać wszystkie informacje potrzebne do wysłania w odpowiedzi, a następnie wykonać POST do Notification URI.

Ponadto, wykonując taki POST, upewnij się, że jest zgodny z oczekiwanym formatem JSON i że umieściłeś „Content-Type: application/json” jako nagłówek:

{
   "responses":[
      {
         "responder":{
            "id":"GUID z tabeli Users",
            "displayName":"Imię kończącego zadanie",
            "email":"Mail kończącego zadanie",
            "tenantId":"Tenant ID",
            "userPrincipalName":"Principal name kończącego zadanie"
         },
         "requestDate":"Timestamp",
         "responseDate":"Timestamp",
         "approverResponse":"Wynik zadania",
         "comments":"Komentarz"
      }
   ],
   "responseSummary":"Tekst będący zlepkiem informacji o każdym zadaniu, kto, kiedy i z jakim wynikiem.",
   "completionDate":"Timestamp",
   "outcome":"Ogólny wynik zatwierdzania",
   "name":"Approval ID z tabeli Approval",
   "title":"Nazwa zadania",
   "details":"Opis zadania",
   "requestDate":"Timestamp",
   "expirationDate":"Timestamp"
}

Po wysłaniu takiego POST akcja zakończy oczekiwanie i wyświetli wszystkie dane jako dynamiczne wyniki, tak jakby została zakończona za pomocą interfejsu zadania:

Mam nadzieję, że ten post cię tak saom podekscytował, jak mnie, gdy odkryłem tę możliwość. Daj znać w komentarzach, jakie scenariusze jesteś w stanie teraz zrealizować!

Artykuł Jak automatycznie kończyć zadania zatwierdzania w Power Automate i Microsoft Teams pochodzi z serwisu Tomasz Poszytek, Business Applications MVP.

This topic is dear to my heart as I am a huge fan of Planner Application. Planner was not necessarily spoiled with a flood of new features like we are accustomed to with Teams, SharePoint, and other applications. So any new capabilities/new features within Planner are welcome and celebrated. One feature we recently got was the ability to create recurring tasks in Planner. So let me explain how they work.

Background

Up until now, we could only create one-time tasks. However, sometimes you have tasks that need to be recurring (occur regularly). For example, you need everyone on the team to submit project updates/Project Status Reports to the Project Manager every Friday and want to make sure this task appears in a Project plan and is visible to all the project members. So in this post, I would like to explain how to achieve recurring tasks in Planner.

How to create recurring tasks in Planner

1. Create a task like you normally would in Planner
2. Once the task is created, click on it to edit it, and you will notice a new field called Repeat. Click on it and choose the recurring frequency. Your choices are: Does not repeat (default), Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, and Custom (where you can assign your own recurring frequency scenario).
3. Choose the desired recurring frequency (i.e., Weekly)

How Recurring tasks appear in Planner

Board View

In a Board View, the recurring task will appear with a “recurring” symbol next to it. It will only show one upcoming instance (next due date only, not all instances at once).

Schedule View

If you opt for the Schedule View, which shows the tasks overlayed over the monthly calendar, it will show all the tasks instances.

How to complete recurring Planer tasks

If you click on a recurring task and mark it completed, it will only complete the next upcoming instance, not the task series. For example, I had a recurring task set for every Friday, and the next Friday date was December 2, 2022. I marked it completed, and it left the task on the Board, and changed the due date to the following Friday, December 9, 2022.

How to stop recurring Planner tasks?

Since marking recurring tasks completed just completes the upcoming instance, how do we then stop them completely? There are two options available:

Option 1: Stop the recurrence

The first option to get rid of recurrence would be to set the repeat field to the “Does not repeat” option

Option 2: Delete the task

Another option you have is to delete the task.

Once you choose “Delete” above, it will ask you whether you want to delete just the next upcoming task instance or the whole series. If you choose “This and all future tasks in series,” it will only delete upcoming recurring tasks but will leave the completed instances from the past on a Board/Plan.

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