Christophe from PathToSharePoint commented on my previous post, asking “how does SP deal with MS Project summary tasks?”. I thought I would show what it does here, as it’s quite interesting and illustrates another new feature of the SharePoint 2010 Project Tasks list – the Summary Task content type.
Users of Microsoft Project will be aware that you can easily create summary tasks to act as a container which groups sub-tasks together. On the Project 2010 ribbon you will see “indent” and “outdent” options – the picture below shows “Indent Task” which will indent selected tasks and make them subtasks of the nearest preceding task at a higher level:
You can see this in action in the sample project below, where the three tasks concerned with mobile development have been indented and made subtasks of Phase 2.
So, what happens when we sync this with our SharePoint 2010 Project Tasks –
As you can see, I have a new Summary task item for Phase 2, and if click on the hyperlink to drill down further, I get to see the subtasks:
This is all made possible because a SharePoint 2010 Project Task list actually includes a second “summary task” content type:
Which is actually a folder with appropriate project task metadata – and Project 2010 uses this when synchronising. Here is list view of the same project task list, which shows the Phase 2 folder more clearly:
So there you go Christophe – and thanks for all your efforts on PathToSharePoint!
Posted by workerthread 
