Organizing People and Work with Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Synchronizing Project Tasks with Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a popular project management application that is part of the extended Microsoft Office family. It provides project managers advanced capabilities for managing and reporting on project schedules, resources, and budgets.

A common challenge of using Microsoft Project is keeping a project plan up to date with the task progress being accomplished across the team.

SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 now provide an integration feature that allows project schedules created in Project to be synchronized with SharePoint project tasks lists. Synchronization is two-way, allowing task progress to be updated in SharePoint and read back to the master Microsoft Project file.

The columns that are synchronized can be customized, allowing only some or all of the project task fields to be included.

There are a number of limitations concerning the integration to be aware of:

• Tasks in Microsoft Project must be manually scheduled. Auto-scheduled tasks are not supported, and tasks are flagged for manual scheduling whenever a synchronization is performed.

• Tasks in Microsoft Project that contain subtasks are represented as folders in SharePoint 2010 and are referred to as summary task items. Summary task items do not automatically roll up progress indicators of tasks contained within them. Summary task progress fields are updated whenever the project tasks list is synchronized with Microsoft Project.

To perform the following tasks, you must have Microsoft Project 2010 installed on your computer.

Sync with a Tasks List

1. Run Microsoft Project 2010.

2. Select Share from the File menu.

3. Click Sync With Tasks List.

4. Enter the URL to the site hosting your project tasks list.

5. Select Validate URL.

6. Select the Project Tasks list to synchronize this project plan with.

7. Click Sync.

   

Manage Synchronization Fields

1. Select Share from the File menu.

2. Click Sync With Tasks List.

3. Click Manage Fields.

   

4. Click the Project Field column for any optional synchronization field. Fields that are disabled are required fields and cannot be managed.

5. Select a Project Field to synchronize with. Microsoft Project by default includes a number of Text fields (numbered Text1 through Text30) that can be used to map to columns in the project tasks list.

6. Click OK.

   

7. Click Sync to refresh the Microsoft Project columns in SharePoint.