Project 2010: Introducing Sync to SharePoint

Hi everyone,

I’m Roberto Reif and today I am excited to introduce a new feature that has been added to Project Professional 2010, the ability to: synchronize a tasks list between Project and SharePoint!!!

A Project Manager (PM) can use all the advanced scheduling capabilities that exist in Project Professional with all the collaborative capabilities that exist in SharePoint.

Users can now publish a project plan from Project to SharePoint and vice versa.  Any changes made in Project / SharePoint can be easily updated into SharePoint / Project with the click of a button.

So how does this work?  Let’s assume a PM creates a simple project plan in Project Professional, as shown below. 

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The PM would like to share the plan with his/her team members via SharePoint.  To do this, the PM clicks on the File tab and drills on to Save & Send > Sync with Tasks List (see image below).  After filling out the required fields, the user clicks on Sync, and in a matter of seconds the project plan has been published to SharePoint.

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The SharePoint list will look as follows:

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Now the team members can view and modify the data in SharePoint, and the PM can synchronize the updates by clicking on the Sync button.  Tip: After the first sync, the Sync button also appears in the Info tab shown below.

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If the same data is modified both in SharePoint and Project, the PM will be prompted with a conflict resolution dialog next time there is a Sync operation. 

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A few important things to notice are:

· Summary tasks are supported in the synchronization

· Most custom fields can be synchronized, and can be added via the Manage Fields dialog (click on Manage Fields button shown on the image above in the Info tab)

· This feature only works with SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010

· This feature only works when Project Professional is not connected to the server

We encourage you to try it out and let us know what you think.  Be amongst the first to download the Project 2010 Beta . Sign up now at www.microsoft.com/project/2010 and be notified when it’s available!

Update on 5/19/11 - with Project 2010 SP1 you will now be able to synchronize auto scheduled tasks too - https://blogs.msdn.com/b/project/archive/2011/05/18/project-2010-sp1-enhancements-to-sync-to-sharepoint-task-list.aspx