Customer Challenge. Many organizations face challenges distributing and managing tasks through web based Calendars, Events and Task Lists. The majority of tasks originate through email. Within Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, the process of publishing tasks and events to a distributed Task List or Calendar is cumbersome since there is no easy, automated way for this to happen. It is also time consuming having to enter information into more than one system, as must currently be done, to effectively promote communication. This is especially important at the executive and management levels, responsible for maintaining the overall status of projects. These problems cost time and curtail effective collaboration and communication, critical to the success of an organization. Worse, they discourage end-user adoption of critical, costly portal implementations that were supposed to enable teamwork - not create busywork.
Business Challenge. Out of the box, neither SharePoint Portal Server or Windows SharePoint Services allows users to create synchronized tasks in their Outlook client. The inability to easily publish Outlook items to portals, publish portal items to Outlook, and keep them all in sync is a major barrier to end-users adopting and using these portals as effectively as enterprises had hoped when making their initial investments in them.
The Solution. To address these issues, MicroLink introduced the MicroLink TaskSync™. TaskSync enables you to select and synchronize Outlook emails, tasks, or calendar events with Windows Sharepoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server task lists directly from their Outlook 2003 client and to keep them in sync automatically.
TaskSync also allows you to select already existing tasks on any SharePoint-based site or sub-site and synchronize them with their local Outlook Tasks allowing for genuine, bidirectional updating, alerting, notification, and synchronization.
Since many "tasks" first appear as an email, MicroLink TaskSync permits emails to be published directly to portal sites or sub-sites as tasks with the full text of the email copied to the task comment area as easily as users can today drag an email from their Inbox to their local Outlook Task List. This capability was built specifically in response to real-world portal and WSS site users who have been frustrated with the limited integration between Outlook and their SharePoint-based portal sites.
Solution-in-Action. Most "tasks" arrive in the Inbox, not the Task folder of Outlook—this requires the user to drag it to the task icon in the left navigation pane and save the new task, but only the user knows about the task, not the rest of the team..
Next Steps. TaskSync is licensed to either the individual user or (at the enterprise level) through server-based licenses. If you would like more information about TaskSync licenses for your organization, would like to try TaskSync for 15 days at no cost or obligation, or would like to buy a personal copy of TaskSync, please contact us.
Contact MicroLink to learn how our products can improve your organization.