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The Tasks module is the most popular Feng Office module. The Tasks tab gives you access to tasks and milestones.
Tasks are a way of letting user's know what they have to do, when they have to do it, how long they have to do it for, and maybe even How to do it.
Milestones tell teams when a set of tasks is due.
Tasks can be assigned to clients, projects, workspaces, and milestones.
Milestones can have tasks assigned to them - but they can exist without any tasks, simply as a reminder for an important date.
Note: In order to enable Milestones, please see the following link
There are many ways to create a New Task. You can find Step-by-Step instructions on How to Add a New Task here: Creating your First Task
On this section, we will review the different functions of Tasks and show you how you can manage them to get the best out of them.
Below is a screenshot of how a typical Task Module looks in the list view, with added Tasks, Subtasks and more.
This is how your Task Module's Tool Bar. This toolbar lets you Edit, Delete, Complete, Print, and Filter Tasks, among other functions.
Below, we will show in detail what each item on the toolbar does for you.
Time
adds a button at the end of each line that allows you to start the time tracking for this task.
Group by
settings (see above) are applied before the Order by
settings. A smart combination between the two features will optimize your task list (i.e. Group by: Due Date and Order By: Progress). There are some more commands for tasks in the list view:
The edit mode allows you to quickly edit the most important properties of an existing task from the list view.
This same feature will show up when you click on Add Subtask, so you can enter your Subtask's information.
Please note: Currently (Feng Office 1.5.3) you can enter any date for start date and due date. You can even enter a start date which is later than the due date, and you can enter a start or a due date which is later than the milestone date. Feng Office does not consider this as an error and does not give you a warning.
You can set up a Task Repetition if you need the same Task to be done more than once. (This is very similar to defining a repeating event.)
This helps you save time and effort, since you won't have to set up the Task manually each time.
This Day Only
. As a way of keeping up with Task's Due Dates, and make sure that they are completed on time, you can set up reminders such as Email Notifications or Pop-Up Messages. (This is very similar to defining reminders for events.)
Apply to all subscribers
if you wish for the reminder to be sent out to all the tasks's subscribers as well.You can set up as many reminders as you wish for any given task.
Please note: Feng Office will not prevent you from defining several identical reminders.
Pop-up reminders are displayed at the top of the screen and look as follows:
In this section, you will have the option to set your own new properties depending on your needs.
In order to see how to add custom properties, please visit the following page: Adding Custom Properties
This section allows you to add Subscribers to this Tasks, which comes in very handy to follow and observe a certain process.
To learn more about subscriptions, please visit the following link: Subscribing People to Objects
This section allows you to Link or Unlik an object (Email, Document, Note, Picture, etc.) to a Task.
To see more about linking objects, please visit this Page.
By default, milestones are currently disabled in order to avoid unwanted complexities, so in case you would like to use them, you must first enable them.
From now on, you will be able to use milestones.
You can create a milestone in just a few simple steps:
After creating new milestones, in order to see them in the Tasks list, you must group the tasks by Milestones:
In the main section of the new milestone you will be able to add the basic details of it:
In this section, you will have the option to set your own new properties depending on your needs.
In order to see how to add custom properties, please visit the following page: Adding Custom Properties
This section allows you to add Subscribers to this Tasks, which comes in very handy to follow and observe a certain process.
To learn more about subscriptions, please visit the following link: Subscribing People to Objects
This section allows you to Link or Unlik an object (Email, Document, Note, Picture, etc.) to a Task.
To see more about linking objects, please visit this Page.
Many organizations (specially businesses), require their team members to track time.
Time tracking is a good management tool for:
Feng Office has built in time tracking features that makes it easy for users to fill in their time sheet.
Please read this article if you want to learn further about time tracking in tasks.
Task Templates are a very powerful tool, and they take a bit of initial configuration to use.
That is why templates deserve a section of their own:
Read here if you want to learn how to configure and use task templates.
Task dependencies enable Project Managers to establish relationships between tasks.
If a task is to be executed only after a previous one is finished, we say the second task is 'dependent' on the first.
You can now define task dependencies in Feng Office.
In order to be able to set and use task dependencies you first need to activate them.
To do so, please follow these steps:
Lets go over a simple example of creating a task dependency between two tasks:
Note: 'TaskB' start date would have to be equal or greater than 'Task A'.
Read here if you want to learn how to assign a task to multiple users.
Some user specific preferences for tasks can be set in the User account.
Tasks can be classified in various ways. Besides the ones explained in the previous sections, tasks count with their own Drag & Drop classification feature. Please refer to this article to find out more.
This feature automatically assigns a number (or more complex code) correlative for new tasks. To make use of it, please go to Settings → Configuration → General → Use automatic incremental prefixes in names: → check Task.
If this option is enabled for tasks, then when adding a task, an automatic generated number will be prepended to the name of the task (idem for other object types if selected).
NOTE: this feature is only available for the Professional and Enterprise editions of Feng Office
Are tasks and milestones shown in the calendar?
Yes, this is the standard behavior. Tasks and Milestones appear on the calendar on their due date.
Discussion
PLEASE NOTE: Comments to the wiki should only contain suggestions and questions that help us to improve the manual (and not the software). These comments will be deleted as soon as the information has been integrated into the manual.
Posts that do not contribute to the DOCUMENTATION of the project will be DELETED.
Ask QUESTIONS on the product here.
Report BUGS here.
Propose NEW FEATURES here.
The priorities seem extremely limiting to me. My previous task manager had like 15 colors for priority levels and I like to organize my work by sliding items up and down in priority. By having just 3 priorities and over tasks, it gets very difficult to find everything. Plus, even if its high priority i have to drill into it each page load just to try finding the item of interest. I end up putting just a few in high priority and have over 50 in medium.. could be more versatile here..
How does the “Add a parameter to this template” feature work?
It would be very nice to attach simply pictures (print screens and designs) to tasks. Task description should be HTML and not plain text.
For the time tracking, is there a way to Stop the tracking of a task by Starting another one??
No. Starting the time tracking for a certain task does not stop the time tracking of another task. See http://forums.opengoo.org/index.php?topic=328.0
But starting the clock on a new task “should” stop the clock on any existing task.
Its not logical that someone works on two things at the same time.
In many countries or states (or governments) a company cannot do this with billable hours as those countries et al may have laws against double billing of hours.
What if the two tasks are related to each other and when dedicating time to one of them, you are actually dedicating time to the other one? And what if when a task is being done you need to wait for someone's reply or a process to take place, and meanwhile you are dedicating time to another task? Either way, if you are a customer you may consider contacting Feng Office through email and talk about this
When a non-administrator client creates a Milestone, they can see all the other companies and contacts under the “assign to” dropdown. The tasks work as they should, they can only see their company and mine. How can I restrict what they see under the Milestone Assignment menu? I want them to be able to create milestones. Is there a way to remove the milestone assignment option all together if limiting their view isn't an option?
I really love this product, it does everything I need it's just this one thing. I can't allow other users to be able to see all the other users in the system so it would be a dealbreaker :( If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it. I will subscribe to the thread for updates.
Thanks!
It's undoubtedly an excellent work, Only this is lack of robust permission system. I would love to see permissions based on per content basis i.e per task etc. Or how it would be to make a sub groups for every task and give permissions based on sub group participants ? Thank you for this wonderful job.
I would like to know how I can Assign One task to multiple people. Our company has many training modules that we have created using workspaces and we have set up tasks to complete each training. But, we'd like to have multiple people go through and complete each task (ie- Read chapter 1 from eBook). Each user assigned to that task need to complete it. Is this possible with the current task system?
You can assign a task to a group. But then ANY user within this group has to complete the task, not EVERY user. Therefore I think OpenGoo does not exactly what you want.
I'd like to know how could I assigned a task to more than one user. It's important because my team of developers work in pair programming, and I could't assign the users correctly in the system.
You can assign a task to a group. The only problem is that a group in this context is a company, and your developer teams are not companies.
Hi guys,
I think OG is a great product and I would like to thank you about developing it! Great job! What I miss in this tutorial - how can I set that a task is dependent on another task, i.e. t2 can be started only if t1 is completed?
Best regards
OpenGoo does not allow you to force a certain order when working on tasks. You can define a dependency between tasks using the parent-subtask relationship, but that's probably not what you are looking for.
Hi Martin. Why cant the list be sorted based on links? If one task is linked to another task, then use this to determine the sort order when the tasks are listed?
The issue seems to be that links are bidirectional.
Our I.T. guy found OpenGoo for us. I had searched for days and sifted through literally 100+ applications. (Maybe 150?) From what I can see so far, OpenGoo will do what we need. Hats off to Feng, you, and everybody else that has had a hand in this project.
Our organization (of about 320 people) was searching for a group-oriented strategic planning tool, especially with an emphasis on Balanced Scorecard planning. (If that's a new term, just search for it; I remain amazed at the thousands of helpful articles.) Although OpenGoo does not address Balanced Scorecard planning directly, our I.T. guy saw (accurately, I believe) that there is potential here. On top of that, the tools you already provide in the task module seem to “fit” the way our organization has come to think, especially in relation to being able to view tasks hierarchically and, alternatively, “tag-oriented” – all at the same time. In this way, we hope to see tasks vertically and horizontally – at least two-dimensionally.
On top of all the great features in the task module, it appears (so far at least
) that OpenGoo just *works*. No nasty errors or unexpected behavior so far… and *snappy* performance… which *highly* distinguishes this project from many others.
We're especially thankful, Martin, for the time you're investing in this help file. It's going to be amazingly helpful to our wide spectrum of users.
So that's it… just wanted to say thanks somewhere. We appreciate the OpenGoo community! Job well done.
Can I think of anything relative to the above wiki, so I'm faithful to the instructions you gave for this thread? … Only that we'd love to see this page all-the-more completed. The “this remains to be written” will no doubt yield many other helpful features waiting in the wings. Please keep up the good work. We're out there using the product, enjoying it, partly because of your documentation.
Doug President of a non-profit charity providing help and hope for less-advantaged people in nearly 50 countries
Hi All, I am interested in the 'Unique ID:' number, it appears they maybe being removed from the old Open Goo interface. I have been using them for my Job numbers but it can get tricky as you have to click all the way into a task to find the number. I am concerned these 'unique numbers' are going to be removed in Feng Office? Thank you! (ps - we love your app. its brilliant for multi-user tasks!)
They are not going to be removed.
When creating a milestone template, is it possible to have a due date in 10 days instead of a particular due date? For example, a project begins and the first milestone is due in 10 days, the next milestone is due in 14 days and so on. That way when creating a new project, I can use the templates and the dates do not have to be modified. When I create a template from an existing milestone, and I try to edit the object parameter for date, a message pops up “there are no date parameters defined for this template”…yet when I go to the milestone, it doesn't give me an option to create a date parameter. Please help. Thanks you.
That is rather odd. Whenever I make a template for a milestone which already has a due date, and later on create a milestone somewhere else through the template I made before, I have no problem at all when editing this milestone and changing its due date.. Which Feng Office version are you using?
I see that it's currently not possible to add task sequencing in FengOffice and I understand that in general it can be a difficult feature to implement.
Anyway, the children of a given task should be sortable at user's will.
Drag and drop is already implemented for changing parent/child relationships. When dragging a task, the receiver gets highlighted if I can drop. So:
From a frontend pov, the only needed feature is a marker to show between siblings when dragging a task around. From a backend pov, the only needed feature is a script for updating a field in the tasks table after a drop.
The tasks table already has got an 'order' field. I've looked into the code but couldn't understand if it could be used for this purpose or not. (As a side note, I'd recommend to refactor that name to 'position' maybe, because it gets very difficult to tell apart when order is used as an SQL term or as a tasks field, by text searching it)
This user-specified sorting feature can be implemented without any enforcement on the FengOffice side, except for sorting that way after sorting as it currently is. I mean, if I'm viewing tasks sorted by priority, all the subtasks of a given task that share the same priority should be sorted as I specified, and if I didn't specify any order, then follow the creation order. For making it backward compatible, add a workspace option for subtasks ordering: alphabetic or user specified.
Sorry for being so pedantic about this feature, but I really can't live without. In fact, it's very common for me to split a task into subtasks that need to be completed one after another. Each time I complete a task I'd expect the next to be the one after the current, but I always need to look my next task around and mentally rebuild how I intended them to be sequenced: both error prone and time consuming!
(Prefixing tasks names with a number is just a poor man feature, soon unfeasible.)
Hello, Feng Office currently does not count with such feature, as you mentioned. In case you are able to develop it yourself, we would be glad to add it in a future release. If you consider doing so, please check out the Developers section in the forum. Otherwise, if you would like to help by sponsoring this feature, please send an email to sales@fengoffice.com. Best regards!
how to assign more milestone to a task?
A task can have zero or one milestone, but not more. However, a milestone can hold zero, one or multiple tasks
Fantastic product for my small business. Just wondering how to report on actual time booked by task, can't see where the data is the standard report set?
Many thanks
Hello Peter, what do you mean exactly? I suggest you to look at the 'Reporting' tab and look for the conditions you may add and use in there if you have not yet
http://www.fengoffice.com/web/wiki/doku.php/tasks#comment_c9985c9506d5d054ecf8119c9fd6c4a9
Yes I have looked at every field in every report tab. Found task estimate field ok but not Actuals (ie when using Add Work or Start Work to log hours worked).
This is supposed to work this way. Timeslots which have not been closed will not be taken into account when making such a report.
I have a lot of tasks, and they are starting to take up more space at the top of the calendar than the actual calendar. I can see all of my tasks in the tasks tab, or in the overview, and don't need to see them in the calendar. How do I make it so the calendar doesn't show the tasks?
You may filter the calendar view with other filters such as showing your user events only or changing from 'All' to a specific workspace..
What if task requires person to submit some kind of file, like document for example. How can that person submit and link that file with completion of his/her task ?
I hope I make myself clear.
You would need to ask the user to link the task to the document with the 'Link object' button, and then complete the task
“Is there are any workaround to assign tasks to groups?
If you need to assign a task to a group of people you have the following alternatives:
”
I got subtask where people have to submit a document and then link it to their representative subtask. Problem is that they don't have permissions to do that if person who is required to link his document to a task doesn't have permissions to add tasks in that wordspace.
Is there some workaround ? Or some way of making this more organized ? Because its easier to track who submited what and when and if he did without being forced to check each time.
Thank you!
What about changing that user permissions so he can link documents and create tasks as he needs?
What is that permission called? I noticed that only people who can ADD TASK can link documents to a task.
And tnx for the respond.
A really important comment about task templates
Task templates are static representations of the original task, at the time the template was made.
1. Create a task 2. Create or assign it to a template 3. Modify the original task 4. Use the template to make a new task in another workspace. You get the task settings from step 1, not the updates from step 3
If you add the task to the template again, you end up with 2 copies inside the template. The only way to remove the old one is in the administrator area.
Regards Brendon
when i tried to assigned task to another user, i click Add User, then i got an error message said that i didn't have permission to access requested page. is there any solution to this?
That happens because your user does not have permissions to add New Users to the installation. Greetings!