The last major CompleteProject feature that we should cover in this walk-through is task collaboration.  Task collaboration is an extremely important feature in CompleteProject. In fact the whole application was written from the ground up to support this one idea.  Much like the e-mail management features in CompleteProject, task collaboration can take a little while to get used to - but it's worth it.  Task collaboration will allow you to work on larger projects and manage information more effectively.

 

Before we dive into task delegation let's create one more task.  Under the "Professional" project create a new task called "End of Year".  This task will be useful later when showing you a bit more about how CompleteProject manages permissions. For more information on creating a task please see creating your first project.

 

Now let's take a look at how delegation works. Select the "Employee Review Task" and then click the "Delegate" command.

 

 

 

Selecting the "Delegate" command will bring up the "Select User" form shown in figure 2 below.

 

 

 

At this point we need to select the target user - the user we would like to delegate the task to. There are a couple ways to select a user.  The easiest would be to select a user that we are already working with through CompleteProject. However, as we are a new user CompleteProject is not aware of any existing relationship between you and another user.  So instead of selecting a known user lets find a user by e-mail address.  In the "Select User" form, select the "User Lookup" tab and enter the e-mail address for the target user.  Note that the target user must already be a registered CompleteProject user.  The lookup e-mail address should be the same e-mail address used for account creation.

 

Once the target user's e-mail address has been entered, press return or the "Search for User" button. 

 

 

 

At this point, you have hopefully found your target user.  All that's left for you to do now is press the "Ok" button to initiate the delegation process.

 

Once the task delegation process has been initiated there is still one more step before delegation is complete.  The selected user needs to agree the delegation. In other words, they need to accept responsibility for the task. To do this the target user will need to login to CompleteProject, synchronize with the CompleteProject network and select the "Activity" tab.  From the Activity tab, the user should be able to see that they have an invitation pending.

 

 

 

Go ahead and accept the invitation by clicking on the "Accept" checkbox in the upper right part of the screen.  Once you have accepted the invitation synchronize with the CompleteProject network. Synchronization will let the CompleteProject network know that you accepted the invitation and will also download all the information for the relevant task.

 

Once you have synchronized go back to the projects view. The delegatee's project view might look something like figure 5 below.

 

 

 

In this case the delegatee has two projects that we are unaware of - one called "projects" and the other called "holiday".  These projects represent items that the user is working on but has not been shared with us.  Note that every CompleteProject user has their own unique view of the world. Part of their unique view may be shared such as the "Professional" task above.

 

 

 

 

If we compare the delegated users view to our project view we can see that the "Professional" project exists in both views.  The primary difference between the professional project in the two views is the way that tasks are colored. For example, note that the employee review task is painted normally in the delegatee's view but painted green in the delegators view.  CompleteProject will show a task as green when that task is not assigned to the current user.  So we can see that the "Employee Review" task has been successfully assigned to the delegatee.

 

Note that the delegatee has access to all information in the "Employee Review" task including the e-mail message that was sent earlier.  In our example we do not have any attachments on the "Employee Review" task, but if we had added an attachment this would be shared as well.

 

But what about the "Professional" project?  We can see that the delegatee has read-only permission on the project because the delegatee's view shows both the project and the "End of Year" task as assigned to somebody else.  When you delegate a task to someone CompleteProject will automatically grant that person read-only permission on the project in which the task exists. The reason for this is because it's often difficult to work on a task in isolation. The default behavior for CompleteProject is to grant slightly more permission than is strictly necessary in order to give the delegatee all the information they need to complete the task.  So the team can work on whole projects together - not individual tasks.

 

What if the "Professional" project had been a sub-project?  For example if we had a project called "My Project" which contained the "Professional" sub-project.  In this case, the delegatee would be granted read-only permission on the "Professional" project but would not have any permission on "My Project".  So the rule is: CompleteProject will grant the minimum permission required at the project level.