Display Microsoft Project Tasks & Timeline Within SharePoint 2013

In this article I will take you through displaying Microsoft Project (client application) Tasks & Timeline in a SharePoint environment.

What is Microsoft Project?

Microsoft Project is project management software that helps project managers to create project plans and manage tasks and budgets.

The following is the screen shot of Microsoft Project 2013.

Please install Microsoft Project to continue with our article. You can download a trial version from here.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973401.aspx

Our Goal

Our goal is to display the Microsoft Project tasks, timeline into our SharePoint site. For this purpose we are using the project template.

Create Project

Open the project client application & create a new project from the Blank Project template.

Now add the following tasks to it.

You can use the Indentation toolbar button to make Task 1 & Task 2 underneath the Planning category. Enter the dates for tasks & save changes.

You will see that the Timeline above is updated with the tasks information.

Microsoft Project to SharePoint 2013 Sharing

The preceding Microsoft Project file will be managed by the project manager. Whenever tasks are added/edited, he/she can publish it to the SharePoint site. This allows the team to work on a project in a collaborative centralized environment.

Create SharePoint Site

For sharing the tasks, please create a new SharePoint 2013 site, preferably from the Project template.

You will get the following site home page.

Now edit the page & add a Timeline web part to the page, after the Project Summary web part.

Edit the Timeline web part & set the data source to Tasks list. (You should be already having a Tasks list in the site.)

Save the changes to the page.

If you are not using the project template then you can still edit the current site page & add following web parts from the Content Rollup category.

Timeline
Project Summary

Share Tasks

Back into the Microsoft Project client application, choose the menu option Save As.

Choose the following options as highlighted above:

Sync with SharePoint
Choose Existing SharePoint Site
Enter URL to our project site
Click Verify button
Choose Tasks list
Click Save button

Wait for a while & the tasks will be synchronized with SharePoint. You will see the tasks synchronized in the timeline.

Now click on the Tasks list & you will see the Microsoft Project tasks are added to SharePoint list.

This concludes our article.

Please note that you can add the Resource name (Login Name) within the Microsoft Project (MPP) file. In that case the user should be available in the SharePoint site too.

References

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/

Summary

In this article we have explored Microsoft Project client interaction with SharePoint 2013.