Tracking in WSS
A very common use of WSS lists is to track important information. Lists are really useful as a tracking tool; they can easily be sorted, filtered, grouped. They can be easily edited and the Datasheet control can be used for bulk list operations. By subscribing to a list for alerts, individuals can easily identify when important changes happen to the list items they care about.
In WSS V3, we have added some additional features to our list infrastructure that are both useful in their own right, and also make it easier to build more sophisticated tracking applications. The main tracking features that we have added include list item versioning, append-only field type and workflow. However, the features are not unique to a particular list type in WSS – we decided to build these features as core platform extensions. Each one of these capabilities has a myriad of uses in WSS – we have combined them to enhance WSS as a platform for tracking applications, but they also benefit our Document Management and Content Management capabilities, as well as opening up a wide array of scenarios to developers and partners building on WSS.
In addition to building the underlying features that enable tracking applications, we will also ship an Issue Tracking list template out of the box. This template will have all of the tracking features enabled by default and will be a great starting point for customers who want to experience all the enhanced tracking features in one place.
List item Versioning
Many tracking applications rely on being able to see the evolution of an item over time. This can be easily modeled using list item versioning. By enabling versioning, WSS will keep track of all edits to the list item and display a rich view that shows the changes that have occurred for each version. Here’s a small example of how it will appear.
You can see that for each version, we show the fields that have changed, when the changed happened, and who made the change. As an aside, we’ve used this view as the basis for improvements to our email notifications, but more about that in another post. One important change we've made for task lists is to allow the list owner to determine if all task owners should receive email notification when a task is assigned to them. This will help overcome the problem of task owners not knowing that a task (perhaps on a list that they don't visit regularly) had been assigned to them.
Append-only field type
The append-only field can be used to append comments to an item that's being tracked without the possibility of changing previous comments. We’ve made this ‘append-only’ capability a property of the multi-line text field, so that you can include such a field in any list.
The ‘description of change’ field in the form above is an example of such an append-only field. When the item is edited, new data can be appended in this field, but none of the earlier remarks can be edited or deleted. For issue tracking and helpdesk applications, this type of field is very useful. It preserves the history, yet it makes it easy to see the latest status.
Tracking and Gantt views
One of the common visualizations that we have seen to present data stored in WSS is a Gantt view. Often, this visualization is simply used to quickly communicate the status of the project and to provide a high-level view of the main tasks. Our Gantt view combines the Gantt chart of the project with the associated list data.
This Gantt view is simply that; it’s a view (one that can be enabled on any list that has start and end dates for the items in the list). We don’t model or calculate dependencies or resources; customers requiring such capabilities should continue to use Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server. For more sophisticated tracking scenarios, it will be possible to associate approval workflows with each item that's being tracked in the list. I’ll write more about workflow in a later post.
Its also worth pointing out that it will be possible to synchronize WSS tasks into Outlook 12. The synchronization is 2-way – changes made to the task within Outlook will be sync’ed back to WSS, allowing users to consolidate tasks from Outlook and multiple WSS sites into a single view in Outlook to better manage their time and priorities. Our Outlook 12 integration is quite extensive, and I’ll save that also for another post. In the meantime, you can check out Melissa MacBeth's blog posts on Task and Time Management in Outlook 12 http://blogs.msdn.com/melissamacbeth/
Also, the Microsoft Access 12 team has built a tracking template that interacts directly with Issue Tracking template that will ship in WSS. The schemas for the two applications are identical, and the Access solution can be used as a rich front-end against WSS data. Here's a screenshot of how that application will look in Access 12.
All of the features I’ve described above can be applied to any list that you create in WSS V3, and even to lists that you upgrade from WSS v2. So, if you’re already using a list for tracking purposes, you can easily enable these features when you upgrade.
