A colleague and I were looking to have a quick way to manage tasks between the two of us. We had previously just used email. But since most of our workload is using SharePoint, we figured we’d drink our own medicine and see if we could improve the workflow.

Things we wanted to accomplish:

1. a running history of all of our tasks in SharePoint
2. quick access (no filling out forms online)
3. be able to assign tasks to each other
4. save emails as attachments of tasks, to track requests as they come in

Setting up a task list in SharePoint is quite straightforward, but making it easy and fast to manage took a little bit of thinking. Luckily, everything can be done out of the box, and I’ll show you how here.

• Step 1 – Setup the task list
• Step 2 – Connect to Outlook
• Step 3 – Copy emails to the task list

Step 1 – Setup the task list

Go to Site Actions > More Options and create a Tasks list.

I created a few views of my tasks and put them on my dashboard so we can see all our active tasks, and the tasks we’ve recently completed.

Step 2 – Connect to Outlook

Go to your task list and click Connect to Outlook in the ribbon. You’ll be prompted (most likely) with several alerts asking you to confirm the connection. After that, if you go to Tasks in Outlook you’ll see your connected SharePoint task list right beneath your local task list. You can create tasks just like you would normally do in Outlook, and they should sync with the SharePoint list.

But that only got us halfway there. All of our requests come by email, so we wanted to avoid re-typing each task. We wanted a way to “send” the email into the task list.

Step 3 – Copy emails to the task list

Problem solved! Right click on the email you want to use to originate a task and click on Move > Copy to Folder

A window will come up with all of the options of where you can copy the email. If you scroll to the bottom of the list you should see a folder called SharePoint Lists. Expand that folder and you’ll see your SharePoint task list that has been connected to Outlook.

Click OK and a new task window will pop up with the body of the email in the task description. You can assign the task to yourself or anyone else that has access to the SharePoint list. Also, just to confirm you are assigning that task to the shared list, look in the footer of the window and you should see something to the effect of: In Shared Folder: SharePoint Tasks.

BONUS: If you want to save an email that has an attachment, first double-click the email message to open it in a new window. From there, if you follow the above steps of moving it to the task list folder, it will save the email message as an attachment to the task, including all attachments in the email itself.