Assigning tasks to client users gives you the possibility to assign, manage, and track the client activities on your project. This could be a simple approval that needs to occur on your project, or a significant piece of work that needs to be completed by the client, as a dependency to the rest of the work.
Before assigning tasks to clients, it is first important to understand the structure of Milestones and Task Lists.
A milestone is a specific point in the project where a piece of measurable work is completed. Milestones can be flagged as Internal or External. Internal Milestones only show up in internal reports. These Milestones could reflect internal activities such as preparation.
A Task List is a list of tasks that is associated with a Milestone. Like Milestones, Task Lists could be internal or external.
Tasks are assigned to a task list. Following is the logic:
Internal Milestones should only have internal Task Lists associated with them.
External Milestones can have both internal and external Task Lists associated with them.
Task Lists that are marked internal, can ONLY have tasks associated with them that are assigned to employees or contractors
Task Lists that are marked external, can have tasks associated with them that are assigned to employees, contractors, or client users
At the time of publishing this article, there is a minor bug in Projects, that is causing some inconvenience. When a Task List is assigned to a Milestone, the flag for internal/external is not visible in the screen to create or update the Task List, and the flag is automatically set to Internal. to over come this, the following work-around is in place.
Disassociate the Task List from the milestone (edit the Task List, and select under Milestone - None)
Update the Task List to External (click update)
Edit the Task List again, and re-associate it with the appropriate Milestone.
In the tasks that are associated with the external Task Lists, you can assign them to either internal or client resources.