Hi folks,
During a work session today, I was delighted to disprove my longstanding assumption that custom data entered into a text field on a Template Task (or Template, I'd now expect) would NOT be copied into a project. Dunno why I had that misconception, in hindsight, but There You Have It.
Anyway: in addition to that revelation, my colleagues and I went a step further and added a column to a Task view that not only showed such text boxes, but also showed their respective "originating" Template Task values.
"Uh...whoopdeedoo, Doug. Since they'd be the same, So What?", you might ask.
Well, the So What, we realized, is that the Project Level data could be considered the "original values" at the time the Project was created, which could even be protected to some degree, if so desired, in a SysAdmin ParameterSection. The Template Level data could then be considered the "latest values"...and the view -- especially with a few interesting calculated columns to reveal and highlight the differences, possibly even filtered to find them -- would be considered "the changes".
In our case, this suddenly opens up a new world where slowly-changing-common-information (numbers in our case, but could be dollars, dates, or textual entries such as a goal, a priority, a brief, etc.) could be easily centralized at the Template Task level, and "broadcasted" to those Tasks that originated from those Templates.
So! Although it's early days for this one, I am certain I'm going to find excellent ways to exploit the concept, so decided to share it here.
If you think of (or already have) any cool usecases, I'd be very interested to learn more, and invite you to share them here.
Regards,
Doug
