A task is an action associated with one or more elements or element revisions in a project and assigned to one or more users. Tasks enable you to better manage the review and approval of elements in your projects.
Depending on your user rights, you can create tasks, assign them to members of your project team, and monitor the status and completion of each task. Depending on their task rights, users assigned to tasks can review, approve, and reject elements and element revisions associated with tasks.
Tasks are available in projects only and are a licensed feature.
Users can be assigned review tasks, approval tasks, or mixed task, depending on their user rights. Users who have the View My Tasks project user right, but not the Approve Tasks project user right, can be assigned review tasks or mixed as a reviewer. Users who have the Approve Tasks project user right can be assigned review, approval, and mixed tasks.
Review tasks are used most often for informal review processes. For example, you might assign a review task to several members of your team when you want their input on an element you're working on.
Approval tasks are used for a more formal review process that is based on responsibility. For example, you might assign an approval task to your company lawyer to approve the legal text in an annual report. If the legal text is incorrect and the lawyer requests corrections, you may be responsible for making the necessary corrections and resubmitting the text for approval.
Mixed tasks are tasks in which you can assign reviewers and approvers. For example, you might assign reviewers and ask them to provide input and at the same time you might assign approvers to ask for content approval.
Color-approval tasks are a subset of approval tasks and require the Use Matchprint Virtual user right and the Approve Tasks user right. You create color-approval tasks when you want specific people to review the color accuracy of one or more elements.
When you create a task for an element that has multiple revisions, the task is associated with the latest revision of the element. If you create a task for an element and then a newer revision of the element is uploaded, the task points to the latest revision and the task status is reset.
You can view, annotate, and set the status for review, approval, and mixed tasks in Smart Review. If you are assigned a color-approval task, you must view and set the status for the task's associated elements in Smart Review; you cannot set the status for a color-approval task in the Tasks view of a project, unless you selected the Allow Color Tasks to be approved from Project/Library view option for the customer.
Sometimes you want to include an element in a task that is used for visual comparison to another element only and does not require approval or review. This element is called a Task Reference Element and is added to the task to help task users with their approval process. This task reference element is available in Smart Review for comparison and cannot be annotated or approved/rejected.
Task templates enable you to configure a task and store its settings for a future reuse. Task templates can be created from the Task Template menu, or from an existing task when you edit it. Task templates are defined and saved at the customer, group or project level, and must be uniquely named. To be able to manage task templates you must have a project role that includes the Admin Tasks user right.