I watched the newest version 8 webinar on Tasks over the past weekend. I was struck by the features which were described. It seems well thought out and designed to be logical improvement over the version 7 implementation. There are, however, a couple of things I would still like to see to take it to next level.
First, it would be very useful to be able to link/update a task to multiple persons, citations, events, places or media at the same time.
Second, it would be useful to have the option to treat each task item link as a unit of work so that it carries its own status and start/end dates. Basically like a sub-task, if you will.
I realise this may not be the way people generally use research logs for planning and doing research but I believe the task list could be useful beyond that. For example if I merge a GEDCOM file into my database. It would be nice to be able to create a task for each added or merged person to verify their citations, review their BDM records, etc., I view it as a single task but it make take numerous sessions to fully complete. I would like to be able to use a tasks/sub-tasks feature to assign and track individual pieces this work because it may take me an extended period of time to complete it for a large group of people. It is something I would like to be able to work at in a piecemeal fashion, yet keep track of my work.
I know Bruce indicated that we could use groups to do this. Unfortunately, groups lack the tracking features that tasks have and tasks lack the multiple selection capabilities of groups. Further, tasks lack the fine grained tracking at an assignment level unless you create a new task for each person, which is not practical when dealing with large numbers of people of events at once. I also find it very counter intuitive to manage some of my tasks using task lists while managing others using groups or other external lists. I would like to be able to use tasks for all of my work flow management.
This would take that feature to the next level in my opinion.