The company I work for use a number of applications besides SharePoint and we're not sure how to leverage them all.

At the moment we're concentrating on how to handle tasks and in this particular case we also have Microsoft CRM 4, Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 to take into consideration.

These are the requirements we have:

• Each department has it's own area in MOSS with a corresponding task list that a user can have tasks in
• Each user has his/her personal My Site with a corresponding task list that a user can have tasks in
• Each project site has a task or project task list that a user can have tasks in
• There has to be one central location to manage all tasks
• We use OneNote to take notes in all our meetings, writing down tasks and assigments directly in the meeting notes
• All tasks must be bi-directionally synchronized to our Windows Mobile 6 smartphones

Now, getting all the tasks from MOSS into Outlook 2007 is a piece of cake - we just connect them to Outlook from MOSS and we're home. It takes some fiddling with the folder structure, naming conventions and the views in Outlook to be able to keep track of hundreds of tasks spread over multiple projects and sites but it's more than doable with a bit of discipline.

Next up is OneNote (a tool I can't live without by now, by the way). Here I'm a bit more uncertain on how to handle things. My current approach is to create the tasks in my local Outlook (if I'm the one taking notes) and after the meeting assign them to the person responsible (I simply include the name of the person respnsible in the task description to keep track of this).

It's not perfect as it requires some hands-on after the meeting to distribute the tasks but I see no way to assign tasks from within OneNote.

As for CRM we're currently on the backburner with it as far as tasks go even though we sooner or later will need to use those as well in order to connect tasks with CRM-entities. Still, as of now it's not a concern so we're leaving them out of the equation to simplyfy things (without ignoring them completely of course).

The smartphones are the roadblock at the moment as I see no way to synchronize anything but my local task folder to them. Not even tasks based on e-mails (or other types of Outlook objects) show up as they "reside" in a mail folder and not the task list - that's the only explanation I can come up with anyhow.

I don't use the phone for tasks at all but one of my colleagues could really use this in order to be as efficient as possible, especially the option to create a task on the phone and put it in the proper SharePoint list right away. I haven't found any way of doing this so if you have any ideas, feel free to post them in the comments.

If you want to know more about how we try to bring some order to chaos also drop a line in the comments and I'll go into more details.