Forum Discussion

Brass Contributor

Jul 10, 2020

How to Designate a SP Task List Field to Assign a Task

Hello All-- I've been an admin for older, on-prem versions of SP for many years but am relatively new to SPO. We're trying to migrate a user group off of a legacy version of SP onto SPO and I'm ...

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SharePoint Online

Steven Andrews

Iron Contributor

Jul 18, 2020

I don't have access to a WSS instance anymore I'm afraid but if you check the site settings and look under the list columns listing can you post a screenshot of that? One of those columns should correspond to a people picker, which I think would be a good candidate.

razor7tech

Brass Contributor

Jul 20, 2020

Steven Andrews

Hello--

I'm talking about SPO. I don't see an Assigned To there. That's what I was hoping you could send a screenshot of.

It's not looking like there is a straightforward way to assign a task to someone without using the alert me feature, or sharing the task item. Is that your understanding?

Steven Andrews
Iron Contributor
Jul 20, 2020
razor7tech

Right, I owe you an apology as I think I've been barking up the wrong tree somewhat. I've just set up a task list called "Test List" on SPO with the image below and the assigned to column doesn't trigger a thing. I've not tested this within SPO before and assumed it was the same. So, apologies for that, I was in the wrong.

Assigned to
Having filled this out it didn't trigger any email as I was expecting it to have done. It's possible that some of the older SharePoint specific functionalities have been removed (like SPD workflows) and I've missed this one.

Your opening post does mention that you'd like to avoid a workflow but I think the investment would be worth it. There are a few templates in PowerAutomate that can be customised fairly quickly to achieve what you might be after.