About assignment
In some cases, you want to ask other people (or other organisations) to complete a task. To do this, you need to use a task type that supports a partner (such as Collaboration - simple, Collaboration - full and Send), and then assign the task to the person you want to complete the work.
You assign the task during its preparation stage, prior to sending the task.
Task assignment
Perform assignment from the People section of the Task details page.
There are three ways of assigning a task:
- If you want to send the task to someone you are already connected to, select them from the Assign to drop down.
- If you are an administrator (or the only user in a single user account), and want to send the task to someone new, enter their name in Assign to - name and their email address in Assign to - email. When you send the task, they will be invited to connect to you. See Connection requests.
- If you want to do the task yourself, select Me in the Assign to drop down. If you assign to yourself, you will be able to complete the task without sending it.
Use Save assignment to save the assignment.
You make changes to an assignment until you send the task. After you have sent the task, you will need to recall the task before you can change the assignment. See Send and recall.
The internal assignment logic has to deal with multiple factors and is relatively complicated. Sometimes the assignment change does not appear to work because Relay's understanding of the required change does not match what you would expect. If you encounter difficulties, unassign the task by selecting the Not selected option in Assign to, delete the name and email fields, and use Save assignment to save the empty assignment. When the assignment has been unassigned, you should then be able to set the assignment to what you want.
The assign by name and email can be disabled, and often would be in enterprise accounts where more control is required over connections. See Configuration.
The assign to Me requires special handling in the task type. This has been added to the Relay task types but might not be available in custom solutions.
Manage connections
By default, the Assign to drop-down will contain all your connections. You might want to limit what connections are available in your project, particularly if you are setting up a project for other people to manage.
From the project folder context menu, select Manage connections.
Select the connections that you want to be available in the project, and use Save to save the connections.
If you do not select any connections, Relay will make all the connections available to your task.
If you have a sub project, the sub project will use the connections defined in the parent project, unless it has defined its own connections.
Manage connections allows you to select people who perform different roles in a project. In standard Relay, only a single role, partner, is supported. Custom solutions might have a table with multiple columns to select different roles, with different task types using different roles.
Address book
If you are sending a task to an organisation rather than an individual, you might want to direct the work to a particular department or individual within the organisation.
To do this, you need to set up an address book in the connection folder for the connection.
You need to be an administrator to do this. You should be able to find the connection folder in the Partners folder in Relay. In the connection folder, select Edit folder from the context menu, and go to the Roles and connections tab to modify the address book. See Roles and connections for detailed instructions.
If you have used an address book, each entry in the address book will appear in the Assign to list or in manage connections as "Name@Connection", for example "Sales@ACME Limited".
Auto assign
When tasks are created, copied, or imported, Relay will attempt to assign them automatically. If you have just one connection in your manage connections list, Relay will assign new tasks to that connection.
If you need to change this, for example to send a task to a new connection by name and email, set Assign to to Not selected and then set the name and email as required.
Information-only assignment
The Task task type allows you to assign a task to a person by name, though it does not support sending the task to them. This is useful if you are using Relay as a project management tool but not sending tasks out, to record who should be doing the work.