There’s a mighty powerful area in your BrightWork project site that you may not be fully aware of just yet –  List Settings. Below I summarize some of the key tailoring that can be done to your list with just a few clicks – no coding – I promise!

To get there, simply click into any of your lists (in my case, we’ll be using Project Issues aka Issues Update), click on List in the Ribbon, and then List Settings:

Now that you’ve arrived in this fantastic neighborhood, let’s tour around a bit. Here’s a screenshot of some of the options neatly organized into groups. NOTE: Not all lists have all these options, but they’ll all have most of these options.

Some of the most popular items:

• List name, description, and navigation:  Here is where you can rename your list, give a description, and set whether or not a navigation link to this list will appear in the Quick Launch. Tech Tip: For reasons beyond the scope of this article, don’t rename the Project Status Reports list (there’s some report wiring behind the scenes that expects this list to remain what it was out of the box).
• Versioning settings: There are several options within this setting, but by far the most popular is the option to create a version each time you edit an item in the list (or document in a library). With this handy feature, you no longer have to manually create multiple versions of a list item; just turn this on and every time someone edits the current item, it’s prior state will be backed up as a version you can later read or restore. Tech Tip: Consider limiting the number of versions to something under a dozen to prevent version sprawl.
• Additional list settings (BrightWork): As that parenthetical “BrightWork” indicates, this setting is a BrightWork special. With this setting, you can turn on automatic reference numbering with your own prefix wording. In this same setting, you can also turn on the option to automatically send an email with info about items to a person who is newly assigned an item. This is one of those settings that is not available in all lists (Project Tasks does not have this option for instance).
• Column visibility settings (BrightWork): With this handy feature, you can very easily choose when to show or hide columns in the list’s form – the choices are…when a new item is created, when an existing item entry is edited, in the display view, in all of these views, or hide the column from all views. One great use of this feature is to hide a column that you don’t what to appear for end users at the moment, but since you may want to display it down the road, you can choose to simply hide it rather than permanently deleting it. So much easier to bring it back to life later on.

So there you have it, an easy way to configure your project sites. There’s still more you can do in List Settings beyond what you read here, so please do explore.

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