Wow thanks for the help @adam I didn't see that in the documentation here:http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/04/introducing-confluence-5-5-tasks-work/
It was really bugging me

@Bill - type slash slash (e.g. // ) at the end of the task and you'll see a date picker pop-up. If the task has one of these dates at the end, it functions as a due date.

I see that the todo tasks listed in a Meeting minuet are automatically summarized as tasks. This is fantastic! However I don't see a way to assign due dates to those, either from within the original Meeting Note, or from within the summary view showing the tasks. Am I missing something?

Thanks! What would make this perfect is to attach notifications to due dates. Please see CONF-35150

Can't wait! Thank you!

Great News!!! Thank you Atlassian!

This has now been fixed in OnDemand and will be available in our upcoming release of Confluence 5.5.

You can type // inside of a task to trigger the date picker and define a due date for that task. A date lozenge will be added accordingly. You can also add date lozenges outside of tasks. See documentation for more details.

I am proposing using task list for meeting actions and technical doc reviews in my company here and due date would be really useful. Can we get an ETA for when we can expect this functionality in 2014?

Thanks!

Hi Natasha
I am pleased to see some commitment to something being done on this within the next few months although as I mentioned in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-7371 , I can only wait an see what it really means as to how we would use the alternative solution,

Hi Natasha Prasad
what is a reasonable Due Date to have this feature implemented?
Ironically, this is a classic example of why we need the Due Date field - without a Due Date, Atlassian just have a "nice idea" with no commitment to deliver.
At least an indication as Henrique has suggested.

I know a few have added a couple of nice additional feature requests but please don't delay adding a Due Date to the tool in order to crerate more sophisticated use of the Due Date

Just get the Due Date implemented urgently - once it is in the system we can use it "manually" whilst you can continue further enhancement - the important thing is to get the Due Date in the first place

All the above looks good, and I agree with bruno to please not forget the on demand customers!

The only addition that I have is a place where I can see all my tasks (configure columns etc) for other relevant information), some way to have the task generate a "personal" JIRA issue where I could keep updates etc would also be good, as well as the capability to easily link back and find the place where the task originated from.

This is a most expected feature and I am delighted to see it is evolving. Just please, don't forget the "ondemand" users.

Rodney Hughes above summed it up perfectly! Assign a due date to a task and then send a notification when that task is coming due, is overdue, etc. Maybe have a setting in admin to control how many days before due date to send reminder, how often to send overdue notices. Also like the idea of easily displaying what is due this week, next month, etc.

I totally agree with Rodney Hughes!

Natasha, thank you very much for opening this opportunity.

I want to add some points for sure!

Now, sorted by importance (IMHO), I believe that:
1. it would also be amazing to have a macro that list all my assigned tasks (with page/space context) on a page and check it done (or uncheck it). I imagine it like the standard sortable table, where one of the columns (is our desired due date field)
2. it would be amazing if we could TAG a task with a sort of project ou category for filtering or listing an specific set of tasks in the above macro feature

And certainly, I think we would love to align our expectation about when we could count on this feature...
Something like:
"next month" or
"first half of 2014" or
"2014, 2nd half" or, at least,
"2015 or later" (but this is not desirable, because you already told us that this feature is in the "short term roadmap" )

Have all a great year!!!

Hi Natasha Prasad
seems my letter to the CEO last week has prompted some action

great to hear this is finally on the short term road map - of course forgive us for wondering how "short" is "short term"? weeks, months, years?

But seriously after all this time do we need to give a use case?
In principle it will be the same for all of us - as we have repeatedly said

we are sitting around in a meeting
we use confluence to make some meeting notes
at some point we assign a task to someone
as part of that task we tell them we want it done by "such-and-such" a date (such-and-such does not equate to "put it on the short term road map" - it is a specific date when it is expected to be completed by)
At the next meeting we would review those minutes and ask questions like:
What tasks does Fred have and when are they due
or
What Tasks were due last week or due next week and who is responsible for them ...

At the moment there is no field where we can enter "such-and-such" date as a searchable/sortable field

seems straight forward to me - just have a look at your Outlook Tasks entries - an excellent model of how simple it needs to be .....

The main page for JIRA gives this description of the product:
JIRA is the tracker for teams planning and building great products. Thousands of teams choose JIRA to capture and organize issues, *assign work*.... (emphasis added)

When *assigning work*, JIRA does not support entering a Due Date. Now I understand why the Due Date feature has never been added to the product. It is an obvious, important feature, but the programmers at JIRA assigned to add the Due Date feature were never given a Due Date for adding it!

Seriously, can anyone give an example of any product used for assigning work that does not provide for Due Dates?

I think something must be broken at Atlassian to apparently not want to understand this requirement. It is absolutely mind boggling that all these users have to beg for something that is so obvious. A task without a due-date is worthless. Period.

We need this!

Without the Due Date and its integration with Calendars and notifications these tasks and lose the most of their potential.
We were willing to use Confluence for our Meeting Notes but as long as tasks are not time-related and there is no way to push any notification when getting close to the due date, then we are going to use some other tool. It's really a pity...

It's interesting that even Attlassian's own blog identifies the need for due dates. Check out:
https://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/09/confluence-101-keep-your-team-on-track-with-tasks/
The graphic for Project Plans shows due dates being used.
and then on:
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/11/three-ways-confluence-makes-project-management-easy/
the graphic says "Assign Confluence Tasks . . . inform them what needs to get done, by when ..."

Due dates are such a fundamental part of tasks that even Atlassian bloggers assume this capability exists.

Thanks Ethan
but why would I pay for something that was already working PERFECTLY in V4 but just needed a third date field????? It is not like we wanted huge new code to be written - just copy the section of code that provided the Completion Date field and rename it to Due Date

I can expect your response would be Atlassian are just not being responsive to customer's needs so we pay for what we need ... but instead of adding one field to a very simple macro but rather changing something to make it TOTALLY useless (as is the new standard V5 Tasklist IMHO) so that others can get paid for very simple functionality will not endear Atlassian to the users ....

The original request in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-7371 starts back in 2006!! - that is SEVEN years ago to add a field to a macro.

Interestingly https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-7370 to add Creation and Completion dates only had 3 votes

I even wrote a LETTER to the Atlassian CEO last year - yes a piece of paper - to hopefully get someone to look at these threads as it seems Atlassian have been ignoring the thread.
Reading all the comments, I'd be fairly confident to say that there would be a LOT of happy users....

What I certainly didn't expect was taking something that worked OK as a tool in V4 and creating this new V5 thing is a VERY backward step

I would simply request they bring back the V4 Tasklist with an extra third field for Due Date and a free text field

Rodney,
If you use a download instance and can spend the money then Scaffolding/Reporting will allow you to set that table up in a structured format with drop downs,dates,assignees etc. Then you can build any sort of individual or overview type report pages you want.

I have the same very basic requirement as Risto
Our Industry Association (rather big) uses Confluence with Spaces for different groups who are all over the world. (Generally fantastic tool for this)

Those groups have various meetings from time to time (face-to-face or virtual) and they use Confluence to capture the Minutes of the Meeting etc
So on a particular page as the minutes of that meeting, or on a separate "Actions" page for the group, we want to quickly insert the standard Tasklist macro using
Edit>Insert>Tasklist

This then is a quick list of who has to do what AND BY WHEN
the next meeting reviews the Action list so it would be EXTREMELY useful if it had the Due Date as an extra field

As I have said before, if it is a Task without a Due Date, it is no more meaningful than a list.
Even Outlook has Due Dates for its Tasks and that is really the base equivalency we are looking for.

I know V5 has changed the standard Tasklist , but since this request goes back years, allow me to refer to V4 where things were VERY GOOD but we just wanted an extra date.
when you created a Tasklist with two tasks - one completed, one not - and then look at the Edit screen you will see this

ALL WE WANT is for you to add an extra THIRD DATE FIELD to those fields called |DueDate|
So we know the system can have date fields.

Of course V5 seems to have stuffed things up big time in that standard Tasklist now doesn't seem to allow you to add a task unles syou are in edit mode and doesn't allow you to add the other useful information that V4 had in its field system

The only other thing that the V4 Tasklist didn't have was a "free text" field where we could write a few short notes - say "refer to page ..... for detailed information on this task.

@Ross - that last line, perfection. I'm not interested in confluence showing me dependencies from one task to another, I use a gannt chart for that. I just want to be in a meeting, set a due dat for a task against a person, and have that show up in their task list.

The only grouping I would really like tot see is maybe by project

If you are going to comment/vote on this issue, we'd love to hear why you would find this helpful - what kinds of tasks would you do this for? What would you do with the due dates?

@Sherif, with all due respect, the answer to this seems so obvious to me that I can't find anything meaningful to say other than "I would use this for tasks that have a timeline attached to them so I could know when to expect them to be done". But it that's a little circular in terms of the value added, then I would offer a scenario:

Suppose I've been assigned a moderately-sized project, which will require the cooperation of a handful of people over the course of a week or so. I've encountered probably a dozen real-life cases of these in the last month alone...but for the sake of concreteness, let's say the project is standing up a new Confluence instance and defining the initial space content. And let's say I've been given two weeks. Along with my Confluence administration tasks, I'm going to need help from IT for the infrastructure, I'm going to need help from accounting to acquire a license, and I'm going to need help from subject matter experts to author some articles, and all of these things are interdependent...so I'm going to need to have a few meetings...and I need to be able to plan. While this could be a job for JIRA, it feels way too small to me to justify a full-blown JIRA project. It feels like a perfect job for Confluence. But precisely because of the interdependency of the discrete tasks that fall out of those meetings, the only way I can plan for the two-week goal is by assigning due dates based on what has to happen when in order to accomplish that. Needless to say, this gives everyone involved warm and fuzzy feelings of coordination and visibility and progress, and more to the point, it helps tremendously in getting stuff done.

So my use case hinges on a bigger-than-a-task-smaller-than-a-JIRA-project example, but there are countless cases of single, bite-sized tasks that have "I need this by..." attached to them too. As @Rodney pointed out, It's almost built in to the very notion of taskness. Anyway, it's worth mentioning that the first thing everyone on the planet says to me when I show them Confluence tasks is: "Hey, that's great. So how do I set the due date?"

Atlassian - Please hear the cries of the people! We need a due date feature! Thanks.

We're evaluating Confluence at the moment and this was one of the first questions that came up when we found out about the task/action list functionality. Is there any sort of eta on when this might be available?

+1 for due dates. Start dates might be handy also, but due dates are the most common request we get from our users.

This is a critical need for our Corporate adoption of Confluence. By having this we can sunset 4 legacy collaboration systems.

@Risk, it's true that not everyone "lives in the wiki" but one of the benefits is in reducing email so maybe the best solution is for this to be configurable by the user - e.g. opt to receive reminders by email, in the workbox, email for high priority only or always remind by both email and workbox.

A couple of folks mentioned the need for reminders here and I'd like to highlight that need. Not every user goes into Confluence daily so an email reminder for tasks due would be very helpful.

Due date creates work-structure for the assignee and would make this plug-in high valuable for teams here, even without reminders in the workbox.

At the same time, I don't understand why the plug-in doesn't list assigned tasks in the workbox. Why give it less functionality than the simple (personal) task lists? If due dates are hard to implement, this should be easy, as it's already by done for the simple tasks.

Something else that's missing is a completed time/date stamp; this should be easy to generate and would, once again, make this macro much more useful from a team management perspective.

Why not view this as "advanced task list", with MORE actual functionality than the simple task list and not just a task list with a cooler GUI?

Due date with email alert for Confluence tasks is absolutely critical feature and is a requirement in our environment, please don't hesitate to implement this, it will ease very much adoption of Confluence as naturally best Enterprise collaboration tool, thank you.

need this feature.

When using the meeting minutes template and assign tasks, without due dates they is no accountability for getting the work done by a certain date.
Should link into the @mention functionality so maybe syntax would be

@mention yyyymmdd do something
or
@mention do something yyyymmdd

where the yyyymmdd is an eight digit date - suggest this format so it doesnt confuse Americans about where the month goes ( just kidding from across the pond

Seriously, need this feature

Must have. Need accountability for tasks that are assigned to individuals.Also love beckjer's suggestions for warnings with email reminders. Minimally, please add due dates for tasks.

Must-have for confluence! Multiple, critical use cases: e.g. client meeting scheduled, need a designer to upload fresh mockups by due date latest

When?

Please add this. It is the missing link!

+1. Absolutely required for non-technical user adoption. We want to migrate from Basecamp to Confluence but this is a major issue.

I'd like to be able to configure the type of warnings for due date approaching (along with severity). Something like email reminders before the task is due. High importance emails on overdue tasks. Highlight tasks based on time left (green for >1 week, yellow for < 1 week, red for overdue)

Absolutely like the idea of having due date feature added to the task lists in confluence. Tasks can only mean their full when they have the assigned due dates. This should then tie up with team clendars. This would be great!

We would also like this due date functionality adding to the tasks list in confluence. The ability to assign to people and have it appear in the task list is great, but it's missing this due date functionality.

I would also like to see this integrated with Team Calendars too.

We're currently evaluating Confluence over Basecamp and I see this as the tipping feature as it's so useful.

adding a Due Date for the TaskList would be great and in addition to that a connection to TeamCalendar of course , or perhaps getting the option of a connection to JIRA perhaps in some way to be able to create an Jira Issue out of a confluence Task. Loads of things to implement for you guys

This is the only thing that is stopping me from moving my department away from share point to confluence to organise meetings, take notes etc.

Add due dates and confluence would be my first choice for managing all project information.

Also smart text while entering tasks (like the @ for assigning someone) would be really helpful here. Producteev reads things like "tomorrow", "next friday" etc and converts these into the actual due date. Some way of entering this in with a similar symbol would be very useful. For example ## and then starting to type with a reducing list could be really helpful to enter tasks quickly.

We would like to be able to assign a due date to a task for projects so that staff are aware of when a task is due and can proactively follow up with other parties to ensure that tasks are delivered on time ensuring project deliverables are met. It would be great for a person to be alerted and reminded of a task when nearing the due date. This also takes away a responsability of an individual reminding others by sharing pages or emailing people to completed tasks.

We need this too~!

We need this too!

We would like to have this function very much to have a list of TODOs in our custom Specification template. As someone already wrote, the ability to get reminded/alerted would be great

A must have! And then in the personal task list you should be able to sort the tasks by the given due date!

@Joe Westcott - Take some of their concepts and implement them "Atlassian Style" Then we will all get the best of both worlds!

Re. @Ethan Foulkes , Wunderlist is a great model for how tasks can work. However, the current version of Wunderlist has a blurry "add task" input field on the iPad which might cause you to think that you're losing your eyesight, and you can't re-order taks on Android (a deal-breaker!), so maybe don't adhere to the Wunderlist model too much.

Probably the easiest way for you is to have a look at your own task software - JIRA. Why do task need a due date there? What is it that you can do with these dates. Reports! Which standard reports exist. If you put in a due date, the resolved date would be interesting too for reporting.

This is another must have feature. As I said in another task related feature request - we currently use adhoc workflows which also does not address this. When working in the time management / efficiency world it is extremely important not to mix actionable with non actionable items. When you mix these 2 things people go numb to the whole area and just ignore it. If you believe this to be true the conclusion is that your task inbox must show you only things that can be acted on immediately, allowing you to use your judgement to select that which is most important to attack first. Often times I want to assign tasks to people but I know they can't act on it right away. In order to not drown them I need to now add THEIR responsibility to my personal management/reminder system and come back to assign it at a later date. The elegant solution is to be able to assign it to them immediately but date it for them so that it doesn't pop into a certain view until that time. They should still have the ability to view these tasks if they choose and modify the date forward and back as necessary(as should I be able to).

I would strongly suggest taking a peak at Wunderlist. It is extremely elegant in its simplicity. Web/cloud based and free. My perfect world would be if the task inbox could be worked like that program and people could insert tasks into it from Confluence pages which would then display the status of it as I manipulate it.

+1 for Team Calendars integration (Great idea, Sarah Goff-Dupont!)

We are starting to use the new task list feature to track projects and it would help to add @date or ^date or something similar to the task and have that highlighted in some way, maybe either boldfaced or a slightly different color.

... kinda like todo.txt (although obviously not the same if there's an intellectual property issue )

I tend to add dates to the tasks that I create for myself, but I note the date I need to start on a task --not necessarily the same date as it is due. It would be great to associate a date for self-created tasks and those pulled in from pages. Whether the date you select represents the start or due date could be up to the user.

Also, +1 for a Team Calendars integration