Brainwave time : comments welcome while this is in concept phase

I am in the middle of a project right now that has quite a few external users sending documents and instructions to me. The problem is that they are posting everything as messages and not assigning tasks to anyone.

This makes things extremely hard to process and delegate. This made me think back to a few Feature Requests from people that requested we add a feature to create a task from a message. At the time I thought they were crazy! Why would you want to do that? Now I understand....

It's early days and the idea is only slowly forming in my mind so I'd appreciate your comments on the best way to implement this.

These are my current thoughts:
  • You go into the messages section and view the message that was written
  • A button is somewhere on the interface Create Task from this Message (Obviously shorter....)
  • Clicking this button now needs to do the following:
    • Create the task - We could use the Subject of the message as the task name
    • Description : I don't like the idea of putting the body of the message as the task description as some messages are verbal diarrhea
    • Comments : This may be better. Add comments to the task from the message (A message could have some replies)
    • Files : Any files will be linked to the task
    • Assigned to : Pick from a list (or multiple people)
    • Due Date : Pick a date (or not)
    • Task List : Pick from a list of existing task lists
So, the above seems fine and do-able. The next bit is tricky, what do we do with the existing message? In an ideal world, we would have the ability to archive the message.

Most of the time the problem is that the person added a message when in fact they meant a task so it may be Ok to delete the message once the task is created. OR We link the task to the message.....not sure yet which is the best way. Linking a task to a message would be more work for us and complicate things a bit....(remember, we have to now think of the API so extra functionality needs to be approached carefully)

Do you think this feature would be useful? Would you use it? Let us know in the comments.....

Dan.