# Introduction

When the success of your project depends on your team members working together, it may be vital that they are able to communicate with one another quickly. Teams can waste valuable time when communications systems are slow or restrictive, such as when mailing information to people in different countries.

Recognizing this, more and more businesses are connecting their team members through electronic communications systems. Connecting a project team with an effective means of communicating is essential to meeting project goals.

When Microsoft Project interlinks team members in tightly knit workgroups, it makes it easier for team members to exchange information about their project. To use Microsoft Project to exchange information, these workgroups must first be connected through some means of electronic communications.

Once connected electronically and interlinked, the workgroup can use special Microsoft Project assignment, update, and status messages to:

- Assign tasks.
- Accept or decline a task assignment.
- Request and submit status reports.
- Send and receive task updates.

To receive and send workgroup messages, team members use electronic inboxes. These inboxes must be connected through e-mail, the World Wide Web, or an internal network (an intranet or internal web). They can also be connected through all three at the same time.

The World Wide Web is a system for exploring web sites, including home pages and other documents, that reside on the Internet. The Internet links millions of individual computers — as well as thousands of computer networks — in a global network that carries all kinds of information. The World Wide Web is the most visible and popular component of the Internet. In general, anyone with a computer linked to the Internet can view any web site on the World Wide Web. An intranet, on the other hand, is confined to people within an organization. It is an internal network with web sites accessible only to members of that organization.

In addition to exchanging workgroup messages, you can also provide access to other documents from your project file, such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, and Microsoft Access databases. When you click a hyperlink in your project file, you can launch a network document that contains valuable information for the entire team. A hyperlink is a portion of text, distinguished by a color, that contains a link to another file, or a location within a file, that usually resides on an intranet or the World Wide Web. When you click the hyperlink, a web browser will search for and display the document associated with the hyperlink.

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