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Milestones

A milestone is a dated checkpoint on something — Design Freeze, Delivery, Client Approval. It has a date, a responsible person and a status of its own, and it hangs off the entity it belongs to rather than living in a separate plan.

Milestones are zero-duration by design. A task asks how long will this take; a milestone asks has this happened yet.

Milestones vs tasks

Both are work items and both are entities, but they answer different questions:

Task Milestone
Duration Has estimated hours Zero — the due date is the thing
Question Who is doing this, and how long? Has this point been reached?
Status Task workflow Its own lifecycle: Planned → Reached
Typical use "Draft the P&ID" "Design freeze"

A milestone can have its own tasks and its own documents, so Delivery can carry the checklist and the paperwork that prove it happened.

The milestone lifecycle

Milestones ship with their own lifecycle, and the states are the point of the feature:

State Meaning Colour
Planned The default on creation — a date has been set and it is expected to hold Blue
At Risk The date is in doubt. This is the state that makes a milestone worth having, because it is visible before the date passes Orange
Reached Done. A final state Green
Missed The date passed without it happening Red

Movement between them is deliberately restricted:

Planned  ⇄  At Risk
   ↓          ↓
Reached / Missed

A milestone can slip into At Risk and recover to Planned; both can end at Reached or Missed. Nothing comes back out of a final state.

At Risk is a status, not an alarm

MatStream does not move a milestone to At Risk on its own. Somebody sets it, which is what makes it meaningful — it records a judgement, not a date comparison.

Where milestones appear

Milestones are surfaced through a Milestones tab on the host entity. The tab is reusable: it can be assigned to a Project, but equally to an assembly, an equipment item or any category where checkpoints make sense.

The tab shows, by default:

Column
Icon The flag icon that marks a milestone
Name Design Freeze, Delivery, …
Lifecycle state Planned / At Risk / Reached / Missed
Due date The anchor date
Assigned to Who is responsible

Columns follow the usual rules — see Grids, columns & defaults.

Creating a milestone

  1. Open the host entity — typically a Project — and go to its Milestones tab.
  2. Click New Milestone in the tab's ribbon.
  3. Fill in the dialog:
Field Required
Name Yes What the checkpoint is
Due date No The date being committed to
Responsible No The workspace user accountable for it
  1. Click Create.

The milestone is created against the entity and version you were looking at, so it is tied to that record rather than floating free.

The New Milestone button only appears on a tab named “Milestones”

The button is driven by the tab's name. Rename the tab to Key Dates and the button disappears, even though the tab still works for viewing. If administrators cannot find the button, check the tab name first.

What a milestone is, underneath

Useful to know when configuring one from scratch:

  • It is an occurrence entity with the Task behaviour and a task type of Milestone.
  • Versioning is off. A milestone is a checkpoint, not a controlled document — its history is its lifecycle, not a version chain.
  • File attachment is off on the milestone itself. Attach evidence to its Documents tab instead.
  • It is hidden from the New dialog, because the supported way to create one is the New Milestone button, which sets the type and the link correctly.
  • It carries a Description (long text) property, plus its own Documents and Tasks tabs.

Setting up milestones

The Engineering Project template in the Setup Wizard seeds all of this — the Milestone category, the Milestone Lifecycle with its four states and six transitions, and the Milestones tab on the Project category. If you applied that template, milestones already work.

To add milestones to another category by hand:

  1. Confirm the Milestone category and Milestone Lifecycle exist.
  2. Add a Uses tab to the host category, pointing at the Milestone category.
  3. Name the tab Milestones — this is what enables the New Milestone button.
  4. Set the tab's default columns, and turn library search off; milestones are created, not picked from a catalogue.

Permissions

A milestone is an entity, so the usual rules apply: category permissions decide who can create one, and lifecycle-state permissions on the Milestone Lifecycle decide who may move it to Reached or Missed. Restricting those two transitions to a project-lead group is the common arrangement — it keeps "we hit the date" an accountable statement.

API reference

Method Endpoint Description
POST /api/wid/{wid}/tasks/milestones Create a milestone against a subject entity and version