Getting things done with free task tracking by Comindware

You surely can manage your tasks in a notepad but it’s way better to access your task list from the Internet. In search of a simple task tracking solution for our website team, I wanted to find software to help us publishing articles and developing our blog. We have editor, writer, guest writer, designer and web-master here and we all need two things:

• share task lists to see where we are
• discuss what to do

and I myself truly need to see what’s going on righ tnow, who’s doing what. I went to Comindware.com in search of a solution because it’s business edition freeware: was glad that I found it. Here is how we tried Comindware Task Management.

Comindware offers you so called Workspaces which consist of projects that you either work on alone or in collaboration with your team via email or comments inside the application.

Workspaces can be both public and private. It’s up to you what workspaces you set for task tracking. It might be a following set: marketing campaign, sales, expenses. Depends on the activity field. I made a workspace for content management and another one for the web-mastering issues.

Each workspace can have a simple list of tasks that need to be completed by a certain date. Tasks are assigned to members of your team. You can filter tasks by assignee, due date and other parameters. You can set statuses to show if your task is started\in progress. I liked the ‘play’ button to start a task! You can log the time you’ve spent on a task.

The user interface of Comindware lies between the desktop client and the online platform. It’s neat, based on MS Ribbon, and I had no problems with the navigation.

With a web-application you can use any OS as you will access the interface through your browser window. Sadly for Apple and Linux evangelists, you need at least one Windows machine to install the on-premise solution. The upcoming cloud version gives me hope this problem will be solved within the next couple of months.
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Interesting

The solution is made on a new ElasticData platform. The main benefit of the platform is the possibility to link data together in a more flexible way. Thus data is processed much quicker: search, reporting, and items management becomes easier.
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Each task has a discussion thread layer, so you leave comments without leaving the application. If you hit “follow this task”, you get email notifications about new comments, task modifications and completion. Easy to stay on top.

In case when just a to-do list is not enough, you might want to split your task into smaller subtasks. The task tracking system will watch you doing all in the right order: it is not possible to complete your task unless all subtasks in dependences are completed.

If you deleted an email notification upon a task status without reading (this happens to me when I am too busy), you can take a look in to the history log that has all the task modifications recorded in it.

One of the best thing about this system are Dashboards, I really loved them. They give reports on all of your tasks in a form of colorful diagrams.

Comindware is a web task tracking system. You access it via the Internet with your email and the password. You will need them first to download the installation file. A small registration is needed, but I was not spammed with any follow up emails afterwards.

When our online business grows, we will have processes rather than just tasks. Then I will think of integrating Comindware Task Management with Comindware Tracker, maybe. All my data will be available for the Tracker and the functionality will be much larger in this case. By the way, the Comindware Task Management comes with a 30-day free fully functional trial of Comindware Tracker so it’s possible to try playing with the processes right away. It’s free.

Pros
Neat interface and an unlimited task hierarchy. MS Outlook integration. Cloud version is coming.

Cons
No mobile platform yet. And you need at least one Windows machine to run the soft.

Verdict
We will keep on using it for our team. Task tracking systems help consentrate on work, avoid procrastination and work together. I choose Comindware because it’s a professional and free solution at the same time.

Sponsor: Retro Fit Lab

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 14:08 and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.