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ActionThis Outlook 2003 client now available

Posted on 17 December 2007 by Ed Robinson

We have some great news for those of you who use Microsoft Outlook 2003: the ActionThis Outlook 2003 client is now available.

The ActionThis Outlook 2007 client has been out for several weeks and has been keenly adopted by those who have the latest version of Microsoft’s email and productivity tool; the client lets you create and manage action items from within Outlook. We’ve realized all along, though, that not everyone uses Outlook 2007 and that the reality is that the majority of people are still using Outlook 2003.

We listened to the requests, and the result is now available. The great news for Outlook 2003 users is that you can do everything with the client that you can with the ActionThis Outlook 2007 client.

To download the client and try it for yourself, sign into ActionThis, click on the Setup menu and select Downloads – the rest should be easy.  Here is the direct link:

If you’re not currently an ActionThis user, sign up for a free trial here: http://www.actionthis.com/Product/Trial.aspx and try it for yourself.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, contact support@actionthis.com or ask a question in the ActionThis online forums: http://www.actionthis.com/Forums/

Ed Robinson, CEO

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New Features

Posted on 17 December 2007 by Ed Robinson

We released new ActionThis features last weekend.  Here is a summary of what’s new:

  • Outlook 2003 client. You can use ActionThis on the website, and for an enhanced experience you can download clients for Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007.
  • Improved IntelliSense on the website. When assigning someone an action item, ActionThis will help you pick from people you’ve recently assigned action items to.
  • More help. We’ve added “How to” pages in the help section on the website.
  • Simplifications to payment section. We’ve revamped the “My Organization” section of the website making the billing section easier to use.
  • Better emails. We’ve improved the layout of emails ActionThis sends, including a better experience when you assign a new person an action item.
  • Changed the “How am I doing” graph, implementing a new way to calculate scores
  • Raised security. We’ve increased security when logging in, and added the ability to reset your password without emailing the password.
  • New Outlook feature “Track with ActionThis”. We’ve added a new feature for the Outlook clients enabling you to quickly create an action item to follow up an email.

We’ve also almost finished a client for Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 enabling you to download action items into a spreadsheet. This is coming soon.

Ed Robinson, CEO

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Should underperformance be acceptable?

Posted on 13 December 2007 by Tim Howell

Recent research released from Tata Consulting Services indicates that one in three companies' IT projects fail to perform against expectations.

No surprise there for anyone who has been involved in IT projects.

What is surprising is this: 43% of organizations say that their business managers and the Board accept problems as the norm. Put a different way, that means that almost half of the organizations involved in the survey expect such projects to run this way and will, therefore, accept underperformance. Is this really acceptable?
Two of the key common problems cited for such failures are overruns on time (cited by 62% of respondents) and budget (49%). Both these factors are usually intrinsically linked – time is money, as they say.

At the end of the day, such figures can be put down to one thing: failure to execute. Execution requires people to get the right tasks done, in the right order, on time.
Admittedly, IT projects can be particularly complex, typically involving multiple internal and external resources. As one commentator noted:

Given the number of technology implementation disasters, Tata’s results aren’t all that surprising. Big enterprise projects are difficult and require a lot of things–business processes, people, customization, training and financial support–to line up. More often than not these moving parts don’t line up.

Software is one solution to this problem, but traditional project management tools are typically too complex to use and update, and the information project plans contain is out of date as soon as it's published. Also, given the myriad tasks in a typical project, are project plans really the best way to manage hundreds of small tasks?

ActionThis has been designed to align these “moving parts” and make sure that action items get done. We don’t claim to replace the communication and project management tools you’re using right now – we complement these tools to help drive successful outcomes.

In early 2008, we’ll be taking this one step further, providing synchronization with Microsoft Project so that plans can be defined in Project, and a core set of milestones can be defined, with ActionThis managing and driving all of the associated discrete tasks through to completion, updating the plan with real world data along the way.

Using ActionThis, with or without Project integration, will inevitably drive people to finish what they start, helping to ensure that underperformance, and missing goals and deadlines, are a thing of the past.

Tim Howell, CMO

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The death of email is exaggerated

Posted on 04 December 2007 by Tim Howell

Recently there’s been a lot of online discussion about the death of email, and how services such as Facebook provide an alternative way for people to communicate with others.

While there’s no doubt Facebook and the other social networking services have a role as enablers of communication, right now it’s premature to call these services replacements for email. This could change sometime in the future, as more people use these services, but for small businesses and those of us who aren’t early adopters, email is the norm. There are a number of reasons why:

  • Everyone has email. Email usage is universal, while email is now considered as essential to business as the telephone and the fax machine. “Email me” is something that can be said by many millions of people – the same can’t be said for most other forms of electronic communication.

  • There are standards . Regardless of whether you use a Microsoft product, a Google service or a product or service from someone else, you use email to communicate. While there is something proprietary about almost any service, the fundamental premise of email is that you can use any “version” to communicate with anyone else. This is proven and works well.

  • Not everyone wants to join social networking services. Yes, usage of social networking services is increasing, but not everyone wants to join the latest service, nor do they want to be updated on what’s happening to their “friends” every minute of every day. Already, there are dozens of services out there, and who knows whether a service you join today will be there in months or years to come? The answer’s simple: If you want to communicate with others, and minimize the effort involved, use email.

Here at ActionThis we’re firm believers in the role that email plays, and believe it will continue to be a significant part of how we all do business for many years to come – that’s why we utilize email for key parts of our service.  We don’t doubt there are opportunities to leverage the capabilities of social networking services, but we see these as future opportunities, not of great interest to our customers right now – if you disagree, let us know!

Tim Howell, CMO

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Updates To ActionThis including Safari support

Posted on 03 December 2007 by Ed Robinson

Thanks to everyone who asked for Safari support. We listened, we worked hard, and last weekend we rolled out an update to ActionThis, adding wider browser support. In addition to IE7, Firefox 2.0 and IE6, we now support:

  • Safari 2
  • Safari 3
  • Firefox 3 beta
  • and we improved layout in IE6

We also fixed some annoying problems that prevented comments in the forums and blogs. You will need to sign out and sign in again to see the changes.

Finally, we extended everyone's trials - so we can get the Outlook 2003 client released and put some final changes in place, letting everyone have a chance to try them.

Thanks for your support, and let us know any feature requests or future capabilities you would like to see in ActionThis.

Ed Robinson, CEO

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