"Task management for teams"
Posted on 28 February 2008 by Tim HowellIf you’ve kept an eye on our home page, we’ve recently changed how we describe ActionThis. Instead of calling ourselves a “Next Generation Project Management” service, we now focus on what we do best: “Task management for teams.”
In marketing terms, this means we’ve changed our positioning; for everyone else, this means we’ve subtly changed how we describe ourselves to the wider market place.
The reason for this is simple: When people think of traditional project management solutions, they envisage Gantt charts, resource costing and other complex features which are typically the domain of products such as Microsoft Project.
At ActionThis, we’ve never seen ourselves as playing in this space – our goal is to help teams work more effectively together to drive the completion of their tasks. While people can use ActionThis to manage their projects and tasks, for us this is a means to an end – we need people to organize their data this way so that we can continue to drive the completion of these projects and tasks.
So we’ve changed how we describe ourselves, simply to make it clearer what we do and where our value lies.
In the past, we’ve talked about “execution,” and helping people finish what they start. This focus hasn’t changed, and we will continue to encourage and enforce execution. Our strengths lie in us being able to connect people together, from anywhere, whether they are co-workers, colleagues, partners, vendors or family members.
We believe our ability to assign and track tasks – or action items, as we call them – across the web, using Outlook or our web application, combined with our reporting and execution capabilities, means that we provide teams with an ideal tool to track the tasks they need to get done, and measure progress.
The change in positioning is a subtle, but important one, but for our users the proposition is the same: ActionThis is the tool you need to drive business outcomes across your team, so that you can get stuff done and go home early. The words may have changed, but the philosophy behind what we’re doing definitely hasn’t.
Tim Howell, CMO
Filed under: General View comments (0)New Features just added
Posted on 24 February 2008 by Ed RobinsonI'm pleased to announce we released new features last weekend. The vision of ActionThis is to help teams and individuals execute, so it’s great to add some more capabilities here.
OUTLOOK USERS: please note you'll need to update your ActionThis Outlook Client from the Website Setup|Downloads page.
Here is what's new:
1. "Auto bounceback". When you assign an action item to someone, if they ignore it or do nothing with it, after 7 days the action item will be returned to you - this enables you to follow up directly with the assigneee or choose an alternative approach.
2. Team workload report (premium members only). We have a preview of the team workload report showing managers workload for all people across projects they manage. We'll be doing more work here over the coming weeks, so please send comments/suggestions to support@actionthis.com.
3. General projects. These have been renamed to Personal projects - in preparation for more team and personal features we'll be adding soon.
4. Merging accounts. We've created a better experience for merging/adding email addresses to an existing membership. This is available through Setup|My Settings|Email addresses page.
5. ActionThis Outlook 2003 client. We fixed an installation issue affecting users with Windows Vista and User Account Control off.
Ed Robinson
Filed under: General View comments (0)Updates to Outlook and Excel clients
Posted on 05 February 2008 by Ed RobinsonI'm happy to say we're releasing updates to both the Outlook and Excel clients tonight (Monday 11pm PST).
These updates address two issues that affect a small number of people:
- Connectivity problems through certain corporate proxy servers
- Not enough permissions to install Outlook client, for some people on Windows Vista
The Outlook and Excel clients are very stable, and we're very happy to release these updates tonight, and solve some of the final connectivity issues.
Ed Robinson, CEO
Filed under: General View comments (0)