ActionThis Blog

New ActionThis Package Deals

Posted on 16 December 2008 by Tim Howell

As a tool focused on helping teams work together, we want to reduce the barriers to working with other people, while letting everyone take advantage of all the features ActionThis has to offer.

We’ve also listened to your feedback that – for some of you at least – having to pay monthly can be an inconvenience. Now, for the first time, we’re offering a range of plans that should give you the flexibility you need when choosing how to use ActionThis.

We’re still offering our existing Premium and Free single user plans. These plans are great if you want to use ActionThis primarily for your own personal task management, or, in the case of the free Personal version, if you don’t need the Microsoft Office features (which are only available with the Premium versions).

Given our users get the most value out of ActionThis when they use it with others, we’ve added some new annual plans that provide significant discounts when you use ActionThis with your team. Here’s a matrix of the different plans on offer, and what discounts are available if you sign up for 12 months.

Account type	Users	Per month	Annual Fee
Personal (Web-only)	Single User	Free	Free
Premium (includes Microsoft Office capabilities)	Single User	$10 per user	$80 – save 33%
Premium - 10 users	10 users	$100	$800 – save 33%
Premium - 25 users	25 users	$250	$1,500 – save 50%
Premium - 100 users	100 users	$1000	$5,000 – save 58%

These changes are in effect from now and are available for both new and existing customers. As always, pricing is in US dollars. Changes will be made to our pricing table in the near future, but in the interests of time we’ve posted them here first. If you have any questions, please contact our Support team at support@actionthis.com.

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ActionThis Release on 19 August

Posted on 20 August 2008 by Tim Howell

You may have noticed that we have made some changes to ActionThis.  The following changes were released last Sunday.

Improvements to the Project area:

• The Project and Action Item pages have been merged.  The new Project page has an Action Item and a Details tab.  The Project page functionality can be found on the Details Tab, while the Action Item page functionality can be found on the Action Item tab.
• A team member can leave a project they are signed to by going to the Details tab and clicking “Remove me.”
• We have created the “(Other)” project that will display all Action Items assigned to you from Projects you are not a member of.
• A new tick box to allow the viewing “Show Closed Action Items” instead of the two “View Open” and “View Closed” text.

Parent/Sub Action Items on Action Profile Page:

• A Sub Action Items can now be created in the Action Profile Page by going to the Sub Action Item section and clicking “Add Action Item."
• Rollover command functionality (from Project page) is also available.
• When viewing a Parent Action Item you can navigate to a Sub Action Item by selecting it in the Sub-Action Item section.
• When viewing a Sub Action Item the Parent Action Item is displayed below the “Status:”
• When viewing a Sub Action Item you can navigate to a Parent Action Item by selecting its display name.

Outlook Client:

• When working offline the changes to an action item's workflow are now reflected correctly in the Workflow buttons (e.g. Accepting an Action Item off-line now causes the “Accept” button to be greyed out when the item is next opened and the action is recorded in the item's history).
• A Sub Action Item can now be created by right-clicking on the Parent Action Item and selecting “New Sub Action Item."
• Action items can now be dragged to different projects or even be moved to be a Sub Action Item of another Action Item.

If you have any questions or feedback please email support@actionthis.com.

Thanks for your continued support.

The ActionThis Team

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Visit us at the 2008 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

Posted on 11 June 2008 by Ed Robinson

We’re exhibiting at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas July 7-10.

Visit us at Booth 120. We've just started signing ActionThis resellers - if you're an IT solutions company, project management or change management consultancy email us (or visit us at the conference) and we'll give you details on the reseller program.

Its great to be invited to exhibit at Microsoft's premier partner event. We're also proud to include four other New Zealand based companies: ActiveDocs, IPFX, Mindscape and Voola.

Its going to be a great event. Thanks to Microsoft and New Zealand Trade & Enterprise for sponsoring the exhibition booth.

 

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New Features May 18

Posted on 19 May 2008 by Ed Robinson

We've added new features to ActionThis

• Layout changes on the website. We've moved the website to support a screen resolution 1024x768 or higher - this means the reports are better laid out and there is more space for working with action items.
• Team workload report. This will now show you the team member workload for all  projects where you have the 'manager' role
• Organization memberships. Invitations to join an organization now appear on the Dashboard
• Office client installation. Both the Excel and Outlook clients are now included in a unified installer
• Outlook Explorer. We've added full offline support to the Explorer
• Outlook reminders. Due reminders have always shown in Outlook's reminder window - we've changed the reminder time, so they appear at 8am on the date they are due

Behind the scenes, we've also put plumbing in place to support blackberry and Windows mobile clients and Microsoft Project synchronization - we're working on these at the moment.  The next major release will have the Microsoft Project synchronization.

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Introducing Larry

Posted on 21 April 2008 by Ed Robinson

If you're new to ActionThis and want to experiment assigning action items via the website or Microsoft Outlook, try assigning an action item to Larry@actionthis.com.

Larry is our virtual team member, who automatically completes any action item you assign him. Use Larry to try out the assign, reassign and bounce back capabilities.

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This weekend's release

Posted on 17 March 2008 by Ed Robinson

This weekend’s release comprised a number of useful enhancements and tweaks across the board. Here are some highlights:

• Using Outlook for personal tasks – ActionThis is designed for teams, but it’s an effective personal task management tool too. If you’re using it to manage your own tasks, here’s something useful: Enter all the details of the task but leave the recipient empty – when you send the action item it will automatically be sent to yourself. Personal task management made easy.
• Printing from Outlook – For those of us who still like paper documents, we’ve improved how printing works from Outlook. You can use the Print button within an action item to get a useful printout of what you need to do. Simple, but effective.

• ActionThis Installation Troubleshooter – Should you have any difficulties connecting to ActionThis, we’ve enhanced the troubleshooting application which can be used to check the settings of your PC and, in conjunction with our Support team, help us resolve any issues.

• Report Subscription Enhancements – Now you can specify the day and time you subscribe to reports, so the reports can work the way you want. Need your task list before you arrive at work? Want to get a list of tasks the night before your day at work? No problem.
• Support for American Express credit cards – We can now process American Express credit cards. If you’ve hesitated to subscribe because we didn’t take Amex, then the barrier’s gone: we now support Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

Of course, there are also a range of other minor tweaks and fixes to the system. If you’ve got any feedback, feel free to post a comment or contact support@actionthis.com.

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ActionThis CEO speaking at SaaS Conference

Posted on 11 March 2008 by Tim Howell

Just as he did last year, Ed Robinson, CEO of ActionThis, will be talking at this year’s On Demand Software Delivery Summit, being run by BrightStar in Auckland, New Zealand on May 19.

Ed’s session is called “Reading the Tea Leaves: The Next Five Years for On-demand Services” and will be a future-looking presentation. Here’s the overview:

On-demand software is challenging the way we think about provisioning software services. What’s in store for the future? What trends are we likely to see from IT department investment and from On-demand vendors? This talk examines today’s landscape, the trends emerging from Europe and the United States and what this means for New Zealand companies in the future.

To find out more, and book yourself a place, visit http://www.brightstar.co.nz/nz/on-demand-software-delivery-summit.html for more information.

Tim Howell, CMO

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What we're working on

Posted on 07 March 2008 by Ed Robinson

We're preparing new features, concentrating on reporting and printing from Outlook and the website.  These will be released in about a week, and here is a preview of the new report saving dialog.

• we're keeping it simple, with intuitive options for saving
• we're adding more flexibility around date ranges and when things get emailed.

BTW: the "pink" interior of the name box indicates you've got to enter something in the box. Our team felt it is more intuitive than a star * which many other sites use.

Ed

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"Task management for teams"

Posted on 28 February 2008 by Tim Howell

If 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

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New Features just added

Posted on 24 February 2008 by Ed Robinson

I'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

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Updates to Outlook and Excel clients

Posted on 05 February 2008 by Ed Robinson

I'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

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Excel yourself with ActionThis

Posted on 31 January 2008 by Ed Robinson

Last week we quietly added a useful new feature to ActionThis: the ability to download ActionThis project data into Microsoft Excel.

The concept is a simple one: You work in ActionThis and use it to manage you and your team’s tasks for a particular project. You want to report on the status of a project and its tasks and add your own information, such as costs or other project-related metrics; you also may want to slice and dice the data a particular way, or simply want a report you can carry round.

Introducing the ActionThis Client for Excel.

Once installed, you have one-click access to the ActionThis service from within Excel. Enter your login details, select a project, and Excel does the rest, downloading all of the action items for a particular project into an Excel spreadsheet. Once downloaded, you’re then free to play around with the data, and any changes you make won’t affect the data in the ActionThis system. We even provide a template to get you started, featuring a collection of graphs.

 

This feature is available to premium members of ActionThis and works with both Excel 2007 and Excel 2003.

To find out more, download the software by going to Setup |Downloads within the ActionThis application. You can also read the User Guide to get started.

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Working to live or living to work? Achieving work-life balance

Posted on 10 January 2008 by Tim Howell

It’s the start of a new year, the holidays are over, and people are returning to the office en masse. January is often a time to set goals for the year ahead, identifying those personal and work-related resolutions we want to achieve over the next 12 months.

For most of us, achieving a work-life balance is at – or near – the top of the list. Typically that means doing enough work to give us the time and resources we need in order to create opportunities for recreation. Or, as some people like to say, they would prefer to “work to live,” not “live to work.”

Here in New Zealand, that work-life balancing act is firmly tilted towards work. Last year, a Labour Department work-life balance survey found almost half of all respondents working between 40 and 50 hours a week, and 19% worked more than 50 hours. The most recent census puts it even higher, with a quarter of employees – 35% of men and 13% of women - saying they worked more than 50 hours a week. Other countries report similar metrics.

If this trend continues, and we work 20% more than we’re meant to, are we ever going to achieve the work-life balance? How can we reduce the number of hours people are working each week, to allow them to do what they want to do, not what they have to do?

For those of us in the technology industry, we often have a simple response: Use technology.

Realistically, technology alone won’t fix the problem. The reality is that, at the very least, any technology solution needs to be accompanied by changes to behaviour – at both an individual and organisational level – and the processes that are employed by those people and their technologies. Together, people, processes and technology work together – and this triumvirate is critical to driving change and improvement.

That said, there is an emerging breed of software solutions that are designed to help people execute – to get things done more effectively, helping individuals and teams to achieve what they need to do, and to finish what they start.

Software solutions such as ActionThis (www.actionthis.com) are designed to help people in a number of key ways. The premise of this particular solution is a simple one: people are great at starting things, but are lousy at finishing. For managers, the impact of this is simple: they spend most of their time following up and chasing people to find out if something has been completed, instead of focusing on strategic and long-term planning. In other words, they end up being reactive and not proactive.

And while there are many tools in the market that help people plan and collaborate, they all have fundamental weaknesses:

• Traditional project management and planning tools are often complex, and don’t often reflect reality. The onus is on a single person, usually the project manager, to update the plan and ensure its currency – usually requiring more follow-ups.
• Collaboration tools help people work together, but don’t drive outcomes. Using these tools we can collaborate in the same way we might hold a meeting, but unless someone drives outcomes, these end up being a never-ending party.
  ActionThis takes the best of both these traditional approaches and adds some smarts to help inform and update people about what they need to do, to ensure visibility of activity and workload across a team, and to drive outcomes from tasks and activities.

Unlike web-centric tools, ActionThis also works with the tools we all use every day. Users can create and manage action items (ActionThis’ version of tasks) alongside their email messages in Microsoft Outlook, without having to learn a new tool. Similarly, they can download and analyse their action items in Microsoft Excel. And soon they will be able to synchronise their Microsoft Project plans with ActionThis, so that project managers no longer have to chase people to update their plans – as their project team updates their ActionThis action items, these updates can be synchronised back into the main project plan.

So how does ActionThis help us achieve that elusive work-life balance?

As individuals it helps us manage and have control over the tasks we need to perform – including tasks we have assigned ourselves, as well as those assigned to us by other people. What’s more, ActionThis will drive the completion of these tasks. No loose ends to worry about. Visibility into everything that’s going on. No surprises.

And if we have asked other people to perform tasks, we don’t need to spend as much time following up and chasing people; ActionThis will do this for us. In the meantime, we can use this time to deliver on those things we have to do.

The theory is simple: the more efficient we are, the more likely it will be that we reclaim some personal time and therefore shift the work-life balance away from work. And, if we need to do more work, then we can simply get more done in the time we have available.

Tim Howell, CMO

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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:

• Download ActionThis Outlook 2003 Client: https://my.actionthis.com/Private/Downloads/ActionThis_Outlook_2003_Client_Setup_1.4.11217.0052.exe
• Download ActionThis Outlook 2007 Client: https://my.actionthis.com/Private/Downloads/ActionThis_Outlook_2007_Client_Setup_1.4.11217.0052.exe

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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ActionThis updates

Posted on 21 November 2007 by Derek Watson

The ActionThis team has been working hard to regularly bring new features to our users since launch and we have another set ready to be released now.

To make these features available we are going to be releasing an update outside our advertised change window tonight (approx. Tuesday 8pm PST). We will keep the outage as short as possible, but apologies in advance to anyone who is affected by unavailability of the site during this time.

Following the next scheduled release on the 25th of November, we are moving to a 2 week release cycle with a firm committment to not releasing outside the advertised change window again. Making this change will not affect the number of new features we incorporate in the product, but it will reduce the rate of churn.

Derek Watson, CTO

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Outlook Integration Video

Posted on 20 November 2007 by Ed Robinson

ActionThis is a great team management system using the website alone. If you use Outlook, the ActionThis client makes assigning action items as simple as email.  For a one minute overview of the Outlook client, see this video:

https://my.actionthis.com/private/Downloads/atOutlookVideo.wmv

Ed Robinson

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Updates coming in two days

Posted on 19 November 2007 by Ed Robinson

No site update today, we need two more days to finish some features:

1. Forums + the ability to comment on blogs
2. A better downloads area
3. Improvements to filtering, formatting and mailing of the workload and status reports
4. Smarter connect pane and minor improvements to the Outlook 2007 client
5. Better merging of email aliases and organization management
6. Fixes to some issues around adding comments to action items

This release will go live Tuesday night PST.

So - I assigned 5 action items out for ActionThis to follow up on, how did they do?  4 came in on time, and the forums still need to be done. 80% on time leaves some room for improvement, but that's what we're all about - executing and improving.

What we're working on next: Outlook 2003 client, Safari browser support and some other productivity extensions for Microsoft Office.

Ed Robinson

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Updates to ActionThis

Posted on 14 November 2007 by Ed Robinson

We rolled out updates to ActionThis last night:

• A number of bug fixes to the website
• Stabilized the Outlook 2007 client, and fixed the Outlook restart issues
• Added the ability for people to delete their accounts
• Revamped the organization management section, so you can upgrade/downgrade your account
• Added a user guide for the Outlook 2007 client
• Provided a smaller "update" download at 3Mb. If you've already installed the full version of the Outlook 2007 client once, then the prerequisites will be in place.  Simply install this update (without uninstalling the full version) to install the update.

If you have Outlook 2007, try using the ActionThis client - it makes assigning and working with ActionThis action items as simple as email.

Ed Robinson

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Updates coming this weekend

Posted on 09 November 2007 by Ed Robinson

We’re preparing for another upgrade Sunday night Nov 11th PST. The major changes are simplifications to organization management and bug fixes.

We also isolated cases where the Outlook client caused Outlook 2007 to restart. We’ve fixed these issues. We’ve also improved the Outlook client's experience synchronizing and working with non-Exchange mailboxes. There are now two versions of the client to download – full install and update. the full install contains all the prerequisites and is intended for first time installers. The update is smaller and doesn’t contain the prerequisites, after installing the full version once, you can simply install the update to get the latest features. We’re also adding a user guide for the Outlook client to help new users get started.

Whew! Lots of work but the application is looking great.
Next up, we’re improving some of the reporting, the email formatting, bringing the forums online and we’re working day-and-night on the Outlook 2003 client, it should be ready soon.  If you'd like to try out an early version of the Outlook 2003 client, please let us know by sending an action item to support@actionthis.com

Ed Robinson

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Presenting at the Connect springboard Showcase event

Posted on 05 November 2007 by Tim Howell

Last week we presented at the Connect Springboard Showcase, an event for early stage companies run by Connect New Zealand and the New Zealand Venture Capital Association.

According to the organizers, the event featured “early-stage technology and life science companies - a showcase of what we believe are some of the most promising, innovative early-stage companies that have the potential to become significant players in New Zealand's technology sector.”

It was a great opportunity for us to get out there and talk to other companies across a broad range of industries, and also gave us the opportunity to explain the benefits of ActionThis to the group of 120+ people at the event.

Tim Howell, CMO

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Make your Week Easier

Posted on 05 November 2007 by Ed Robinson

Try this, it takes 10 minutes and will make your week easier

Many of us spend half our work-week simply following up with people. This week, try using ActionThis to help. Choose 5 things you’re waiting on from other people – these might be emails you’re waiting for a reply, or assignments due this week.

Now assign each of these to the people you’re waiting on as ActionThis action items. Let ActionThis keep track of these for you. It doesn’t matter if the recipient isn’t already a member of ActionThis, they will be prompted to sign up.

When I send an action item to someone for the first time, I usually choose an action item that people are already aware of, so it acts as a reminder to something they’ve already agreed. I usually keep my action items short – a subject line and a due date, but the choice is yours – the more unambiguous information you give people – the more likely they will complete it on time.

Here are the five I sent out today, I’ll let you know the results next week.

• Remember to set up a time to speak on the phone, I’m available Monday 12pm,1pm or 2pm to Tim W, due Monday
• Schedule two days vacation for each of the team as a thank you for shipping, to Derek W, due Tuesday
• Update Schwizzler Text. To Aaron S due Monday
• Provide sketches for the IdeaLog article. To Mark D, due Monday
• Get the Forums up and running. To DerekW, due Wednesday

With ActionThis, I can track the status of these items from the “My Follow up” tab in the dashboard, or set up a custom report view to email me the status every day.

Ed Robinson, CEO ActionThis

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Building awareness of ActionThis

Posted on 29 October 2007 by Tim Howell

In the run up to launch, we deliberately kept a low profile. As we’ve gotten closer to launch, we’ve contacted an increasing number of people – media, bloggers, analysts – and told them about ActionThis and what we’re doing.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and as the articles and posts have appeared, so has the visibility of ActionThis.

Now, as we launch, coverage of ActionThis is starting to build:

• ActionThis Launches Online Task Management Service – Read/WriteWeb (link http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/actionthis_launches_online_task_management_app.php)
• Can ActionThis Stand up to Basecamp? – Mashable (link http://mashable.com/2007/10/28/actionthis-launch)
• Software firm's package 'gets workers home early' – New Zealand Herald (link http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10471893)
• ActionThis launches on-line project management service – Geekzone (link http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?ContentId=7460)
• ActionThis – Execute Your Project (Killerstartups.com) - http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/community--Execute-your-Project/

Success – and the coverage that will bring – will be dependent on one thing: our ability to execute. We’ve taken an innovative approach to solving a universal problem, and will be listening to – and learning from – the feedback we get from all channels. Feel free to send us your comments and suggestions.

Tim Howell, CMO

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Welcome to ActionThis

Posted on 29 October 2007 by Ed Robinson

Welcome to ActionThis, we’re an online project and team management solution with a difference. We focus on “execution” – getting things done. Planning and collaboration are valuable, but it’s the finishing that counts.

Sign up now, your first 30 days are free – you can use the website, invite your team and use the great extensions for Microsoft Outlook 2007. After your free trial, you can continue to use the web application personally at no charge, but I’m sure you’ll find our team connectivity features, client tools and the upcoming Microsoft Outlook 2003 extensions, mobile client and Microsoft project extensions add so much to your team’s productivity, you’ll want to take advantage of our premium membership at a low monthly charge.

ActionThis enables teams to better connect with each other, and I want to thank our partners who have connected with us and helped launch ActionThis:

• Amazon - delivers our storage, http://aws.amazon.com
• Compuware - provides our automated quality assurance tools, http://www.compuware.com/
• FRST - assists with our research and development, http://www.frst.govt.nz
• Intergen - provides us the best product design and development team, http://www.intergen.co.nz/
• Microsoft - supports us building a cutting edge software+services product, http://www.microsoft.com/
• NZTE - assists with our market development, http://www.nzte.govt.nz/
• Telligent - connects us with our customers with blogs and forums, http://communityserver.org/

Special thanks goes out to our hundreds of testers who have used ActionThis for more than six months, helping us fine tune and enhance the product.

Ed Robinson, CEO

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