Answers to commonly asked questions about ActionThis.
ActionThis is an online task management service for teams. ActionThis comprises a web application, which can be accessed over the Internet, and premium features including client software that allows ActionThis to work with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel.
You can choose to use the web application for managing your tasks, in conjunction with whatever email application you use. For a premium experience, the ActionThis Client for Outlook is recommended.
ActionThis’ features are focused on helping users complete their tasks – to finish what they start. Reminders, reports and other features help drive the completion of tasks.
The features of ActionThis are designed to help you and your team work more effectively together. Key features include the ability to send tasks – or action items, as we call them – to anyone with an email address, and allow these tasks to be tracked and reported on.
Users can send and manage tasks using the ActionThis web application, or can use the client for Microsoft Outlook to seamlessly process these alongside their email messages.
A full range of reports are available to allow users to look at the status of any report, and to understand their workload.
ActionThis can be used by anyone who wants to get things done. For individuals, ActionThis is useful for capturing and tracking all of those tasks you need to get done, and remind you about them – anywhere, using the web or Outlook.
For small businesses, and teams and departments within larger organizations, it’s ideal for managing simple projects and managing activities amongst a group of people.
Not only is ActionThis useful amongst people within a company, it’s also ideal for coordinating activities with, and between, multiple organizations – for instance if you need to liaise with external partners, contractors or vendors to supply products or services that are needed by a project.
By centrally capturing all of these activities, ActionThis can automatically track and remind users about what needs to be performed, and permitted users can use reports to measure and improve performance.
It’s very easy to use ActionThis to work with other people – in fact, this is what the system was designed to do.
Anyone who has an email address can be invited to use ActionThis and they can access the online application over the web within minutes. Simply send them an ActionThis action item, and they will be able to get its details from ActionThis after registering as a user.
From there, they can choose to use ActionThis for themselves, or simply use it to work with you – it’s up to them.
No. ActionThis can be used in conjunction with any mainstream web browser – Outlook is not required.
That said, the ActionThis Client for Outlook is ideal for those people who want to seamlessly create and manage tasks alongside their email messages, and saves them from having to monitor their Outlook inbox and a web site to keep track of what they need to do.
ActionThis supports both Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.
An “action item” is the term used for a task in ActionThis.
The reason for this is simple: we believe the word task is generally considered negative, and “action item” is considered a far more positive term – after all, we want to drive people to do things.
Yes. ActionThis stores your data on our secure servers, within a secure data center. Your data is backed up every day, and we make sure our servers are operating effectively. We also encrypt the data we communicate to you, so that it cannot be intercepted and interpreted.
Access to any data is password protected, and you control who has access to any of your project data or receives tasks from you.
ActionThis provides support in a number of ways.
Online help is used throughout the web application to assist users in using and getting the most out of ActionThis. If you have questions not answered there, we provide online forums which you can use to ask more specific questions from the ActionThis support team and wider online community. And for those more specific questions, we also provide unlimited email-based support.
We also provide a series of “How To...” training guides which explain how to maximize your usage of ActionThis, including how to install and use the Outlook client, how to drive better meeting outcomes using ActionThis, and how to use ActionThis with your team.
Premium subscribers to ActionThis pay US$10 per person, per month. This provides access to all of the features of ActionThis features, including the web application and reports, and the client software for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel.
For users that don’t require all these features, we provide the Personal Edition which is free and allows you only use the web application to create and manage tasks and teams.
For more information on how much ActionThis costs, review the How to Buy page.
All customers receive 24/7 access to their task and project information, secure data access and storage, and free upgrades – you don’t need to maintain the system, we do that for you.
ActionThis supports all the standard Windows and Mac browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer (6.0 SP2 and above), Firefox (2.0 and above) and Safari (3.0). For best results, we recommend using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2.0 or greater.
