Two more suggestions - calendar and contact manager

Richard Jackson · Guest

Here's a couple more suggestions.

1) Include a calendar that is linked ot the task list, but is much more powerful than the one you have now. Rather than try to describe the feature list of such a calendar, see here:

[url]http://bulldog.tzo.org/webcal/webcal.html[/url]

We currently use this so that everyone knows when visitors will be in the building, when we have meetings, when people are out of town, etc. It's very useful, and having something like this linked to the task list would be even more useful.

2) You currently allow a task to be linked to a document or a URL. A really great addition (although almost certainly a very non-trivial one to implement!) would be to also allow links to records in a contact manger such as Act! or Goldmine. This would be very useful for scheduling customer/client related tasks.

Serge · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 242

[quote="Richard Jackson"]1) Include a calendar that is linked ot the task list, but is much more powerful than the one you have now. [/quote]
We are going to include a calendar view. We hope it will satisfy most of your sheduling needs.

Serge · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 242

[quote="Richard Jackson"]2) You currently allow a task to be linked to a document or a URL. A really great addition (although almost certainly a very non-trivial one to implement!) would be to also allow links to records in a contact manger such as Act! or Goldmine. This would be very useful for scheduling customer/client related tasks.[/quote]
Thank you for feature request. We will take a look at these programs and consider the possibility.

Richard Jackson · Guest

[quote="Serge"][quote="Richard Jackson"]1) Include a calendar that is linked ot the task list, but is much more powerful than the one you have now. [/quote]
We are going to include a calendar view. We hope it will satisfy most of your sheduling needs.[/quote]

Can you give me any more information about what you are planning or have implemented?

Now that I have used Team To Do List more, I can say that this is definitely a big missing feature for me. I can schedule a task so that it must be done by a certain date and time (please, can we have an option to get rid of the time? I rarely need a task to be completed at an exact time), but I can't schedule a task that occurs at a specific date and time. Examples are meetings, visitors, business trips, conferences, etc.

What I would like to be able to do is schedule certain tasks for specific dates, possibly with times. When I look at the calendar, any day that has a specific task should be highlighted, so that it is immediately obvious. In this case, it should NOT be highlighted if there are tasks that have to be completed by that date Either that, or that should use a different highlight color. Perhaps one color for tasks specific to that date, one color for tasks to be completed by that date, both colors if both are true for a certain date.

If I click on the date on the calendar, I would then like to be able to see any tasks that are specifically for that date. I would like to be able to do that without seeing tasks that are scheduled to be completed by that date. Perhaps an option to view tasks specific to that date, tasks to be completed by that date, or both.

In Team To Do List this is by far the biggest limitation for me. In a network version it would be crippling, because we would need to use a second piece of software to schedule meetings, etc. That would be extremely undesirable.

Serge · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 242

As for Calendar... It will be full-functional calendar view, on the separate TAB (like task view and resource view now). The more information will be available when we have features descriptions.
As for Optional Time settings… it is connected with many options like sorting and reminder so trivial to implement. We will think how we can improve Due Date and Time.
As for the difference between tasks belonging to exact dates and periods… we think we understood your description but could you describe the solution or example how you will use it and what for?

Richard Jackson · Guest

[quote="Serge"]As for Calendar... It will be full-functional calendar view, on the separate TAB (like task view and resource view now). The more information will be available when we have features descriptions. [/quote]

OK. That sounds great. That's better than I had envisioned.

[quote="Serge"]As for Optional Time settings… it is connected with many options like sorting and reminder so trivial to implement. We will think how we can improve Due Date and Time.[/quote]

Thanks. It's not that big a deal though. It would be nice to be able to turn off the time requirement, but it's not critical.

[quote="Serge"]As for the difference between tasks belonging to exact dates and periods… we think we understood your description but could you describe the solution or example how you will use it and what for?[/quote]

As an example, let's take one resource, call him Tom. I may give Tom a task, let's say preparation of a presentation, that needs to be done by a specific date, say 1 month from now. Tom has a lot of things to do, so on any given day he may or may or be working on that presentation. It doesn't matter which specific days Tom works on that presentation, only that it is finished by the due date. There are also tasks that must be done on specific days. For example, there may be a conference one week, and Tom is allocated to go. He may also have to visit one of our customers on a specific day in the following week. To make sure we do not have scheduling conflicts for things like this we currently use a web based calendar. Anyone can look at this, and see who is out of the office, where they are, if we will have visitors on a given day, etc. Tom's conference and customer visit will show up on this calendar, but his other time commitments (for example the presentation) will not. If another customer phones and says they would like to visit our facility, meet with Tom, and see some piece of equipment, I can look at the calendar and see when Tom or the required equipment are already booked. I can then suggest possible dates for the customer to visit.

There is no way (at least, no way I can see) for me to allocate specific dates for a task in Team To Do List. For a meeting that occurs on a given day I can kludge it and use the due date, but it's not ideal. For something like a conference, that does not work, because I can't enter a starting date and an ending date. So I wold like to be able to select whether a task must be done by a certain date, or needs to be done on specific dates. If I select specific dates, I can enter a starting date and an ending date (other people may also want a list of dates, although I would not need that). If I go to the calendar view, I would then like to be able to filter what I see by choosing resource(s) and/or choosing to look at tasks to be finished by a certain date or tasks to be performed on specific dates.

Team To Do List is a great product. For me, the only major thing it's missing is this calendar scheduling capability.

Serge · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 242

Thank you for the example. The new product will feature Start date and time and Finish date and time. So you the tasks of 'due date' type will be in the top of your calendar view and the tasks within a day will be scheduled on the day time table. Ex. Tom's 'preparation of a presentation' will be seen in the top of the calendar view for all the days of a month while 'visiting a conference' will be displayed on particular day and in the particular place on the schedule, ex. 15.00 - 16.00

Richard Jackson · Guest

Sounds good to me.