Drag and Drop Tasks In Outlook With Kanban Task Manager

I have mentioned the new, fascinating kalmstrom.com project Kanban Task Manager for Outlook several times earlier in this blog, Now the application is coming together, and today I could try the "drag and drop tasks" feature for the first time.

Drag and Drop Outlook Tasks
It was a joy to finally could open the Kanban Task Manager folder in Outlook and see the nice user interface. I quickly created some Projects, Phases and Tasks to try how it was to drag and drop them, and it worked just fine! We will of course create more elaborate video demonstrations later, but II made a short demo to show how it works.



Visualize progress and blockers
Kanban Task Manager takes the idea from the traditional kanban board, where cards on a board symbolize different tasks of a project. The kanban board makes it easy to see what has been done and what is still in progress, but to manually putting up cards on a board cannot give all the advantages you get when you move the kanban board into Outlook.

More task features with Outlook
Using Outlook for task management makes it possible to do so much more, like filter for project or responsible or show tasks for several projects at the same time. And in Outlook you may drag and drop the tasks between different phases of a project instead of unpinning a card and then pinning it in another place - and maybe dropping it on the floor or loosing the pin in between!


Automatic and instant synchronization
The most interesting difference between the traditional kanban board and the kalmstrom.com Outlook task manager is probably not the drop and drag or filtering but the synchronization. As soon as one team member has made a change to a task it will be visible to all other members in their PCs. This means that everyone can see how a project is making progress, and the manager or responsible may easily discover problems and blockers.

SharePoint or databases for the sharing
The immediate synchronization of tasks is made possible with one of three options for sharing and storage of tasks and settings: a Microsoft SharePoint site, an MS SQL Server database or an MS Access database. All versions are supported by Kanban Task Manager, and if you don't have any of them you can let the application create an Access database for you.

Soon you will have a chance to try Kanban Task Manager in your own team! We will allow a 30 days evaluation period of the full version, and in May I hope to tell you about the release.