Outlook Tasks + SharePoint As Used By kalmstrom.com

Some weeks ago kalmstrom.com Business Solutions released Kanban Task Manager, an application for project and task management in the Outlook tasks view. The kalmstrom.com team has recently begun using this new software internally, with SharePoint handling the sharing and storage.

Status phases
Kanban Task Manager is installed in a folder under the Outlook Task view, and it uses standard Outlook tasks that have been given drop-downs for selection of project, phase and responsible.

We have chosen to use the phases to show status of the tasks: New, Developing, Testing, Ready for release,
Published, Waiting, Deferred and Bug fixing. The Outlook tasks may be dragged and dropped between the phases, soﾠit is very easy to change status of the tasks as a project proceeds.

Action colors
Each ﾠOutlook task may be colored, and the kalmstrom.com team has decided to use different colors for different kinds of work. We have green for development, blue for testing, yellow for documention, orange for design and so on.

In combination with the phases the coloring makes it easy to see how projects proceed, and it is especially useful when you choose to show tasks for all projects and all responsibles. The tasks may be filtered by project or responsible also, but sometimes you need to see the whole picture.

Sharing via SharePoint
The kalmstrom.com team is placed in Sweden, India and Spain, so we need a way of sharing that works via the Internet. Kanban Task Manager gives three sharing options, SharePoint, SQL Server database and Access database, and for us SharePoint was the obvious choice. With this alternative we also get all the possibilites of SharePoint to combine with Kanban Task Manager.

Synchronization of tasks
As all members of the kalmstrom.com team have their Kanban Task Manager installations connected to the same SharePoint site, we ﾠall see and use ﾠthe same Kanban board and the same Outlook tasks, and changes are synchronized automatically within minutes. Should we want an even quicker sync we can just press the sync button.


Before we had Kanban Task Manager we used a SharePoint task list to keep track of projects and tasks. That worked too, but with Kanban Task Manager we have something much better! Maybe this application will suit your organization also? Take a look at the video to learn more, and you are welcome to try Kanban Task Manager for 30 days without any obligations!