Using Kanban Task Manager In Big Teams

We are sometimes asked if Kanban Task Manager for Outlook can be used by big teams. The answer is Yes. In next version the kalmstrom.com developers have made sure our new project management application will work well even if you have many tasks, projects and responsibles.

Demos with few tasks
The Kanban Task Manager documentation on the kalmstrom.com website shows a software that is used in a small group, but this is only for practical reasons. A few tasks and projects show how the application works just as well as many of them do. The images and video demonstrations have to be rather small, and that makes it difficult to show Kanban Task Manager with many tasks in Outlook.

Outlook tasks with dropdowns
Kanban Task Manager uses standard Outlook tasks, but dropdowns for selection of project, phase and responsible has been added to each task. In the Kanban Task Manager homepage – which is the Kanban board where the tasks are visualized and synchonised within the team – the tasks may be filtered by project and responsible. These values are selected from dropdowns too.

Buttons for more than 100 values
Using dropdowns is a good way of minimizing errors and making selection quick and easy, but if you have too many alternatives the dropdown will be difficult to handle even when the values are shown in alphabetic order. Therefore our technicians have decided to convert the dropdowns into buttons to show phases, projects or responsibles when the number of alternative is more than 100. In the image above both the Project and the Responsible dropdowns have been transformed into buttons.

When a user clicks on one of these buttons a new dialog will be shown. It has a listbox with all the values and a text box of the autocomplete type, so that selection of the desired value is easy and fast.

Support for up to 1000 items
Kanban Task Manager supports as many as 1000 alternatives each for project, phase and responsible, and it is highly unlikely that an organization will need more than that.

We have also tested the application with 1000 tasks in the Kanban board, and it works fine with all three sharing options: a SharePoint site or an Access or SQL Server database. With even more tasks Kanban Task Manager will be a bit slow and difficult to navigate, so if you need to have more than 1000 tasks we suggest that you break down the team using the same Kanban board into two or three.