Outlook Kanban Boards With New Views And Icons

The Outlook editions of Kanban Task Manager will soon be updated with new views and indications for overdue tasks and percent completed.

Four editions
The kalmstrom.com kanban style software for project and tasks management comes in four editions. Two of them are for Outlook, workgroup and single editions, and two are for SharePoint. The editions work on two different platforms, but we try to keep the features as similar as possible. This is especially important as the Outlook workgroup edition can synchronize with both SharePoint editions.

Kanban view
By default each Outlook task is shown as a color coded card on a kanban board with phases for the work process. These cards can be filtered in various ways, and they can be dragged to another phase and dropped there. New tasks can be created directly in the kanban view, and existing tasks can be opened and edited.

New icons
The coming updates of the Kanban Task Manager Outlook editions will give users more graphic information on the task cards. When a task is overdue, it will be indicated with a red left border on the kanban card.

When users fill out the % Completed field in the task, the value will be shown with an icon on the task in the kanban view. The high priority task in the image below is nearly finished.

Month view
Next version of Kanban Task Manager will have more views. The Month view gives two options: calendar and timeline. Here you can see when tasks are planned to start and end and which tasks are in the pipeline for the coming month, the current month – or whichever month you select.

In the timeline, the time slots can be dragged to change the start and due dates, and tasks can be edited or created.

Project View
In the Project View each project will be visualized in the form of a pie chart, so that it will be easy to see  how many tasks there are in each phase of each project. Only phases that have tasks for the specific project are shown.

Phase Columns
To allow users with few phases and big screens to use their horizontal space better, we will finally add a possibility to use more than one column of tasks in the same phase. In the image below there are many incoming tasks that are waiting to be moved through the phases. Therefore the "Not Started" phase has been given 2 columns, which shows more tasks with less scrolling and gives a better overview.

Work with the workgroup edition of Kanban Task Manager for Outlook V5 has already begun, and when it has been released it will be a quick job to update the single edition too. We will soon give you a chance to try the Kanban Task Manager Outlook editions.

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions