New Views In Kanban Task Manager For Outlook

The workgroup edition of Kanban Task Manager for Outlook V5 has been released. The new version has several new features, like month and project views, overdue indicator and a possibility to show more than one column in any phase on the kanban board.

Outlook editions
With Kanban Task Manager workgroups can cooperate on tasks and projects in a kanban board in Outlook. The add-in can be used stand-alone, but the Outlook workgroup edition can also synchronize with both Kanban Task Manager 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. Lanes for different kinds of tasks may also be used.

The cards can be filtered in various ways, and they can be dragged to another phase or lane and dropped there. New tasks can be created in the kanban view, and existing tasks can be opened and edited.

Month View
The Month View is a new view that can be reached from the kanban board. It gives a good overview of when tasks are planned to start and end.  The Month View is displayed either as a calendar or as a timeline, where tasks can be grouped in various ways.

The time slots can be dragged to change the start and due dates, and events can also be edited or created directly from the timeline.

Project View
In the Project View each project is visualized in the form of a pie chart. With this new view, managers and team leaders can quickly see  how many tasks there are in each phase of each project. Only phases that have tasks for the specific project are shown.

Completed icon and Overdue indicators
When a task on the kanban board is overdue, it is indicated with a red left border.

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. In the image below the task is nearly finished.

If the Trip to India task above had been overdue, it should have had the red overdue border, but it should also have had the rest of the completed icon marked with red – a strong "Finish this now" signal!

Phase Columns
To allow users with few phases and big screens to use their horizontal space better, we have added a possibility to use more than one column of tasks in the same phase.

In the image below there are many incoming tasks waiting to be moved through the phases. Therefore the "Not Started" phase has been set to show the tasks in two columns.

Upgrade
I recommend current subscribers of Kanban Task Manager to take advantage of the free upgrade benefit that is included in all kalmstrom.com subscriptions.

Try it
If you have not yet tried Kanban Task Manager, you are welcome to evaluate the solution. We allow 30 days free evaluation of the full product. Below you can see the new views, and there is a lot more documentation on the kalmstrom.com website.

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions