Kanban Task Manager With New Design and E-mail Management

Kanban Task Manager is the most popular kalmstrom.com product among new subscribers, so it evidently serves its purpose well even as it is today. But Kanban Task Manager also has great development potential, so in 2017 we plan to enhance Kanban Task Manager in several ways. Both the Outlook and the SharePoint editions will have a new look and be easier to work with when there are many tasks on the kanban board, and we will also include better e-mail management.

New design
We have understood that the current  kanban board design is not optimal for big teams with many open tasks and projects. Therefore we have already begun working on a total re-design of the kanban board, with smaller and clearer kanban cards. We have also moved the filter options to a left pane, to make better use of the vertical space. The image below shows the new design of the SharePoint editions, and the Outlook editions will have a similar look.

E-mail management
Another idea will require more research and longer development time: we want to add an e-mail management feature to the SharePoint editions of Kanban Task Manager. With such an enhancement, organizations can handle e-mail conversations on the kanban board, all the way from the initial issue report to the final closing of the ticket. This way Kanban Task Manager can be used for issue tracking and user support as well as for projects management.

The Outlook editions of Kanban Task Manager already have a "Convert e-mail" button, and so here we only have to make the e-mail conversion automatic to get a good function.

For the SharePoint editions we have to add an e-mail feature. E-mail management is already possible if you combine one of the Kanban Task Manager SharePoint editions with our product HelpDesk OSP, but we can do better.

Add-in enhancements
There are currently two SharePoint editions of Kanban Task Manager: a sandboxed solution and an add-in. There are some differences, but we plan to enhance the add-in edition so that it works more like the sandboxed solution. At the same time we will of course keep the add-in advantages, like the easier installation.

We want to move more of the functionality to the host web, thus avoiding the problems of cross-site scripting. That will remove the need for having a special edit form, which we currently have in the add-in edition. It will also make the 'My Tasks' embedding work better in the add-in edition.

The only thing we cannot change is the support for SharePoint 2010. Only the sandboxed solution of Kanban Task Manager supports that version, because Microsoft did not introduce add-ins (or apps, as they were called at that time) until SharePoint 2013.

The whole team is looking forward to the development of new Kanban Task Manager versions, and I hope you are looking forward to using them!

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions