Better Task Management is Coming in eXo Platform

Companies that use eXo Platform often do so because they are looking for better ways to communicate or because they want to collaborate more efficiently. When social collaboration starts to take off, it tends to generate a lot of interactions. But how do you keep things organized? How do you balance your teamwork with the tons of small things you need to do on your own?

To address this, we have been working on a brand new application dedicated to task management. Today, we released a first milestone to let you preview it and give us your feedback.

Start by downloading the latest preview of Platform 4.3 and install the add-on :

./addon install exo-tasks

Once it starts, you should see a “Tasks” menu. Click it and welcome to the new Tasks application.

Capturing Tasks

Creating a task is as simple as typing a quick description. Hit “enter” and you can hop to your next idea. New tasks will pile up in the “Incoming” list, which has been designed for capturing tasks as fast as you can type. Capturing your actions as soon as they come to mind is a well-known productivity trick. It frees your brain and relieves you from the stress of forgetting something. Once the task is in the system, you can continue with what you were doing with minimal interruption.

You can go back to your “Incoming” list as often as you need to and refine your tasks. There is a sliding pane where you can do things like adding a more detailed description, setting a due date and a priority, or assigning the task.

Once you’ve completed a task, hit the “rewarding” checkbox to mark it as completed. It will automatically disappear and navigate you to the next one!

Organize Into Projects

Once you have created a bunch of tasks, you will want to group them into projects to make it easier to work with them. You can create projects and subprojects as needed.

Give them different colors, so you can easily identify their tasks.

Spaces automatically get their own projects and the Tasks application is populated in any new space, so that each team or project member can manage the relevant tasks.

Get Work Done

Now that you have learnt how to capture and get things organized, how do you actually tackle all these tasks?

Dealing with tasks directly from the “Incoming” list is fine for very small and informal jobs.

But sometimes, you need more help to see you what’s important for you to do now. For that, we let you filter and group your tasks based on their due date: Overdue, Today, Tomorrow and Upcoming.

That’s it for now. I have covered the key aspects but there are a ton of smaller things to discover if you take the time to try it out. Keep in mind, it is a preview release and things will certainly change along the way based on your feedback.

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