Announcing: Task Tracking

The short version

We are excited to announce that Simul now enables you to create and monitor tasks for your Word documents. This feature keeps the management of scheduled work for a document in a common place, shared by all users.

The longer version

It can be difficult to understand what work remains to meet a particular milestone for a Word document and who is responsible. Common approaches to task management involve either

• navigate_next Each user controlling a list of private tasks in Outlook or;
• navigate_next Creating a shared task list in SharePoint.

Both of these solutions keep the tasks in a separate workspace to the document itself and offer very few tools to track the task’s progress or aid collaboration.

Simul now offers a task management solution which associates tasks with documents and provides an interface for members to collaborate.

Notifications

When tasks are assigned, the user will see notifications on the documents page indicating the number of outstanding tasks per document:

This red circle indicates that there is 1 task assigned to this user. When viewing the document itself, notifications can be seen in the document navigation:

Selecting the tasks icon will navigate to the tasks list for the document which is described below.

Tasks List

Simul provides a list of all tasks, clearly showing the outstanding work required for a document. The tasks can be easily filtered by status or assignee and a due date can be scheduled:

In the above, we can see that the document has 3 tasks, 1 closed and 2 open. 2 of the tasks are due on the 31st of July and each task is assigned to a different member of the document. If we select a specific task we can see the full history of the task.

The Task

The task provides a place for members to collaborate and discuss a particular change to the document. Each task has its own timeline where any changes are recorded and displayed, along with all comments that members have added. This could look similar to the following:

This provides a shared space which all members can access and contribute to. The creator and assignee of the tasks will also be alerted to any updates via email.

Getting started

Tasks are ready for you to start leveraging now. Simply navigate to the tasks list page, as described above, and select the “New task” button:

Give the task a title and, optionally, a due by date, assignee and description.

That’s it, start enjoying having your tasks and document in the same workspace for everyone to collaborate!