7 Reasons Why I Love TaskRay

What’s this? Two blogs in two weeks? Have I gone crazy? Well the answers are, A blog post, yes, and no. I’ve always been crazy.

I’m enjoying a vacation with my family right now. At least, I hope I’m enjoying it. I’m actually writing this before I leave. I wanted to share with you why I love Taskray so much. For those who aren’t familiar, TaskRay is a product from BracketLabs. You could consider it “Project Planning Lite.” It may not have all the bells and whistles as some other project planning software out there, but my experience is the majority of the people don’t use those features anyways! What BracketLabs provides is a smooth, easy, and great user experience within Salesforce.

So enough, here’s why I love Task Ray.

1. 1. Easy to Add a Task

With Taskray, all I need is provide a subject and hit enter on my keyboard. Bam! Task is created. If I need to do a more completely entry, I click “New Task” and a windows pops up with all my fields. Most of the time, I just quickly create my tasks, assign a due date, and away I go!

1. 1. Easy to change status

The Kanban view of Taskray is fantastic. You have multiple user-defined swim lanes. All I have to do is drag and drop a task from one lane to another. And I’m done! It’s also a great view for quickly seeing what items are left to do within a project.

1. 1. Calendar View with Assistant

I have a lot I need to get done before I leave for vacation. The calendar view is the perfect way for me to plan when things have to be done and visually tell how many days I’m allowing myself to complete something. The Assistant shows me all tasks in my project that I haven’t assigned a due date. I can simply drag and drop the task onto a calendar day. Then I can change the number of days a task may take by simply dragging the end of the bar to another day. I’m in this view every day.

1. 1. Chatter in Tasks and Projects

I’m not the only one going on this vacation. My wife is also going, along with my three children. Admittedly, without my wife, I would likely show up to the hotel with nothing but the clothes on my back and a puzzled expression. I’ll be lucky to know where my kids are… let alone what I did with that one shirt. You know the one I mean.

Chatter let’s me collaborate with my team mates right where we are tracking the project. I use this all the time to get clarification or to let them know I hit a roadblock and need assistance.

1. 1. The Plan View

This screenshot isn’t really impressive with only one project selected. I use this view all the time to determine who is busy and who can take on more work, and when I can start a new project. It’s quick. It’s easy and look at the pretty colors. Plus, if you use dependent tasks you can clearly see what tasks need to be completed before others start. Plus you can easily change the starting and end dates. I love it so much.

1. 1. Task Checklists

Sometimes, or in my case all the time, Tasks will have multiple sub parts. In other systems you need to create separate tasks (Bleh). But with Taskray, I can add a simple Checklist. What I love is how easy it is to add check items. You name your list, and you start typing. Hitting enter automatically saves and starts a new checklist item.

Plus, as you complete your check items, you can see a progress bar that let’s you know what percentage of items you’ve completed. So easy. So simple. So Taskray.

1. 1. The Row View

Admittedly, this is not a view I use all the time. I do use it frequently when I’m managing multiple tasks across multiple projects and I know I’m behind schedule. The Row View gives me a nice and easily to use list that shows when tasks are due, or overdue. You can see I’m overdue for packing my clothes and fixing my sunglasses (children sigh).

I will add that this isn’t a paid placement. BracketLabs didn’t give me any money or anything to write this article. In full transparency, I do have access to this tool because of my job with Better Partners. I use TaskRay every day as part of my job as VP of Operations & Delivery. It is my primary tool for seeing what projects we have open, who is working on them, and where we are with delivery. It’s an added bonus that I can create a project for planning my vacation and no one else minds.

I strongly suggest you take a look at Taskray if you have any sort of project management process. Do you have a number of things that need to happen to support your Sales staff? Maybe you have your own post-sale delivery process. TaskRay supports templates, which didn’t make sense for me to use for my vacation planning, but can be a big time saver with fairly repeatedable projects.

If you liked this post, head over to http://betterpartners.com/blog/ I’m the primary content provider for our company’s blogs. Sign up on the form on the right hand side of that page and receive an email whenever we post something new. I’ll likely be posting some awesome tricks that you can do with TaskRay and other products over on that site as well. My most recent post was about a new Spring ’17 feature called Optimzer. Check out One Simple Way To Start Optimizing Salesforce