We caught wind of ActionThis a few weeks back, prior to the site launch. See here for our initial write Now that the site has gone live, I was able to test it out and give it a whirl. You may remember that ActionThis is a task-management system for individuals and teams. With the space crowding, and Basecamp having a significant stronghold in this area, I spent the majority of my exploration time looking for differentiating factors to see how ActionThis could be used for highly defined and practical purposes that live up to its mantra: helping you actually execute those pesky items on your task list.
So how does ActionThis stack up? Well, it’s biggest point of differentiation so far is the integration it has with your Outlook client, for better use of your existing email. I’d like to see this level of integration offered with regular email clients, enabling users to send, assign and respond to tasks via email as well. For better management of projects, ActionThis provides a holistic view of the group’s collaborative efforts, with a few different perspectives to choose from. Directly from your Dashboard, you can see at a glance how you’re doing, how your team members are doing, and how your company is doing. Are there tasks overdue? How is the overall flow of your various projects?
For more details on team and individual progress, you can see an interactive time line of all the tasks for a particular project. View these in a workload report or a status report, both of which can be saved and emailed. Why not exported to a spreadsheet as well? Building out the workload report could be particularly helpful for project managers, as certain parameters could be indicated for better management of team members and the assignments for which they’re responsible.
What I do like about ActionThis is the easy way in which team members can communicate with each other, through private messages and the Bounce Back feature, which offers users an opportunity to ask for further details regarding an action item. The level of private and public communication options still enable teams to work together, but also allow for individuals to communicate directly with project managers on a more personal level.
As with Basecamp, ActionThis is a paid service, though there is a free option for limited use of its services. So as more social networks add group functionality, more tools create automatic services with email integration, and communities like Huddle start with social features and build more task management tools from there, it will be interesting to see how ActionThis will make itself stand out from the crowd. More iCal and mobile integration would move it further in the right direction, as would some automated tools for scheduling, setting limits on particular projects, and individual assigning of tasks to team members.
As some of these other automated and email-integrated tools often offer one feature for one aspect of a project, there’s still quite a gap between services like Ikordo and ActionThis. Nevertheless, the gap is closing and the more integrated your service is with existing networks and applications, the easier it is for people to use and connect with each other around your projects. See here for more tools for organizing tasks.
Editor’s note: apologies to ActionThis for jumping the embargo on this: it’s already out on a number of sites.
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