TaskRay has updated its project management and customer onboarding solution enabling customers to collaborate better with customers and partners. As companies emerge from the pandemic, lines between organisations are becoming increasingly blurred with remote work.
With project teams no longer working from a single office, there is little difference between different team members working from home regardless of whether they are employees, customers or partners. The latest update from TaskRay helps organisations use their solution regardless of who they work for. External task ownership and public dashboards are two significant new features that help collaboration between project stakeholders.
Mike Tetlow, CTO at TaskRay, commented: “Maintaining transparent and consistent collaboration between internal teams and external stakeholders is critical to driving successful post-sale experiences. We are thrilled to deliver these new capabilities that enable TaskRay users to foster collaboration and build a foundation of trust with their customers.”
External task ownership
It is now possible to allocate external team members as secondary task owners. It allows non-Salesforce or TaskRay users to own and complete work within the project. External owners are notified of their tasks via email, which includes a link to take them into the task, view details, collaborate and mark the project as complete. The limitation is that they must fully complete the task, although they can add a comment as they do so.
Project managers can allocate tasks, set up external task owners with their email and set the frequency of reminder emails, with the option to send daily and weekly reminders. This feature is available in the Standard and Premium options of TaskRay.
This feature will enable customers to ensure that the wider project team is better engaged and remove some of the project managers’ administration onus. Partners and customers no longer need to use their task and project management solutions to mirror their supplier’s TaskRay project management plan, freeing up more time to do the work.
External users can use the task assignment email to ask questions or share files with the internal users. Enabling the feature requires the allocation of a single TaskRay license, not one per external user.
Public Dashboards
The new dashboard enables project managers to share information about the wider project, not just individual tasks. The new Public Dashboards include:
- The current project Gantt chart
- Snapshot view of project insights, which includes tasks statuses and an indication of how complete the project is
- Milestones
- Tasks at risk
- Project notes
- A view of external task ownership and their statuses.
Administrators can customise the public dashboard by adding a company logo and brand colour. They can also customise the views to determine which task fields are viewed. What isn’t clear is whether all external tasks are viewed by everyone or just those of the viewing party. It is possible to give access to external users for all projects or just for specific projects. Administrators can set whether all TaskRay users can set projects to public viewing, and it is also possible to designate some tasks as internal only.
Other new features
TaskRay has added new Flow templates with this release.
- Customer Onboarding Kick-off Flow
- Customer Onboarding Completion Flow
These flows are available out of the box, and Administrators can customise them. Administrators can also modify and use the ‘save as’ feature to create new flows that override the original one.
- External Owner Completion Flow
- Customer Onboarding Feedback Flow
Other updates include enhancement to the Flux Planner UI. This includes redesigned filters and a page processing message when filters take time to process. The Flux Planner also automatically resizes information when using a date range filter. Information on other minor improvements and bug fixes are available in the release notes.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
The new features that TaskRay has introduced extend the solution beyond the customer organisation. For the cost of a single license, customers will increase efficiency while maintaining some privacy and enhancing the customer experience.
For TaskRay, this also provides the opportunity to demonstrate the solution to a wider audience. It also provides a potential selling opportunity for TaskRay for those clients of customers still using spreadsheets to manage projects.
