Kantata has unveiled the Spring 23 release of Kantata OX. The release has several exciting new components and enhancements to some existing ones. Amongst the new features are Kantata Boards, Insights Dynamic Dashboards, Kantata Connect and enhancements to resource scheduling.
Of these, Kantata Boards are the most intriguing and offer customers and prospects a means of consolidating some of the applications in use within their organisation. Kantata boards can potentially become a complete replacement for Trello or Asana, offering a work management solution in addition to the strong resource management and PSA features that Kantata OX already has.
Jared Haleck, Chief Product Officer, Kantata, commented, “PSOs are unique from other organizations as they rely on the performance of their employees and contractors to keep clients happy and the business thriving. The new capabilities released are purpose-built to improve project organization and transparency, streamline reporting processes, and empower the company to curate their perfect platform.”
Kantata Boards
Kantata Boards enable internal contributors to work more closely with project managers and vice versa. In addition to tasks within a project, Kantata OX now allows project managers to create “to-do jobs” for internal contributors to interact with on the new boards.
These are similar to Kanban boards, with PMs able to define the different swimlanes so that internal contributors can move tasks along as they progress. It effectively replicates what some task management solutions do, but within the project for the project managers to track.
Enterprise asked Gerald Dalisay, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Kantata, whether these to-do jobs integrate with other solutions. Dalisay replied, “None at the moment. The play when we developed this was, first and foremost, create that collaborative experience within Katana and then start looking at what other third-party solutions we have that make sense to integrate into this particular functionality?”
The Boards address a need that Kantata saw and heard from clients, that project managers were using other tools to collaborate with colleagues, especially around items that were not strictly related to the project but were important for its completion. So will this look to replace Trello?
Nick Coughlin, Product Marketing & Growth Strategy at Kantata, replied, “Yes, eventually this is something where we envision customers and particularly those individual contributors, being able to do those things they would typically do and in Trello, and other task management solutions within Kantata. So potentially for some customers today, our functionality, although it’s earlier, will be able to replace those other tools and long term, our vision is to replace those other tools.”
This moves Kantata OX into direct competition with those tools. It will have considered other integrations, such as Jira for example. Luckily Kantata has released something that will make that easier.
Kantata Connect
This is the next generation of Mavenlink M-Bridge. Rather than upgrade that product and the APIs that Kantata built, they added a completely new integration engine to the platform. Over time they will extend it using both the integrations to Salesforce that Kantata SX has and those from Mavenlink M-Bridge.
The advantage is that Kantata now has an integration and automation tool with huge promise out of the box. It will allow customers to connect their Kantata OX platform to hundred of different software solutions. Dalisay explained how Kantata will use this to differentiate its PSA, noting, “What we’ve done here at Kantata is verticalized it and focus on the workflows that are key to a PSO.”
Kantata Connect will become available in May to customers.
Insights Dynamics Dashboards
Insights Dynamics Dashboards are available in addition to the Kantata Insights classic dashboard. They are more user-friendly and enable novice report builders to create reports and interactions in a user-friendly way.
The features include new report types such as heat mapping, trend analysis and scatter plots. It is also possible for users to create notifications on KPI thresholds within the dashboards that will send an alert if the budget is exceeded, for example. Currently, the email setting is only for the current user. Will Kantata enable project managers to create notifications that can be sent to other stakeholders or groups of stakeholders?
Resource Scheduling
Kantata OX already has a very strong resource management capability. This update increases the flexibility it offers organisations, possibly attracting a wider set of PSO organisations than before. Hitherto, Kantata has focused on the resource Manager’s experience. However, many firms still rely on project managers for resource management tasks. This update enables project managers to access resource manager functionality within the project view. It has also created a resource page that is more intuitive and usable for both personas.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Kantata OX regularly updates its software but has held back its major updates for this release. Spring 23 does not disappoint and holds huge potential to meet the requirements of PSOs of all types. The features will be generally available in May, with Kantata Boards and especially Kantata Connect seeing further improvements in the months ahead.
Kantata offers two solutions, and Kantata SX will soon unveil its Summer 23 release. It is further strengthening its position as a vendor that offers solutions that are purpose-built and streamlined for the professional services industry.
