Introducing Asana: The Modern Way to Work Together
blog.asana.com
blog.asana.com
I see no feature beyond the basic tasklist features that all PM software has. Not even velocity like Pivotal Tracker.
What is innovative about Asana? The customer doesn't give a shit whether it's done in Luna.
"Asana is beautifully designed. Seems too generic for bug, applicant or project tracking but it's going to be my new To-Do list manager."
But to expand a bit -- I have a hard time seeing this replace specific purpose-driven tools (JIRA, Cerberus, etc.) even though it's gorgeous, functional, and has a cool off-line mode. It's just too generic for me. But for people who aren't coming from one of those products and have nothing today, it's a great way to introduce productivity. I'm surprised they didn't build in an SSO / LDAP kind of integration...
Finally - Salesforce focused on CRM as a use-case before branching out and getting less specific (support, chatter, etc.). Starting out generic requires your users to figure out how to apply it to their life, which I think is the wrong strategy.
It worked for Trello.
It is definitely a success in terms of awareness in our community.
Anyone seriously use both tools & have an idea of their comparative strengths and weaknesses?
Hard to explain why. It almost feels like an elitist snub, or something.
With this one, I didn't really understand what the product does. The repetition of "this is not micromanagement hell; instead you'll have more time to do the really fun stuff" in the video made me suspicious.
But hey, maybe that's just the over-literal cynical nerd in me who wasn't touched by the "emotional" impact of the video.
1) doesn't appear to support external users. I can't seem to give a client access so they can comment on tasks, answer my questions or track my progress. All people you invite to a team appear to have unfettered access to all things.
2) no spec/pricing sheet on what's included. blog says "is and will remain free for teams with up to 30 members", but how much will it cost afterwards? Also, for the free plan, how many attachments can I add? What's the max size of an attachment? I don't want to invest my time into a new thing and then hit some invisible limit. (Yes, I've tried to look in the support/help faqs)
3) import/export. will you make it easier for me to move in from my current system? once I'm in the system am I locked in?
I'm currently using Apollohq, and it's been doing pretty well. It has all the features I mentioned above, as well as time tracking. Only thing is it costs money (a bit too much for my small team) and they've been slow to get a phone-friendly version. The interface has also slowed down since the beta, but for the time being I'm overlooking it because I expect growing pains.
The problem we're having with Trello is that we can't get a good view across all projects. Trello requires me, as a manager, to constantly hop in and out of projects. I hope they can offer something to get a higher view. I'd love to use Trello more.
Take advantage of keyboard shortcuts, it's what makes Asana feel so quick.
Asana lets you do things your own way (ie. it doesn't dictate a project management style), but a little structure is useful. Read their 'Best Practices:' http://help.asana.com/customer/portal/articles/84980-best-pr...
In Trello, changing from one state to another is a matter of drag and dropping to the next list. How would you do that in Asana?
2. Use tags instead, and use the tag filtering options.
For example I tried remember the milk but it immediately crippled itself with the iPhone sync. Not like they're billionaires either.
And their strategy includes leaving out a massive proportion of users by making IE a no go area.
What are their prices? I can't find the damn things anywhere. Am I going to get a £1000 bill when I reach 30 users?
They've a long way to go.
Product is great BTW, if a little programmer centric with the shortcut obsession, just pointing out great product doesn't mean great profits.
BUT - there are good options available to them.
Once you have more than 30 people using it, if it jumps to say $5/person/month it is over $10000/year for the next 30 users.
There's the Yammer model: Free to use, until you want things like security controls (think "who sees which task"), customization ("match your company color scheme") and integration ("single sign on, Salesforce integration etc etc")
The truth is though that this is a feature for an enterprise software company. It makes perfect sense for someone like BMC, Citrix, VMWare/EMC, or even Atlassian (if they could afford them?) to buy them out to fill holes in their offerings. Their sales channels can push an enterprise version to existing customers and then is makes sense for everyone involved.
They need more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode#Distributed_issue_trac...
Our organization (Kiip.me) has been using Asana for a couple months now. We've tried a variety of tools for task management and project planning: Basecamp, GitHub issues, Pivotal. With each of these tools, up until Asana, we didn't find it helped our team very much.
Asana has changed all that. Our whole team, including BD/Sales, have been using Asana to coordinate various tasks. The biggest thing: Asana is _fast_. It doesn't get in your way! You can tab over and add a task in less than the time it takes to even load the tasks page on something like BaseCamp. Some additional features that make it great:
* Followers - You can add followers to a task if you want other people involved. This emails them and notifies them of the task.
* Comments - Comment streams are very nice. They provide a nice timeline of activities happening on a task.
* Keyboard shortcuts - I never touch the mouse in Asana. Ever. And this increases productivity by tons. You can fly around multiple projects, tasks, etc in seconds.
So there is some reasoning behind our use of Asana, here are some reasons we didn't like other options:
* BaseCamp - Had all the features we wanted, but it got in the way too much. No keyboard shortcuts, slow page loads, etc. Taking 30 seconds to add a task == too slow.
* GitHub issues - All the issues are on each separate repo. It is difficult to quickly navigate between them and to get other people in the company to look at them.
* Pivotal - The UI was completely non-intuitive to us and didn't jive with the way we wanted to work. We didn't want a tool that forced us to work with IT, we wanted a tool to work with US.
That being said, I wish there were some other features that Asana would implement:
* Dependent tasks - It is not possible right now to have a hierarchy of tasks towards various goals. This makes it weird to have one big task that is like "Ship the whole product v1" then have a ton of little tasks that are related but not obviously so.
* Multiple assignees - There are some tasks that just make sense to have multiple assignees.
Hope that helps.
Mitchell
The feature I miss more is the possibility to assign tasks to multiple team members. I'd also love to see a native iOS application. Asana team recently released a mobile-compatible version of the site that works great but I'd still prefer a native app.
I have also tried out Trello but it has a "toysh" feeling to it and Asana just has more features.
> I'm not going to summarize the good and bad aspects
> because the previous comment does it egregiously.
It's more akin to a web based collaborative version of Things http://culturedcode.com/things/ and it does this job very well. The keyboard shortcuts help you to quickly jot stuff down, throw it into a project or assign it to someone else. Anyone can leave a comment on an item or take ownership of someone eles's to-do that's been added to a project. Plus there's a personal section so you can keep the Milk reminders away from your team's projects.
Two things I'm excited about.
a) I've read somewhere that Asana wants to be the platform and if our workspace needed a custom time logging application we could build / buy this functionality and have it built into our workspace.
b) Because of the real time nature of comments / assignments the email notifications are sometimes a bit slow, it would be great to have an Jabber / iChat interface to receive and reply to incoming comments and to-dos.
What's the status on Lunascript?
(Lunascript was a DSL we were initially writing for coding against Luna; we ended up deciding that wasn't worth optimizing and going with a JS syntax instead)
Any feature comparison?
Very lean. Shortcuts. Mobile Html version.
I really like it a lot.
I'm bored at work and I'm very impatient.