Will omnifocus 4 really give us the ability to collaborate with colleagues on whole projects?
I see that they are working on version 4 for mobile devices, but seemingly not for Mac… That makes me think that this major new feature might not be included in the next version. Surely it would need to be worked into the desktop version too…
I’ve been using omnifocus for 4 years now and it’s great. But I’m going to have to change to another system because of the lack of collaboration features.
Before making the change I am trying to see if this feature might be forthcoming… and if it’s forthcoming soon enough for me to wait…
I’ve found that collaboration would only be effective if both you and the recipient are both using OmniFocus. Everyone has a different preference of task managers. The only time the buy-in works is if a company mandates all their employees to use the same app for collaboration purposes.
At my previous office, I used Asana because that was what the project manager wanted. He didn’t care if I used OmniFocus. All he cared was that he saw the task completed in Asana.
I’ve worked it out where I see a task in Asana and I will develop a project in OmniFocus that has the specific next actions for me to use. My boss didn’t care about the various subtasks unless he assigned it to me in Asana. He gave me the scope and the defined expected outcome. I fleshed out that Asana task with my own next actions in OmniFocus that fit my workflow. If I had further questions, I would contact him to get more information and fill out the rest of the project.
OmniFocus is originally built as a personal task manager. Collaboration is on the roadmap but there is no announced ETA yet.
In the Slack channel, there was talks that a lot of work was started on OmniPlan and OmniFocus collaboration features. But that was put on hold while the OF4 TestFlight is the being worked on. Collaboration work will probably resume when OF4 for Mac and iOS is finished. Who knows? We nugget see collaboration in version 4.1 or a bit later?
OF4 for iOS is being developed in the SwiftUI development platform. A lot of the code will be ported fairly easily into the Mac version. The idea was to get the iOS/iPadOS version out first then work on the Mac version with the new refinements for version 4.0. When both platforms have been released, it looks like there will be a good opportunity to see new features such as collaboration released in version 4.1 and beyond.
I have tried using Asana and others but OF is better for the way I work and the way my business works.
I really look forward to collaboration because then I can share a project with a staff member and collaborate on a project/list. At the moment I need to use a workaround with another app… kind of like what you did…
Collaboration I believe is when it arrives going to be limited but it will come. As mentioned I think we will see iOS released first then Mac with the same Swift code base and once parity is established new features can be added across the range. The problem at present is database changes (which collab would need) will likely break older versions and at present we have V4 coming on iOS but V3 on The Mac will be around (at least during the Beta of the Mac version) for a while and introducing changes now would really be a nightmare for compatibility.
