I work a lot with other people on projects.
Unfortunately this is not supported within Omnifocus.
Within the standard app of Apple’s Reminders, they have a great method to share Task-lists (or what would be called Projects in Omnifocus). I find this a great solution. And I really hope that the Omni group would integrate this kind of feature in the upcoming versions.
PS Please don’t make me buy a 3.0 for this. ( I already bought 1.0 and 2.0,… it is getting ridiculously expensive).
Please, people, if you support this feature, respond on this topic, so that Omni will see how great this feature would be! :)
Sharing OmniFocus projects would be nice. But it will work only if other people are using OmniFocus.
Apple Reminders is included automatically as part of iOS. This means that everyone has Apple Reminders whether they wanted it or not.
Many of my friends use other task managers. This would make it harder to share. For cases like this, I just print a PDF of my project and e-mail it to them.
@ JackKu Shared projects or not is an ongoing discussion. I don´t feel that a collaborate task manager is what Omni group promise for OF and In my case I would worry that the function of shared projects would interfere with the stability of being a personal task manager. This is of course only my opinion so there´ s no right and wrong here, we see how it develop :)
But while waiting for that I would like to recommend Asana that I find is more suited shared projects. For smaller things that´s convenient to share in my household (and that´s not big projects) like shoppinglists, I use reminders and share through iCloud.
@ Wilsong PDF:s is a great idea. Is there any way for your friends different task managers to import .opml? If so Curt Cliftons script could also be an easy way as well.
Usually I go into context-perspective and choose the person that I want to remind about waiting tasks, and export all these tasks as .opml, then can that person import it in OF/OO or other programs that support the format.
I think many of my colleagues wouldn’t know what opml is. Giving them instructions on how to import will be rocket science to them - way above their pay grade to even care. That’s why I just use pdf. Simple enough for them to print out and report back to each other.
In another office I previously worked at, Asana was a perfect solution.
I also kept my collaborative projects in Asana and my personal stuff in omnifocus.
A little off-topic, but are you a Clarify user? I living in the same landscape as you are describing, and using Clarify for small tutorials for everything helps me all the time. Anyway, thank you for the suggestion with pdf:s.
I am just using Mac OS X built-in print screen. I select from menu bar File > Print. There is a popup menu at the bottom left corner of print screen to print to PDF or open in Preview.
I print out the list, write a deadline, sit down with the person to see if they have the right tools, right skill set, and time available. We go over the next actions list to see if the next actions are written clearly. Then we change whatever needs to be changed (forgot to add intermediate steps or need to get the proper tools and equipment). I followup at the mid-way point to see how things are going and tweak again if needed. Then hopefully try to get the task list done by the deadline.
This is a problem but only for certain contexts. Indeed none of my colleagues use OmniFocus (in fact, most are horrendous with respect to task management), but my partner does. My partner and I would benefit a great deal by being able to share a project, for example. We currently use OmniFocus for our work and other personal task management related needs, and a second todo application for our shared obligations, which is fine in some respects, but it would be nice to be able to consolidate these things into OmniFocus.
That being said, the lack of collaboration isn’t exactly a deal breaker in my opinion, but it would be a GREAT addition.
If I am focusing on just one particular project I would expect/hope that I would only export what is in view rather than the entire database. I would like to pass off some OmniFocus projects to other OF users. Bummer. I’ve been hoping for this since day 1.
There are a lot of things I would ‘tweak’ about OF, to suit me and help my workflow. The BIGGEST easily would be to add a sharing feature like you can do in a lot of task managers nowadays, like Asana & ToDoist. I would not be surprised if big companies began considering OF for their employee delegation and to help them manage their various jobs if you added this feature.
I have 2 businesses. So this feature would be a MASSIVE help for me also OF.
I am firmly against OF becoming another collaboration app. There are plenty of alternatives if thats what you need. It is actually nice to have an app focussing on individuals and doing it very well, not all of us need to collaborate or share, anyway is that not one of the features of Omniplan?
Perhaps not everyone wants to pay for collaboration, if you do as I say you are well served already by Basecamp, Omniplan, Asana etc etc etc. I would also guess that this feature would require a subscription model and syncing to be completely rewritten (again) for it to be anywhere near viable.
An alternative for developing an OF service where you can share projects with others, would be to make it easier for OF to talk with the popular services like Trello, Asana and Basecamp.
Since I work in many projects in different plattforms that would be a huge help and I rather see a collaboration instead of a new path of the program
The most obvious solution is to put back what you take ;-)
OF is able to import Reminders’ tasks. It would be great if OF would integrate w/ Reminders (other Apps do this; eg Curio)). An OF project or subproject would sync w/ a Reminders List.
I too strongly feel that the possibility to share projects with others is a vital feature missing. Me and my wife would really benefit from sharing some of the to do @home or about the kids stuff and see the progress the other made on any of those projects. Like plants have already been watered this week or identified two possible routes for that hiking trip together.
We’d really appreciate that feature!
It appears that the TaskPaper format is gaining favour in certain circles. Now that OmniFocus 2 has the ability to copy and paste as TaskPaper format, maybe this would be an option if the other task management apps use this file format?
It is basically a text file with keywords or tags used to indicate fields such as due, task title, etc.
There are probably quite a few apps for Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android that can import TaskPaper format or to be able to use it directly. I’m not currently interested in this but I’m sure a Google search for those of you that might need to share projects would yield results for others who don’t want to use OmniFocus. Even if they don’t use a task management app, the text file is human-readable and can be viewed in any text editor or word processor.
