Sharing Tasks with Co-Workers or Teams

Just got back to the office. I did a test. I switched to one of my custom perspectives and was able to export tasks that were shown in this perspective only.

You can probably create a custom perspective that shows a particular context or perspective and use that as your export template.

FYI just got a response from OG on the Sharing request;

Hi Peter,
Thanks for writing. As you might imagine, we’ve got an existing feature request for collaboration support. I’ll add your vote and feedback, so the rest of the team will know you’d like to see it too.

Best regards,
Theo W.
Support
Omni Group

Please note that OG seems to be using some kind of “voting system” (amongst other things surely) to determine which OF2 feature to develop next. So please send in your vote now if you would like to see the OF2 Sharing feature any time soon.

Why not use the mail drop system to just forward a task to your co-worker via the sharing tab? That at least works for small-scale (home) situations, and would technically scale to an office.

Very disappointed to read your plans for 2015 and find no plan to add some type of sharing or collaboration feature to OmniFocus. This seems an easy decision, even if it’s the ability to email a projects tasks to co-workers. I’m disappointed that collaboration and sharing wasn’t mentioned in your 2015 plans, indicating that you’ve decided not to go that direction, or it’s not a priority.

Kevin Carlisle

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The hard part of collaboration is that you will also have to get your colleagues to buy into OmniFocus. It won’t be an easy sell. Will you be able to get others to using OmniFocus when they already have their own preferred task manager? I know my wife prefers just using Apple Reminders and doesn’t want to learn OmniFocus. I have other colleagues who are using Things or Wunderlist. I just e-mail my task request and I create a follow-up task to check on their work progress. It is their responsibility to put the e-mailed task into their own task manager. It’s their responsibility to take care of the delegated task. Why worry about what other people are using for a task manager? You can only take care of your end.

In one company, I was told to use Asana. It is fair as a personal task manager and better suited for sharing projects. In another company, we were told to use Outlook. I just buckled down and got used to doing it the Outlook way.

I think an app like OmniPlan is better suited for collaborative efforts. The project status can be updated to reflect current conditions. That’s a better program for collaborative effort.

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My take is that they should be working on integration with other services that are specifically built for collaboration (Basecamp, Asana, …). The UI is clearly not built for this, other people may want to use other tools, they may not have OS X. At the end of the day, OF is just an interface in front of a database. Write functionality that can sync my OF projects with Asana et al, and I’ll be happy…

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There might have to become an industry-wide standard that would have to be adopted. I remember OPML was used as a way to transfer outline type documents from one program to another. The vCard is a standard used to send contact information. maybe there should be some kind of project-based or task-based format that would help to make this a possibility. I’m guessing that it will be up to the individual companies to figure out how to import things that don’t have an equivalent. You’d probably need to OmniFocus contexts to tags. Not every task manager has defer/start dates but they will most likely have due dates. So many things to consider when trying to create an industry-wide standard.

Right now, the only way my team does shared tasks is to use Basecamp. I don’t see how Omnifocus will work for collaborative efforts.

Hi,

I am new to OmniFocus. Here’s what I would like to do: I have a small team with loads of concurrent project running, the projects have certain milestones that are allocated to my team colleagues. What is the best way of modelling this in OmniFocus? What is important to me is to see where I stand with
(1) my personal deliverables
(2) the overall team deliverables
(3) the deliverables allocated to a specific team member

Thanks for sharing an insight or two,
Mercator

Hi there! I am a long time user of Omnifocus and I LOVE the app!

It helped me to gain more focus and get more done in less time. Because of that, my company grew and slowly I formed a team around me.

But here is the crux. I have to use third-party apps to be able to work together with lists etc. with my team. And I need to manually get all that info into my personal Omnifocus. That is a pain in the **s. ;)

I am now thinking of moving away from Omnifocus and use a different app. Not because I don’t like it, but just because it cannot handle teams.

I red somewhere that the Omni Group will work on team-collaberation for Omnifocus? Is there anyone of the company that can confirm this? And what is the roadmap to that? When will it be available?

Thanks,

Collin

I’ve heard from a few podcasts that many folks have used OmniFocus for their personal projects and tasks and keep it separated from their professional life which is managed by other team-oriented projects.

In the past, I’ve used Asana to collaborate with others in a team-based situation. The projects and tasks in Asana are kept away from my private stuff (groceries, home projects, shopping lists) which is kept in OmniFocus.

Maybe OmniFocus 2.5 or OmniFocus 3 will have team-based collaboration? I guess Omnigroup offers OmniPlan for that kind of stuff…

thank you for your reply, but that’s not my question!

Well, using two apps is just lame imho! And totally not helping you getting things done. Anyway I know many apps that do teams. The question was about OmniFocus…

the short answer is no. OmniFOcus does not do teams. It’s not necessarily lame to have two different apps. OmniFocus is geared towards individual users. I think I read somewhere in these forums that some users have set up Reminders to forward tasks to other folks.

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The iCalendar file format specifies a “TODO” item type. Unfortunately, it’s pretty limited in what properties can be specified.

Easy solution. Buy another product

Like all of you I like the app and it’s my app of choice but in this modern we need collaborative tools. I use an iPhone ipad, 2 Mac book and an iPad and the payment for each is a it rich. Anyway, unless omnifocus listen the customers, the customers are ripe for the picking on other that will,listen

Sadly I’m nearing the point of probably being forced onto another platform. We’re looking at Wunderlist right now since they’ve added collaboration, which is more important than the features it’s missing compared to OmniFocus. I’ve been using OmniFocus for 5 years and always held out hope that it would be consolidated with OmniPlan into a single product with collaborative capabilities. It’s so disappointing that it’s 2015 and Focus is still totally siloed while every other platform has embraced collaboration.

Just adding my voice to this. IMO Omnifocus is the best time management app, but hugely let down by the lack of collaboration.

I was somewhat disappointed when I found that there was not a hard-baked collaborative system, but here’s what we came up with.

We are a small law firm. Four users.

Bought licenses for each user. Yes, pricey, but given the time suck of what we were using before (spreadsheets and MS Word docs) well worth it.

Projects = cases or matters. I tried to use folders for clients and then nestle projects inside, but found the sorting system didn’t return the results in the way we wanted.

What I wanted was the ability to print out one report that lists every project with upcoming dates, and then another with due dates for all projects arranged sequentially. (We still use paper for our group meetings.) Today, tomorrow, next week, etc. When we used folders, OF didn’t recognize the projects by folder, but put them in as independent projects. So instead of showing older "Smith, Joe: and then “Smith v. Wesson,” the upper layer folder seems to have been disregarded in the arrangement. So it just showed “Smith v. Wesson” as a project without a home. Sometimes on a transactional deal, the client’s name may not be in the matter name. E.g., “New Lease Transaction.” Not a big deal as long as a client’s name is in the project name, but it doesn’t work otherwise.

No biggie. Now we just name projects “Client: Matter” and all is good. E.g., “Smith: New Lease Transaction.” That works just fine.

Created contexts for each user. E.g., Bob to do. So now every action has a project (or case) and a context that each user can go to to see what is on their list. Also using a perspective called “Due” so everyone can see at a glance what the office has to take care of in the coming days/weeks/months.

Like any system, it’s GIGO, so it’s only as effective as the people working on things are.

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Collaboration is a must. I really hope to see OmniFocus add teams.

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Yes we switched to flow for the same reason after being a long term user of omnifocus, it really is needed today if you are using it for business