Still no collaboration in OmniFocus? It's 2023, guys!

In my organisation, we’ve had to switch to GTD lists in GoogleDocs, and OmniFocus is now redundant for me.

As a long-time user (since Kinkless days), I long for the day when OmniFocus will allow me and my team to collaborate and track projects and work progress using its great GTD structure and features.

Until then, we’ve had to knock up an approximation of the OmniFocus structure in GoogleDocs, to allow a shared overview of project progress and for team task allocation across multiple projects.

Please, stop with the (to me) pointless but, I’m sure, very fun to create bells and whistles, and get the focus back onto core functionality. Many of us are working online and collaboratively, these days. Please don’t ignore this reality.

Thanks.

2 Likes

No we aren’t some are and some work alone. Generalities rarely translate to facts.

3 Likes

Corrected.

While collaboration would be nice, many people (me included) would see little value in this. So I can’t see this as being the highest priority.

It was discussed briefly by @kcase in the latest Omni Show episode. (In the context of the 2023 plan.)

I’m glad that Omnifocus is designed for individual use, e.g. as part of Getting Things Done, and not for shared use in the workplace in companies.
As a former software developer, I imagine what would happen if the Omnigroup converted Omnifocus into a multi-user system: 😩😩😩
Here is a small selection: Masses of demands for rights management to be set up for access to data, extension for use with Scrum, addition of project cost planning, working time management and so on …
Maybe you should use Omniplan and not Omnifocus.

Tomorrow I will call my bike shop and make it clear that we are in 2023 and they still have not supplied my mountain bike with an outboard motor for sea use. 😆

7 Likes

I sanity checked what I said with Dr Packer and she said she wouldn’t use it apart from giving me tasks to do. :-)

I then pointed out she could already email them in - which she was unaware of.

I suspect many households are like mine.

2 Likes

Respectfully, please for the love of god “no”. I want my Omnifocus private and encrypted, and I don’t want a bunch of collaborative features bloating up the app and interface.

There’s so many collaborative task management and project management apps already out there. I don’t want this one ruined. There’s…Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Notion, Nozbe, Todoist, Taskade, TickTick, MeisterTask, Ayoa, Basecamp, Monday, ProofHub, Wrike, Ora, etc. Take your pick.

6 Likes

Finally, some clarity!
So OmniFocus is intended for teams of one. There will be no scope for task delegation or shared projects.
Now that is clear, we can move on. I’m afraid all our/my work is collaborative (research, design development and NPD), and OF no longer cuts it. ‘Connected works’, so I will search out a collaborative solution.
Best of luck with everything and goodbye.
A.

There’s a wide gap between “no collaboration” and “full on business apps”.

My wife and I both use OmniFocus to manage our personal tasks. However, there’s often recurring household tasks that either one of us could do. Or, critical reminders like kid’s medication.

So… we use Apple Reminders. It’s OK, but not great. We had incredible recurring sync issues where I would log in on my wife’s laptop once every few months, and iCloud would reset the sync database generating hundreds of duplicate reminders. And of course, there’s no concept of projects or any of the great features in OmniFocus.

Other apps have kept their focus by supporting collaboration for small teams and families. I wish OmniFocus would do the same. Even basics such as:

  • Sending a task to someone else’s Inbox from OmniFocus. We do this currently with the email forwarding setup, but a “Send to…” feature built in would be so handy.
  • Notify another user when a task is complete. Even just a notification of “<person> completed <task>” would be very helpful.
  • Enable showing of Reminders in Forecast (seems doable given OmniFocus can already ingest tasks from Reminders).

The real thing this does is limit adoption by individuals already invested in Apple’s Reminders app, who are probably the most likely users to want to upgrade to something more powerful. All of my other family members use Reminders and shared lists, and wouldn’t consider OmniFocus without that functionality.