Some of the features of otak seemed useful, but not useful enough, so I emailed the author (as his website invites), only to discover that the product has been inactive for some time, with the author off on other things.
The failing of task managers, to my mind; and I refer mainly to my experience of Microsoft Outlook, is the very restricted view of what a 'task' is.
If the task is something like 'get some milk', or, 'post letters today', then they are probably fine; but for business use, its useless. Imagine a task 'take over Extrata'. Useless.
A task manager would become useful to me if it had features such as:
- Place tasks in groups (otak does this), and see what other tasks are in the group, with their assignees
- Sequence tasks; not as a fully fledged project scheduler, but simply to be able to relate a group of tasks, and ensure that when one goes late, the others' start or finish dates are adjusted
- Set task durations or lead times (or both): Outlook seems to think that a due date is sufficient, but when a 5 week task pops up on the due date, one would be at a loss to do it (maybe this means I need shorter tasks, but grouped, or linked)
- Link tasks to people (so one can see who has what tasks.
- Identify when a task's advancement awaits work by someone else (a 'contact')
- Attach documents to tasks by file location
- Have a calendar view of tasks
- Show dependencies: other tasks or people's work that is dependent on this task, and other activity upon which the task itself depends, with capability to track the 'input' tasks.
