Monday 31 December 2012

Do.com Project management overview

00:30

In my previous blog post I introduced the pros and cons of DO.com. Go ahead and read it, and come back to this blog where I explore how to use DO.com via a sample project.
How do I start?
Lets walkthrough a basic project / task management and try to use our imagination as to see what we can use this platform for.
-          First visit https://do.com/ and sign up for your personal do.com account, this is where we manage our projects
 and tasks with the specified group of people
-          There are two ways of signing up, you can sign up with your personal ID or use your Google Apps ID if you have one.
You’ll see the following screen 
Do.com Home page

 You’ll notice on the left hand side there are a couple of things that look interesting
·         Groups – Your group is the people you work with and the projects, tasks and notes you work on together. To share projects, tasks and notes with someone, they must be in your group. You can create multiple groups by clicking the ‘+’ sign on the bottom left hand corner
·         Tasks -  This is a list of your tasks or your groups task and you can filter them based on pre-defined filters like “Completed task”, “My Tasks” etc or create your own custom filter
·         Projects – This is the wrapper for all your tasks; projects are meant to reduce clutter and organize tasks logically. When you share a project among your team they can access all the tasks within the project.
·         Notes – this is like a sandbox of notes and ideas each person wants to track, and can evolve into a task or attached to a task.


Step 1: Create a project
During your 1st login you might have created a project and some dummy tasks. If you skipped those steps, then create a new project, by clicking on the project and ”create new project”
Do.com Create project

 Enter the
·         Project Name
·         template if you have a predefined group of people you often share task/projects with
·         dead line of the project
·          description
Once the project is created, we get a detail UI where more tasks can be created. But before that, a quick note about the project tabs
Do.com Tasks screen

There are 3 tabs:
1)      Tasks shows a list of tasks for current project, you can create new tasks, Subscribe to the list on your calendar, or create a new section to organize the tasks for logical separation.
2)      Activity, This tab reminds me of chatter.com feed, this acts as a similar news feed for the project and changes to the list of tasks
3)      Attachments, obvious enough, is a tab to keep track of the attachments your members posted in the project
Step 2: Create tasks
Now that we have a project, we need to create some Tasks. Navigate to Tasks and click on create Task button
Do.com Header

The creation page collects some basic info
Do.com users may invite colleagues, friends and family to tasks regardless of whether those contacts are Do.com users. Invite your members and if he/she is already invited, name is available to select on the dropdown. I’m not going into the details and will leave it to your imagination to fill out the rest of the task details
Do.com Screen

Things to Note:
·          Tasks can be recurring and can be assigned to multiple people.
·         Once assigned the member gets a notification by email, and can choose to accept it.
·         Once task is completed the member can mark it as completed from either the dashboard, his email or from the mobile
·         The dashboard gives a high level overview of the ongoing/completed projects and tasks.
I hope I have whetted your appetite for DO.com with this blog. The best feature of DO.com is its ability to integrate intimately with salesforce.com.