Mediaboss Marketing

Igloo's enterprise social networking suite now has task management features, the latest ESN vendor to make such a move.

Igloo's task management implementation takes three main forms.

The first is team tasks, where a workgroup can assign, monitor and collaborate on the steps and actions needed to complete a project. The second way in which tasks can be assigned and managed within Igloo is by appending them directly to content so that, for example, collaborators can annotate a document with to-do items needed for its completion. Tasks can also be added to calendar items, discussion forum entries, files and other types of content.

Finally, Igloo has added a personal task management feature, so that individuals can manage their to-dos without necessarily making them public, unless they choose to share those lists with others.

"Task management is the largest single feature capability we've introduced since social analytics a while back," said Andrew Dixon, Igloo's vice president of marketing and operations.

In all instances, task items can be shared and commented on, and their activity tracked via stream notifications. They can be assigned deadlines, priorities, access permissions, categories and level of urgency. All tasks can have subtasks.

Because tasks will be scattered among team lists, documents and personal lists, Igloo also created a central dashboard where all these action items can be viewed in a single place and sorted and filtered via several criteria, such as urgency, due date, type and the like.

Principles guiding the task management implementation were to make it simple and intuitive to use, and to have it be organically integrated with the rest of the suite, as opposed to having a separate tool for it, according to Michael Mackuliak [cq], an Igloo technical product manager.

ESN software, often described as "Facebook for the workplace," is designed to help coworkers collaborate and communicate better via ad hoc, spontaneous interactions, but it's not good for keeping structured track of to-dos and deadlines.

Consequently, many ESN software makers, including Jive and Tibco's Tibbr, have added social task management (STM) features to their suites. These STM tools help business managers plan projects and let employees track their work tasks.

Continued here:
Igloo adds task management to enterprise social suite