Russell Mix CEO Co-Founder

Attending Web2.0 in San Francisco earlier this month gave us tremendous insight on the progress of SaaS solutions for the work place. The best take-away is that more and more companies are coming to understand the need for availability of cleanly integrated collaboration tools (integrated calendars, wikis, chat threads attached to other services) for knowledge workers. Unfortunately, too many solutions are single applications for use with your email, and with your file storage client, and with your calendar, and with your other tools. This cannot be the future. Too many applications and too much un-integrated data is chaos.

Users recognize that better tools for collaboration must be fully integrated. What has been coined as "hyper-collaboration", a backbone of Qtask's service suite, makes all data available from one central work point. Not only that, but data is entered by the user once, and can then be accessed and handled by all team members, with the transparency and accountability only a single system can provide.

And of course, there is the absolute requirement of mobility. Workers have to be able to work when and where they are, across the entire data set and with access to their teams. Easily.

More tools are coming forward, attempting to integrate two or three or four services. But Qtask proved at Web 2.0 that our integrated solution is the hyper-collaboration answer, ready for you, now. Red Herring may agree too, as Qtask has been chosen as a finalist for the Red Herring 100 for 2009.

What are you waiting for?

Dara Schlissel Writer Los Angeles/New York

Nomadic knowledge worker that I am, movement has always played a big part in my life. Currently I’m based in L.A. and, as I plot my return home to New York City after many (many) years away, I fly from west to east and back again regularly. As you’ve perhaps read in this column’s previous contributions, the ability to work from anywhere is one of Qtask’s best features. Yes, even from your internet-enabled phone! You know already? You’ve been reading :).

But wait - there’s more!

Challenging deadline

It turned out that during the month of March, while we at Qtask were in production on our new website, I had to make a couple of trips. Before I became a writer, I was an interactive media producer - I’ve launched entertainment brands online, and built marketing websites for established blue chip companies.

While I left this role behind to pursue writing, I, of course, still carry that background with me. Which is why, when we started work on the Qtask website redesign, I was amazed, not only by Lisette, Qtask’s very own Wonder Woman, but also by the incredible efficiency of Qtask’s service suite when used properly and entirely to manage the production of... anything.

For Qtask’s website, Lisette created the schedule, as well as a task for each page. Since our site consists of 90 pages, that was 90 tasks! In the design phase, all specs and proposals were posted in Qtask, and team members were given a time frame for feedback. It was easy for me to keep track of what content to create, since all I had to do was look at the form Lisette had created for me, again, in Qtask.

Once a page’s proposed content was finished, I would post the link for the wiki with said content in the appropriate task’s discussion. Comments would go into a box directly in the wiki, so I could read contextually and accordingly integrate - or argue with the review team when necessary ;-).

This process, at first foreign and awkward, soon became anything but. Flipping back and forth between browser tabs made it easy to go through all the steps, and having all the feedback and histories accessible made changes and subsequent approvals simple too. Working on the plane was easy too, since I could just copy/paste wiki and discussion content into Word docs in order to keep churning. Even Lisette’s move from Hollywood to Holland (yes, Holland!) didn’t negatively impact our schedule.

Qtask’s new website launched, to rounds of praise internally and externally, on its due date, March 31st. Congratulations - to us! I, for one, remain impressed by it all.

Oops, time to board...