CRM and project management are two of the biggest categories in business software. In fact, if you checked with Capterra, you’d find these the first and second most expensive categories to advertise in. This is why Keystroke is so excited to announce the next release of QuickTasks (scheduled for June 15th) because it’s the first on-premise product to wed these two business productivity categories together.

To date, QuickTasks (QT) has been used as task management solution that integrated with Act! via the WebAPI, K-API, and the SDK. This integration allowed users to export tasks from QT to Act!, and link them for follow-up purposes. Tasks could be assigned to the same user, or others, and then easily tracked in both Act! and QT.

While Act! is a multi-user product, allowing tasks from QT to be assigned to one or more users, QuickTasks itself was a single user product. We knew if we were to incorporate QT into project management, we’d have to either completely rewrite QuickTasks, or tightly integrate it into a powerful PM product that could support multi-users, Gantt charts, Goals, reporting, and more.

Considering we already owned Webplanner.com, an online project management solution, the decision was easy. Why not integrate these two programs together, and enable the online collaboration and planning tools we need, while remaining tightly integrated with Act! CRM.

And that’s what we’ve done (learn more about Webplanner by visiting www.Webplanner.com).

Existing QuickTask users will continue to use the product as a task management tool, but those wishing to collaborate with others can now export one of more tasks from within QuickTasks to Webplanner, and either create new projects or link them to existing ones. The key here is the tasks are “linked”, meaning if they’re edited or cleared in one program, they get updated in the another.

Why tie them together?

The simple truth is in business and life, we collaborate with people both inside and outside our CRM user group, and to effectively work with everyone, we needed an online planning tool that was tightly integrated, easy-to-use, supported free collaborators, and worked on all platforms – PC’s Mac, and mobile devices.

Webplanner.com checked all the boxes.

To better support this integration, though, we had to make some significant changes to QuickTasks and Webplanner.

• The first was we added “costs” and “duration” fields to QuickTasks so reporting and scheduling data could be better represented in Webplanner.com.
• The second, and more significant change, was the addition of “Contact” support, whereby a select “Group” of Act! Contacts could be downloaded into QuickTasks - like they are done currently with our mobile solution - Handheld Contact. By adding contacts to QuickTasks, tasks were no longer limited to the Act! users.
• The third was allowing Webplanner to support the same downloading of the Act! contacts

By adding Act! contacts to QuickTasks and Webplanner, tasks could include anyone from your CRM. Simply create a task, link it to a contact, export it to Webplanner, convert that contact to an "assignee" and then invite them to join your online project a collaborator. It's that easy, and joining an online Webplanner project is free for your invitees.

That's the power of combining these three programs together. Generate tasks at the speed of thought with QuickTasks. Convert these tasks quickly to a project with Webplanner, and then engage & collaborate with your contacts from Act!.  Get more done with more people using QuickTasks for Act!.

The Nitty Gritty (here's how these programs work together):