Kanban Tool

Comentarios: I was recently on the hunt for a task management tool that I could run separate from the commercial products used at my workplace. This would allow me to add in personal tasks and lower level tasks that weren't appropriate to track in the enterprise boards I was a part of. I came upon Kanban Tool and was immediately impressed by the set up options; At a basic level, you already have access to basic, time and event driven Kanban boards, as well as several types of team boards for collaboration. From there, you can further customize the columns, number of lanes, and functions. You can import and export tasks through .csv and and calendar, making everything portable. In practice, I was impressed with the simplicity of the cards on the board. They can be created by color, helpful when trying to manage a bunch of different workflows like I am. At a glance, I can also see the priority, days until due (or past due days!), and the number of sub-tasks within a card. That's right - You can set up checklists WITHIN the card, which is hugely useful. If you like to have a card for each subtask, you can do that to, and mark subsequent tasks as blocked until the subtask is complete. I also enabled a cool extra that causes cards to "fade" over time, giving another visual cue to things that aren't getting done. Time tracking for each task was a bit of a revelation. Once I got in the habit of shifting every task I was working (The timer starts as soon as you put it in the "in progress" zone), I got really good info on what type of tasks were chewing up time, and even on the fact that I was working on a lot of things throughout the day that I didn't think to track. Finally, Kanban Tool offers what they call "Power-ups", which are basically plugins. The ones I have been really excited about are the ability to attach files to Dropbox or Onedrive, a custom Chromecast feature that allows the board to be cast up to a TV (Great for my family chore board in particular!), and one that allows you to manipulate checklists without opening cards. In the end, the only real niggle I had with the product was that while I can manually arrange cards in the To Do area (I use multiple swim lanes), one lane can't be longer than the others. I am an enthusiastic product researcher, so I was a bit surprised when my productivity management hunt just lost steam after starting with Kanban Tool. For flexibility and daily use, I couldn't ask for more.

Puntos a favor: Flexibility, extensibility, intuitive interface.

Contras: Not being able to fully manually arrange to do items.

Comentarios: Kanban Tool is truly one of the best Kanban applications I have seen. It is definitely a Kanban purist, providing functionality beyond simple boards with drag and drop functionality. It provides plenty of features to make this a very functional application for environments who truly embrace the use of Kanban boards. The UI is simple and clean... nothing fancy, just pure functionality.

Puntos a favor: Kanban Tool offers true kanban board functionality with an amazing number of features and customization abilities not found in other Kanban products. Kanban Tool lets you create Kanban boards of any size and style. Start with a default simple board and expand columns and swimlanes as needed. Customize the cards by various types, as well as customize the fields you wish to display. Kanban Tool starts with 11 fields and lets you add another 15 custom fields. Reconfigure your board and choose from about 2 dozen power up apps to make your experience better.

Contras: Kanban Tool avoided the eye candy most other developers often rely on to bring customers on-board. They left well enough alone. No fancy UI's, just truly functional product. In hind-sight, this is not necessarily a CON, but thought it deserved to be mentioned.