Geeks to help admins?
There may not be a huge a demand for this, but I was wondering if any programmers would be into writing a simple program for Executive Assistants.
As you know, I work in a portfolio that has 9 Directors and a CIO -- and my responsibility is to keep them on track with their action items and so forth... this only gets a bit tedious due to lack of tools to track the action items with.
I think this could be done in excel, basically what I need, and I am sure many other EAs would appreciate, is a program where I can enter action items with appropriate columns for classifying the items by priority, status, due date, etc.
All this I can do for certain in excel, what is missing is that once I check the item as complete or critically overdue I need to have those items automatically transferred onto another sheet as either "Archived Complete Items" or "Critically overdue items"
What is critical is having that automatic sortation of items into an archive.
Can anyone do this? I think it's something that could be developed in-house. From my quick research online, there aren't many programs offering this -- its mostly PM software that is too elaborate, I just need something simple. Sharepoint is alright... but not as custom as I need it to be. Any ideas?
Thanks!
T.
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Bento?
Hi Tamara,
You might want to look at Bento from Filemaker. It runs on a mac and is a spreadsheet like interface to a database. Check out
http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/tours_tours.html
You can download a fully working demo to try it to see if it can do what you need.
tim
How about UTORexchange?
Have you considered using the "Tasks" feature within UTORexchange? You can assign tasks to others, receive status reports when they're marked complete and the views are customizable. If you want to get more advanced, you can play with delegation of permissions so that you have the ability to see/manage their tasks directly.
Cheers,
Ian
could work
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the heads up... this would work, but the issue is that we have MAC OS X and XP users... so the exchange does not function as well as it could. Perhaps with the snow leopard it will. I'll revisit exchange once we have the new operating system.
T.
Entourage on the Mac (the
Entourage on the Mac (the version currently available) might still provide the funtionality you need. I think it's still worth a look given the integration benefits.
Snow Leopard's integration with Exchange is great but is limited
Hey Tamara,
I am running the developer release version of Snow Leopard and it does integrate nicely with Exchange using Mail and ICal the only issue is that its functionality while integrated and easy to use is limited (i.e. you cannot really assign users and control To Do tasks in the way I am thinking you plan on using it). I will let you know if I find anything useful for your purposes.
Just pick one... ;)
For my personal tasks, I prefer using Tasque. RememberTheMilk.com also falls into the same category (Tasque can talk to RTM's service, by the way). RTM integrates with a lot of services too, including Twitter, BlackBerry, iPhone, GMail/Google Calendar... you name it.
Project tracking for a number of people is a different beast to tackle, though. The quickest way to try out many systems (albeit web-based ones, but hey, why not?), is through this website: http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=4&cat=Groupware
Google Docs may also be the answer... In particular their forms feature: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-sharing-spreadsheets-start.html
thanks!
looks good... the tasque one is not bad especially because i could potentially just extract tasks from a document, which is always the case. the issue I have is archiving. I have to be able to archive the items for reference, documentation purposes. Rememberthemilk works to a level as I can share and assign, etc, the issue i am facing is having to tell the users to use yet another login. that is tedious...
ideally speaking
If i could embed something into a blackboard community page that would be the best... there must be a way.. like that they keep to their UTORids, its secure, etc, etc... and I can easily share it.
Embedding
If you're thinking UTORauth integration and embedding into Blackboard, then you're probably better off with a web application. Did you get a chance to check out the demos I mentioned in my previous post? Don't be put off by all the bells and whistles, just focus on the project/task management features.
ms sharepoint
hi.. have you asked if you can get a ms sharepoint portal site from your support group? it should work fine with the macs as well.
http://www.macwindows.com/ADinstruct.html
the benefits would be integrated usernames and logins (UTORid/UTORcsi) as well as keeping everyone on familiar software and not having to re-learn new office applications (word, excel, project) or ways of doing work.