What defines the ideal project management solution? For us, it’s a place where everyone can come together and focus on the things that really matter. Over the years we’ve created several tools that can take you part way towards this goal, however none so far have solely been focused on project management…

Until now. Zenkit Projects is built to facilitate project management, whether you use classical or Agile methodologies. It’s powerful and flexible enough to enable real progress in your team – no matter how many projects you have, no matter how big your challenges are.

Over the 5 years since we first launched Zenkit, we’ve had a lot of feedback from you about using Zenkit for project management, so we implemented our 5 key learnings: It is super easy-to-use, has a 360-degree dashboard, a global kanban, resource management, and dedicated reporting.

Now onto the good stuff. What exactly does Zenkit Projects have to offer?

Dashboard

One of our most highly requested features over the years has been a project dashboard. Zenkit Projects goes above and beyond, with a dashboard that shows you your tasks, your team’s tasks, and progress across all projects all in one place. Best of all, you can work on any task without even leaving the dashboard! Let’s dig in…

Your Tasks’ Progress

The top of the screen is reserved for tasks assigned to you from across all projects. These rings show the completeness of all your tasks across projects. “My Day” shows everything due today (or overdue!), “My Week” shows all tasks for this week, and “My Tasks” shows all tasks assigned to you, including those without a due date, and those that aren’t due today or this week.

To view the tasks that match any of these, simply click the circle icon to open a filtered Tasks panel on the right-hand side:

Click on a task to open it and view or work on the task details.

All Tasks’ Progress

The next row of circles shows the completeness of all tasks across all projects, whether they’re assigned to you, to someone else, or just not assigned to anyone. They function the same way as your tasks, just click on one to open the filtered task panel to the right and access the tasks.

From the task panel on the right, you can also add tasks to any project. Tasks added here will match the filter that was set (e.g. if you’ve clicked “Today” it will add today’s due date to the new task, if you’ve clicked “This week”, it will add a due date at the end of the week).

Project Progress

The rest of the dashboard gives you a really clear overview of the progress of all of your projects. It displays each project as a bar, divided into sections that show how many tasks are in each stage of the project. Click on any of these sections to open the task panel to show tasks related to that section.

For example, in this screenshot, it’s showing all tasks in the “To Do” stage in the project “Product Launch”.

As with each of the previous sections, you can click on any task here to open and work on it or add new tasks to the project.

Global Smart Views

The next major feature is the smart views. For a multi-project solution, global task views are like magic: You don’t need to switch between projects anymore! These are global views that you can use to keep an eye on all tasks from across all projects, and they include:

• Global Kanban board
• Global calendar
• Global task list
• All done tasks
• All assigned tasks
• Today
• Week

It can be overwhelming to see everything all at once, so you can use a range of grouping, sorting, and filter functions to quickly find the information you need. Once you set up the grouping, sorting, and filtering settings, those will stay that way until you change them.

This means that if you close the app, change to a different view, or open a project, you’ll always go back to the settings you had. This also means that you can create multiple of the same type of smart view (e.g. a global task list) to perform different functions, simply by using different group, sort, and filter settings.

For example, a global task list grouped by project, sorted by date, and filtered not to include completed tasks will float the most urgent tasks in each project to the top of each section. Meanwhile, a global task list grouped by assigned to, sorted by workload, and filtered to exclude completed tasks can show a list of everyone’s most time-intensive tasks.

Both of these views serve an important, but still completely different function, which is why you can have as many smart views as you like!

Resource Management

A truly powerful project management app is meaningless without a way to quickly assess how well tasks are distributed amongst your team. That’s why Projects also has integrated resource management, shown under any Gantt chart and available as a global view, too!

With resource management you can easily find the optimal schedule for all team members across all your projects and thus improve the efficiency of your organization. This feature enables you to see at a glance which team members may be overbooked, and who you can transfer tasks in order to alleviate the strain.

Put plainly: The global resource planning view enables you to see the workload of each member, shown as a red or green bar with the number of hours they’re scheduled to work on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

The bar is shown as green if the person is scheduled to do 8 or fewer hours of work per day, and will go red when that number is exceeded. This max “load” can be adjusted, depending on your typical schedule, but is set to 8 by default due to the 40h work week that most companies adhere to.

Clicking on someone’s name will open a menu showing all their tasks, grouped by project, and of course, clicking on a task will open it to the right-hand side.

Reports

Another very highly requested feature is reporting. Now, this is of course partially covered by the smart views, however, you can also create 2 specific reports: Bar or Sunburst. These reports visualize the workload of each team member and can be modified to display the information you need.

These two reports, combined with all the different report settings, enable you to create no fewer than 720 custom reports to gain important insights. Risks, opportunities, and challenges can be easily recognized and used to optimize your projects.

Projects

Last but not least, it would be a bit silly to write all this without mentioning the projects themselves! I’ll try to keep it brief.

When you create a project, it’ll automatically create a Kanban board, however, just like in Base, you have the option to choose from multiple views: Kanban, Gantt, List, Calendar, Hierarchy, Table, and Mindmap. The Gantt chart also supports all the important instruments of classical project management: all 4 dependency types, lead & lag, critical paths, resource management, and subtasks.

This means that whether you use Agile, Hyper Agile, Kanban, Waterfall, or whatever other methodology you prefer, you will always have the right tool at hand, and be able to switch between them at any time to get the best of every approach.

Other Updates Throughout the Suite

You may also have noticed some changes to all your other apps…

The biggest change is that there is now a sidebar to the left of your screen, which is where you can access your app and account settings and easily switch between apps. You now access your Zenkit profile and app settings from the same dialogue, too. Navigation within each app is also still accessible from the panel, as it always has been.

The panel means that things like settings, notifications, folders, and activities are kept separate from where you actually work. It’s a cleaner, more structured design that gives you more space for you to be productive without distraction. A nice added bonus is that this new side panel is much faster and more performant than the old one!

Other improvements throughout the Zenkit Suite include:

• The resource planning function we built for Projects has also been added to the Gantt view in Base.
• You can now use filters in Base’s three global views: Calendar, Favorites & Team
• You can also use filters in all lists, including smart lists, in To Do
• You can sort tasks in To Do’s “Week” and “All” smart lists
• You can group tasks in the “All” smart list
• Last but not least, the Markdown rendering library in Hypernotes is now twice as fast!

Change can be hard, I know! It may take a little while to get used to the new layout (I still head to the top right corner to access settings!) but after a couple of days, it’ll feel like it was always that way. I’m particularly a huge fan of the new app switching area, and the combined profile & app settings!

What Does This Mean for Base?

Many of you likely already use Base for all your project management needs, and over the years we’ve received many requests for features and improvements to the app that would push it further in the direction of project management.

In the end, it made a lot more sense to create a specialized app that will be 100% focused on project management, rather than to add all the necessary components to Base. Adding all that extra stuff to Base would simply make it too cluttered, too confusing, and ultimately not as helpful or easy to use as it should be. Projects alone is able to provide nearly every PM feature that’s been requested over the years, packaged in a fun-to-use, clear & simple app.

We’re confident that the new Projects app will meet the needs of the majority of our users, as most of you already use Zenkit for project management. This will leave Base open for a radical evolution into an app-builder with automation, actions & triggers, and a way to manage processes as well as projects.

Want to Transfer from Base to Projects?

If you use Base and want to make the switch over to Projects, all you need to do is connect it with Projects via the Suite. Additionally, if you already have a subscription to Base, we are happy to transfer your subscription to Projects, free of charge! If you’d like us to do this, please get in touch with our team (billing@zenkit.com).

What do you think? We’re so proud of Projects and we’re sure you’re going to love it, too! We’d love to hear your feedback about Projects, the new layout, and the added features in Base and To Do… what’s your favourite feature? Is one of your own requests now fulfilled?

Cheers,
Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post World, Meet Zenkit Projects appeared first on Zenkit.

2021 has been a productive year so far. Not only did our team release our new app, Hypernotes, but improvements and additional features have been added across all of our products. We published them with little fanfare, and barely a mention, but that’s not to say that they’re not worthy of celebration!

Here’s a short list of our favourite little updates over the past few months:

Undo/Redo

Since January this year, it’s possible to undo or redo certain activities in all Zenkit products using the Cmd/Ctrl+Z and Cmd/Ctrl+Y shortcuts on your keyboard! This includes reverting information added to fields in Base and To Do, like labels, dates, members, etc, or changing the text in chats, comments, or description fields. You can undo as many times as you like, and if you’ve already closed an item, the undo function will still work and even re-open the item for editing! You can also undo larger actions the creation or archiving of an item in Base. You cannot undo the deletion of an item, as this is a permanent change (which is also why you’re asked to confirm deletion!)

Printing Single Items and Tasks

Whether you’re working on a complex item in Base, or viewing simple tasks in Zenchat or Hypernotes, you can now print an individual item or task. To do so, simply open it, click the … button, and choose “Print” from the drop-down menu.

You’ll then generate a PDF, which shows all the fields available on the task, including all labels in their assigned colours, info about attachments, and comments (if you’ve chosen to include them). You can print or save the PDF to your device by clicking “Print” and then choosing a printer or the save to PDF option in the print settings.

Drawings

Okay, yes, we did write a whole article introducing the new drawing tool, but it’s worth mentioning again just for the sheer fun of it!

Logout on All Devices

The logout on all devices feature was introduced in version 4.5.2 to add an additional layer of security, just in case you’d forgotten to log out of a shared device or a device was stolen. The remote log-out function, when used, will log you out of all Zenkit products on all other devices and browsers except the one you’re currently using.

To use it, open your Zenkit profile, then open the “Authentication” section. Click on “Log out on all other devices”. That’s it! No need to confirm or do anything else.

Improved Recurring Items and Reminders

It’s not quite as flashy as some of the other updates, but we made huge improvements to the way reminders act with recurring items. It used to be that you’d need to set a reminder on each of the recurrent items, however now if a reminder already exists on the last item in the series, then it will be added to all future recurrences of that item.

New Knowledge Bases

With the progression from a single “does-everything” product to multiple products, we needed a way to consolidate and better manage our knowledge bases, which were previously all hosted in separate published Zenkit collections. We moved on to publishing using the same platform as our support helpdesk so that we could quickly and easily include links to relevant articles when responding to requests. It also enabled us to publish the knowledge bases in other languages, too!  German! The knowledge bases are due for a design update this year, so they’ll fit seamlessly into the Zenkit universe.

And…

• We’ve added archive access in Hypernotes
• Made it easier to find files shared in chats in Zenchat
• Added JSON export for collections, lists, and notebooks
• Added syntax highlighting for code blocks in Hypernotes
• Kept up all 8 translations of all four of our apps (with a new language coming soon)
• And much, much more!

If you want to keep up with all these updates as soon as they’re live, please feel free to take a look at our public changelog. Our dev team add details about what features were added, and which bugs were fixed in each app or the Zenkit platform as a whole.

Are you making use of these new features? We’d love to know! Leave a comment below, or get in touch with our team. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit team

The post What’s New in Zenkit? appeared first on Zenkit.

The latest feature to grace the Zenkit suite isn’t a new productivity tool or a fascinating new way to connect everything together. In fact, some may even find it frivolous or worse, an anti-productivity tool!

But we think that drawing at work is an excellent use of time…

Introducing the Drawing Tool

Whether you’re creating a task in To Do, whipping up a new note in Hypernotes, or having a watercooler chat in Zenchat, there’s always room to draw. Drawings can help illustrate a point, send some cheer, or act as a basic diagram of something you’re planning to build. Whatever the reason may be, we think that this feature can offer an important visual aid that has thus far been missing in the productivity universe.

You can add a drawing anywhere in Zenkit that you would usually upload a file or image: In Hypernotes, use the quick command “/draw”. In Zenchat, click or tap the + button and choose “Drawing”, in To Do and Base, instead of uploading a file or linking to one in the cloud, simply click “Drawing” instead!

Drawing in Zenkit

Once you’ve opened the drawing window, you’ll be presented with a blank page and an array of basic tools, like a colour picker, some different brush options, undo/redo, and the option to add text or images to the canvas.

The first thing you can (or really, should) do is select the size of your canvas. You can do this by clicking the “Size” button in the top left corner. Choose either a custom size, or pick a predetermined portrait, landscape, or square image.

Once you’ve created your canvas, pick a colour in the top right, and start drawing!

The colour picker currently offers the same colour options as the label colour picker, however, this may change in future updates. To change the size of your brush, use the toggle to the left of the coloured circle. In the same corner, you can also pick a different brush, which will allow you to use different textures to create more layered and varied work.

You can click “Select” in the centre of the top panel to select different elements of your drawing and move them around, rotate, or resize them. To go back to drawing mode, click “Drawing”.

To undo or redo an action, use the undo/redo buttons or the Ctrl/Cmd+Z and Y shortcuts. To erase the entire drawing, click on the “Clear” button.

Once you’re happy with your drawing, click “Save” in the top right corner to save it as a file attached to your item, an image inline in your note, or send it as a message in chat.

Annotation

The drawing tool is not limited to only creating new images. It can also be used to annotate or extend existing ones, too! Any image file uploaded to any Zenkit product can be annotated using this tool. Simply open the image, then click “Annotate” in the top left corner.

The annotation will allow you to draw and select anything you added to the image, as described above, however it will not let you select or remove elements that existed in the original image.

What do you think? Are you going to start adding some drawings to your work?

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post Draw Anything in Zenkit appeared first on Zenkit.

We’re so excited to announce the release of the fourth member of the Zenkit family: Hypernotes!

Hypernotes is a note-taking app designed to enhance your knowledge management, and help you create, share, and understand knowledge in a totally new way. It’s designed to be used for any writing task; wikis, Intranets, documentation, book outlines, research, diaries, first principles, a personal Zettelkasten, etc. This means that it can also be used by just about anyone, and the range of plans makes it accessible to anyone from students, NGOs, and freelancers, all the way up to SMBs and large enterprises.

All that said, it’s not just any old note-taking or team knowledge app…

What’s the problem with traditional knowledge management?

1. They’re great for taking notes, but not so good at helping you access them.

The tools traditionally used to capture and share knowledge are linear and hierarchical by nature. Most popular knowledge bases and note apps are very limited by their pre-defined hierarchies and folders. Anything you write has to fit into a certain category, or get slotted into a folder or notebook with other notes of a similar theme. 

This inevitably leads to hundreds, if not thousands of notes containing valuable knowledge that end up gathering dust because it’s simply too difficult to find them, which also means writing is duplicated, sometimes multiple times!

Who hasn’t started taking notes, writing down ideas, or collecting useful quotes and articles, only to forget what it was called, where it should be stored, or even what category it belongs in? Sometimes something you write defies being categorized; it could be in multiple existing categories, or needs a new category entirely.

Search goes some way to solve this, but it doesn’t always find everything you need, especially if you’re not using the “right” search terms! This means that knowledge is lost and forgotten, and all that note-taking leads to nothing… what’s the point of documenting something if nobody reads it?

2. Knowledge is lost when people aren’t around to point you in the right direction.

Companies aren’t just faceless productivity machines. Their competitive advantage lies primarily in people: how employees apply their knowledge, experience, and skills in their work.

When someone is away or leaves the company, their unique knowledge goes with them. Arnold Kransdorff, a knowledge management researcher and author, puts the impact of this bluntly: If this knowledge walks out without being documented, the organization will be “plagued with an inability to learn from past experience, which leads to reinvented wheels, unlearned lessons, a pattern of repeated mistakes, productivity shortfalls, and a lack of continuous performance improvement.” Ouch.

Just think how much time, money, and effort could be saved if companies were able to continually and effectively capture each employee’s unique knowledge over the entire duration of their employment.

What makes Hypernotes so much better?

Hypernotes creates a living knowledge base. It’s structured kind of like your brain is. With Hypernotes, notes organically link to one another, so finding relevant knowledge is much easier, even if a note was written years ago! The more you write, the greater your knowledge becomes and the more links are created between things you didn’t even consider to be related.

With Hypernotes, your “read/write” ratio is therefore increased: Because notes organically link to one another, finding relevant knowledge is much easier, even if someone is accessing them for the first time. Readers simply have to click through to find relevant articles that always link back to where they started, and new knowledge is automatically connected to old with suggested links.

And because we’re Zenkit, Hypernotes of course has extremely effective task management built right into it, and you can connect your writing with any other app in the suite. Here’s how…

Bi-Directional Links

Whenever you’re writing in any note, you can use shortcuts to link your text to other relevant notes, kind of like hyperlinks online. You can do this by inserting the title of a note you’ve already written, inserting an entire block of text, or by using a tagging system.

The magic though, is that these links go both ways. Once you link from note A to note B, then a mention will be added to note B that links right back to note A!

Hypernotes also automatically scans your writing to look for words or phrases that match other notes you’ve written before. It then suggests that you connect them with a mention at the bottom of each related note:

If you choose to connect these two suggestions in the example above, whenever you look at the notes “Zettelkasten Method”, “Zettel Unique Identifier”, or “Structure Notes”, there will be a link on Niklas’ name leading you right back to this page where everything you’ve ever written about him is collected! (This is also how Hypernotes works as an excellent CRM, as you can track and make notes on all your interactions with people you’re in touch with).

Outlining

Notes are not written in plain prose, but use an outline of bullet points for each new line. The reason for this is that each separate bullet point, or “block” as they’re called, can be indented, creating a hierarchical outline of the information you’re writing down. Each individual block can also directly be referenced in any other note, so instead of copying & pasting things multiple times, you write it down once and it’s available to use anywhere else in your notebook!

In this example, the blocks are indented to three levels, and there are several references shown (there’s good old Mr. Luhmann!). Clicking on any of the bullet points opens the block up to behave like a totally new note:

Knowledge Graph

Yeah, notes and pages are cool and all, but just wait until you see the graph! The knowledge graph is a visual representation of all of your knowledge and all the connections within it.

The graph shows by way of color-coding which notes have tasks attached, which have comments, notifications, which are favorites, and more. You can focus in on notes to see only the things most relevant to it (and you can change the levels of focus as you wish with a simple slider):

And you can also “collapse” the connections to see how one note is connected to other, more distant notes & ideas:

This all is fun to play with, but in the end it provides an invaluable resource that makes finding connections between ideas an intuitive, visual experience. Using a tool like this can help you to make connections between ideas that you never thought could be related, sparking yet more ideas, better writing, and a better-informed worldview.

Task Management

It wouldn’t be a Zenkit product without a nod to collaboration! Hypernotes isn’t designed just for a single person building their knowledge (although it is perfectly suited to this!). It’s designed to facilitate better knowledge collection and sharing among team members, where each user is able to intuitively and actively contribute to building a base of information to be shared by all.

You can add members to notebooks, and create and assign tasks on the notebook and note level:

There is a general task area for each notebook. This is found on the left hand panel and you can add tasks here at the top of the page, and also view all tasks, even those that are assigned to a specific note.

Within an individual note, you can add and view tasks in two ways:

Each note has a “Tasks” button in the top right hand corner that will show all tasks related to that note. You can add tasks from there, mark them done, and open them to assign people & due dates, attach files, and more.

You can also add tasks in-line, directly in your text:

The task will appear right in the middle of your text and you can continue writing as if it’s just part of the sentence

Of course, each task can be opened, members assigned, due dates, reminders & repeaters added, files and more info attached, etc.

You can also connect Hypernotes with all other Zenkit products, which means you can view and work with these same tasks in Base & To Do, and chat about them in Zenchat!

Shortcuts

All this sounds a bit complicated, but there are plenty of shortcuts (and a handy list explaining them all) that make using Hypernotes super simple.

From anywhere in your text, use the “/” key to open the quick command menu:

Quick commands help you add references to other pages or blocks, add images through links or uploads, create tasks, add items from other Zenkit products inline, and even use special text formatting like code and LaTex!

There’s also an info menu shown on each page which lists helpful shortcuts for adding references, using the graph, formatting text, and much more.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on about all the features and functions we’ve built into this incredible app, but I think I’ll let it speak for itself. You can use Hypernotes totally for free online, and on your mobile devices:

Web | iOS | Android

Of course we also created desktop apps, which you can download from the Hypernotes platforms page.

That’s all folks! We’d love to hear what you think about the newest member of the Zenkit family! We hope you all enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it. Please feel free to share your feedback in the comments below, and don’t forget to share your support on our Product Hunt launch tomorrow!

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post World, Meet Hypernotes appeared first on Zenkit.

We’re so excited to reveal the reason we’ve been so quiet these last few weeks: World, meet Zenchat!

Zenchat is a chat app. But it’s not just any old chat app. Zenchat’s built-in task management functions enable holistic collaboration in teams like never before.

Meet Zenchat

Zenchat is just like the chat apps you know and love, with a little Zenkit magic thrown in:

Chat 1:1, in a group, about a project (from Base or To Do!), or even about a single topic or task.
Quickly turn any message into a task & assign or edit within your chat. Never switch apps for routine task management again!
Get in the habit of directly chatting about tasks so valuable information stays where it belongs. See that chat in the comments of any task or item, in any Zenkit product.
Connect Zenchat to the Zenkit Universe to see your tasks in advanced views like Kanban, Gantt, to do lists, and vice versa.
Like all Zenkit products, Zenchat is enterprise-ready: SSO, SCIM provisioning, admin tools, identity management & more.

So now you know the basics, let’s get back to the beginning. Why exactly did we make a chat app?

The Story Behind Zenchat

When we first started building Zenkit we thought that communication tools (like team chat) and tools to add structure to work (like Kanban boards, to do lists etc) had an equal impact on productivity and collaboration. We thought it was 50–50.

But if you watch the people around you, it’s more like 90–10, or even 99–1! Humans are naturally inclined to chat. It’s a habit that sticks with us not only in our private lives, but at work too. That said, without that 1% of structure, there’s no sustainable productivity. Information just gets lost in chat threads.

So we have a problem: People don’t want to leave their chat, but they have to in order to track their work. But when you use an external app to manage tasks, you lose all the valuable commentary and feedback related to that task because—let’s face it—you’d always rather have a quick chat about something than use the comment function in a task app.

But what about integrations? Well… we don’t think integrations quite cut it either. Commands are not handy for regular users (e.g. commands to add a task, or commands to show tasks). And like normal messages, the integrated task elements also get lost in chat threads and messages.

On top of that, there’s ambivalence about where to add task relevant information. Do you chat about it in your team or with your manager? Or do you add it as a comment on a task? The likelihood of someone adding the relevant info to a task after chatting about it is about as high as people using the comment feature in a task to discuss it. (So… pretty unlikely)

So we decided to make something that could do both. Something that would seamlessly combine collaboration and task management into one app.

That was the genesis of Zenchat.

We wanted to combine chat and tasks perfectly so that you’ll never have a jarring context switch that brings you out of your flow, you can keep task-related discussion connected to the task itself, and your conversations gain more direction and relevance.

How to Use Zenchat

Simply go to chat.https://zenkit.com and log in with your Zenkit account (if you’re not logged in already)!

1:1 Chats

Zenchat will already have all of the people you already collaborate with in other Zenkit products available to chat with. Simply search for their name and get chatting!

If you’re not yet connected, invite them to join Zenkit by clicking the + icon, then “Invite new user by email”.

Group Chats

From that same + menu you can create new group chats with members you’re connected with. Give the group a name, add as many members as you like, and get chatting!

Project Chats

This is where it gets interesting! Using the Zenkit Universe, you can connect any collection from Base, or any list from To Do, to a chat. Once connected, you have a group chat directly connected to your project and anyone who’s a member of the collection or list will also be a member of the chat. Tasks created in this chat will become tasks in the To Do list, or items in the Base collection.

Whenever anyone chats about or comments on tasks or items, a short summary of that will be added to the project chat so that you have a bird’s-eye view over what’s going on in your projects.

Topic Chats

Chat about any task or item. In any chat, click to open any task and start commenting on it. “Star” a task to make it appear as a separate chat in the panel to the left.

If you’re commenting on a task or item in another Zenkit product, you can choose to chat about it instead! To do so, open the item, click the … icon in the top right hand corner and choose “Open in Zenchat” (this only works if you already connected the chat to the collection or list).

Creating and viewing tasks

In all chats, any message can be turned into a task! Click the … icon on any message and choose “Convert to task”. To view the task details, simply click on the task to open it. You can even begin chatting about it from there, or click to expand and add even more detail!

A list of all tasks can be viewed from the task panel in the chat – simply click “Tasks” in the top right corner of the chat to view them. This panel can be opened as a small drop down menu or pinned as a panel to the right of your screen.

Chats are connected to To Do by default, but you can also connect them to Base. Once connected, you’ll see the option to “Open in To Do” and “Open in Base”.

What does this mean for other Zenkit products?

The great news is that with every new Zenkit product, all other products are improved. To release Zenchat, we made big improvements to the database and naturally several big changes to the comments! You’ll now see the chat in the comments section of tasks and items, and in these chat comments you can now send voice messages, attach pictures, preview links, and more!

Alongside the release of Zenchat, we’ve also updated our website to showcase the Zenkit suite and make plenty of space for all the new products coming soon!

Get started with Zenchat

You can use Zenchat on any device or platform you choose. Download the version you need here: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS and Linux: .AppImage, .tar.gz, .deb, .rpm. Find the full list of download options here.

We hope you love using Zenchat as much as we do! Please let us know what you think in the comments below, and if you’ve given it a try we’d love to hear about your experiences!

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post World, Meet Zenchat appeared first on Zenkit.

Zenkit To Do has been out in the world for less than a week, and the amount of positive feedback we’ve received from you (both long time Zenkit users, and users we’ve welcomed in the last few days) has been overwhelming and so, so wonderful. We could not have wished for a better first week!

If you’ve been in touch to share your feedback, feature requests, bug reports, criticism, or just some love for the team – THANK YOU! We’re reading every message you send, and trying our best to respond as soon as we can. 

Through all of your feedback, one request shone through as something that many of you want, nay, need:

Desktop Apps (for everyone)

You asked for it, so we made it happen. Apps to use on your OS of choice were the most highly requested ‘feature’ of the week, so…

Desktop apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux are all now available either as a direct download, or from the App Store and Snap Store (Microsoft Store coming very soon!).

You can find them here: https://zenkit.com/todo/platforms

There’s a handy shortcut you can use to make adding tasks to your To Do list super quick and easy:

Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Space: quick-add a new item to any list you choose

There will be more info on all of this in our To Do knowledge base (also coming soon). 

List Add-Ons (for Plus plan users)

There are several features we’ve planned to implement in the first few weeks after the release and the first three are already here in the form of list add-ons. 

Add-ons are optional features that you can toggle on and off on a list by list basis. You can access them by opening your list, then tapping or clicking on the list name.

The three we’ve added today are available to all users with a Plus subscription or higher.

List Backgrounds

List backgrounds enable you to give each of your lists a separate identity by choosing a different theme for each. Just like the main theme, each list theme can be dark or light, solid or transparent, and the toggles will show the appropriate backgrounds for each.

As a Plus subscriber, you’ll also be able to upload any background you choose!

Email to List

Turn any email into a task by adding the ‘Email to List’ add-on! This add-on generates a unique email address for your list that you can then save in your email address book to quickly forward emails to Zenkit To Do.

You can also optionally assign a user to the newly created task through a unique email address, too. To do this, simply click on ‘Show more examples’ in the Email to List settings, and copy the address next to “Assigned to User”.

iCal Subscription

Send tasks with due dates on your lists to any calendar app you use! The iCalendar subscription add-on generates a unique URL for your list, and any task with a due date is automatically added to any calendar you add the link to. 

You can learn a bit more about how this works in our Zenkit Base documentation here. To note: due to the simplicity of To Do, you won’t need to add filters or pick date fields in the To Do iCalendar Subscription add-on

Thank you all once again for your wonderful response to To Do! We’re excited to keep making it better and better.

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post Zenkit To Do: Desktop Apps and 3 New Add-Ons appeared first on Zenkit.

This is a very big day for us, and for Zenkit. Today, the Zenkit you know and love has been joined by a new product: Zenkit To Do. To Do is the first of many new products that will be joining the Zenkit family, so it’s time you were properly introduced!

But first of all: What does that mean for the original Zenkit application and for you as a Zenkit user?

The original Zenkit app will be in the center of the whole Zenkit product family. We will continue to improve its existing features and functions, as well as innovate as we always have done. To express this new central position, we rebranded it as the “Zenkit Base” or simply “the Base”. With the release of To Do, Zenkit Base will be stronger than ever. You can learn a little more about this rebranding and the latest changes to the Base here.

Now, on to the star of today’s blog:

What is Zenkit To Do?

Zenkit To Do is a super-simple task management tool designed from the ground up to help you work productively and collaborate with anyone. It’s just as beautifully designed as Zenkit, but much simpler and easier to use for daily task management.

In case you didn’t catch it last week, here’s To Do in action:

You can start using it by logging in to todo.https://zenkit.com with your existing Zenkit login credentials (or if you’re new here, register for an account).

What can it do?

Like any good task management tool, To Do allows you to focus on what needs to get done, reminding you at the appropriate time, and helping you get your team on board.

Here’s what you can expect in the first batch of features available with the launch (as you can expect, there’s a lot more on the way!):

Inbox
Quick Add
Smart lists
Starred
Sharing
Due Dates and Reminders
Repeaters
Subtasks & Checklists
Files
Comments
Offline support
Dark mode & new themes
And lots, lots more…

Check out the full list of features here.

So far, so… normal? We’ve picked out the most necessary features needed for people to get things done effectively. But what really sets To Do apart from the crowd are the additional features that make it a stellar choice for anyone looking for a little something more from their task manager.

The special sauce

Like Zenkit itself, To Do is enterprise ready, with groups, roles, SAML, SCIM, auditing, and everything else you need to ensure that your team is able to work securely on the same platform.

The most special thing about To Do, however, is that it’s part of the Zenkit Universe. This means that it integrates seamlessly with Zenkit Base, and any other products we will launch in the future. (We will roll out this sync the week after Easter).

So what does that mean, exactly?

While To Do can be used as a completely separate product, it is also deeply connected to Zenkit Base (and all future Zenkit products). All tasks within the To Do app can also be accessed and changed within the Base (and vice versa).

Tasks can be added and changed in the Kanban, mind map, Gantt chart, and all other views of Base, and the simplified to-dos are automatically synced to matching lists in To Do. This means that now you can choose if you want to use the full functionality of Zenkit Base or the simple, task-focused style of To Do (or both together).

It’s especially beneficial for teams who may already be using Zenkit Base, and would like to add more users to their setup but don’t necessarily need everyone to have full access. By adding To Do to your Zenkit suite, even more users will have access to whichever collections you choose to link, without having to join your collections or workspaces directly. The learning curve for To Do is also much smaller, meaning that new team members or clients can get on board quickly.

Zenkit To Do vs. Wunderlist

For those of you familiar with Wunderlist, Zenkit To Do should make you feel right at home. That’s no accident – Wunderlist’s imminent shutdown has left many users worried about what to do with their data, and dissatisfied with many of the alternatives. Zenkit To Do was created with the intention to give Wunderlist users a new home, too!

Additionally, with a “one-click-import” function, Wunderlist users will be able to transfer their lists, along with due dates and starred tasks, directly into Zenkit To Do.

Is there anything else I should know?

First of all, congratulations on getting this far! Today’s post has been a little longer than usual, so thanks for sticking with me. From now on we’re just crossing t’s and dotting i’s:

You can learn more about To Do on it’s dedicated home page, and all the features are listed on the To Do pricing page.

To Do has its own dedicated subscription structure, separate from the Base subscription and pricing. If you already have a Plus subscription for Base, you can still access To Do for free, and vice versa. All pricing information can be found on the To Do pricing page.

We have updated our Terms of Service today to reflect this addition to the Zenkit family, as well as to clarify and define some new terms used to describe how data is shared between the different products. Zenkit Terms are applicable to all Zenkit products.

Lastly, we’re hard at work putting together a new knowledge base specifically for Zenkit To Do. We’ll keep you posted as soon as it’s ready to go! If you have any questions, you’re welcome to get in touch with our lovely customer success team via the in-app chat, or via email to service@zenkit.com.

That’s it folks! What do you think of Zenkit To Do? Will you give it a try? We’re so happy to finally be able to show it to you all. It’s been a couple of months in development and it’s hard to keep such great news a secret

Cheers,
Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post World, Meet Zenkit To Do appeared first on Zenkit.

You may have noticed some visual changes around Zenkit recently – smoother lines, more fluid animations, and a subtle polish here and there. We’ve been working on something big, and this is just the first part of it. While we’ve been taking this crisis a day at a time, our team has been very busy working away at this update, and a huge project that we can’t wait to show you!

First Things First: Some Changes and Updates

A lot of the change is primarily visual. Zenkit still does the amazing things it’s always done, except now with a fresh look. We have built a couple of new features though, just to keep up with demand! (Don’t worry, the Zenkit mobile apps will get this update later this week).

Same Name, New Domain

The Zenkit you know and love is the same as ever, but it will now be accessed via the URL base.https://zenkit.com. Just a small indicator of things to come

If you have any collections bookmarked or linked anywhere, don’t worry, you’ll automatically be redirected to the right place!

Updated Profile and Settings

You can now access your Zenkit profile by clicking on your profile icon, then again on your name. Your profile manages your email address and password, language and date settings, authentication options and more. Other app settings, like theme, notifications, offline settings, and more, are accessed by the “Settings” menu.

New and Updated Themes

We wouldn’t let this design refresh without a few new theme options to choose from! The biggest difference you’ll notice is in the transparent theme, and how you pick your theme.

Transparent or not, light or dark, just click a toggle to switch between options. When you switch between light and dark, the appropriate backgrounds will appear underneath for you to choose from.

Filters for Gantt and Table Headers

Lastly, a little new feature that should make working in tables and in the Gantt view a little easier: You can now access filters for a specific field by clicking on the column name. This saves time by enabling you to quickly drill down into your data without losing context.

These are trying times. We hope you’re all well, staying inside when possible, helping each other out, and getting help when needed! Working from home or under great pressure can be strenuous so we hope that these changes to the app make your work, wherever you are, that little bit more delightful.

A Sneak Peek at What’s Coming Next…

On that note, we would like to introduce you to the newest member of the Zenkit family: Zenkit To Do.

Zenkit To Do was designed from the ground up to make managing tasks as easy as possible. With a beautiful, intuitive design, smart lists, reminders, and more, it enables you to collaborate with your team, family, and friends, wherever you are. (Update 06.04.20: Learn more about it here – Meet Zenkit To Do).

So you see, from now on we have two products: The original Zenkit product, now known as Zenkit Base, and Zenkit To Do, the first of many new products to come. Zenkit Base will be the centre of the new and evolving Zenkit Universe. You will learn a lot more about this in the weeks to come.

For now, the most important and wonderful thing to know about this is that they work seamlessly together. Zenkit Base and Zenkit To Do share the same data store. You log in with the same email address and password. The tasks you see in Zenkit To Do are the exact same tasks as they are in your collections in the original Zenkit app. There’s no syncing, no imports, and no hassle. Mark something as “Done” in the To Do app, it will also be done in your Zenkit collection, and vice versa.

The beauty of this system is that different people need different types of tools. We tried to achieve this within the main Zenkit app, but of course, it got a bit too complex for some use cases. Now, a manager who needs a high-level overview of a project can create a Gantt chart, mind map or Kanban board, then link the collection to a Zenkit To Do list. From there, employees and other team members can work on their assigned tasks in a simple list, quickly find tasks due today or this week, and more, without having to deal with the more complex charts.

For those of you familiar with Wunderlist, some of the functions and features may ring a bell. We’ve taken inspiration from one of the most beloved task list apps around and wanted to offer a similar option for Wunderlist users looking for a new home as it’s gone for good on May 6th.

We will release Zenkit To Do in early April. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post New Look, New Features, and an All-New Product (Soon) appeared first on Zenkit.

Today, we’re proud to finally release our most requested feature ever. Since Zenkit was launched way back in 2016, our users have been requesting that we develop a Gantt chart or timeline view. We’ve been putting it off, not because we thought it was a bad idea, but because we thought it was so important that we had to do it right. We had to wait until the moment we were able to do it justice.

Now is that moment.

Over the years, we’ve learned a lot. Not just about building software, but also about project management and everything it entails. We feel that Zenkit the product, and Zenkit the team, is mature and experienced enough to manage the complexity involved in delivering the best Gantt view we could.

With the new Gantt view, we didn’t want to create just a simple timeline view of your tasks. We wanted to make sure we could deliver every feature you’d expect from a fully-fledged Gantt tool. This means that not only are your tasks displayed on a timeline, but that you can create 4 different types of dependencies between tasks, add lag and lead, create milestones, view the critical path, and even display one chart superimposed over another.

Let’s get into it!

Benefits of Using Gantt

Zenkit started life as a Kanban tool – the increasingly popular project management methodology used by teams of all sorts around the world. Like Kanban, Gantt is a way to track and manage projects. The main difference between Gantt and Kanban is that Gantt gives you a more structured, granular overview of the project schedule, while Kanban focuses primarily on the progress of tasks. This means that you can precisely track the start and end dates of activities, whether or not an activity is dependent on another, the resources needed to complete them and much more. Unlike Kanban, Gantt charts give a clear and easy to understand visual representation of the project timeline, enabling you to understand your project schedule and resources at a glance.

Gantt charts were commonly used in long term, complex waterfall projects that involve physical resources and multiple teams of people, particularly in industries like construction, manufacturing, engineering, infrastructure, IT, and more. Now, with the help of software (like Zenkit!), you don’t need years of special training as a project manager to manage complex schedules and task lists. Almost anyone can create a Gantt chart if they think it would help their project!

Introducing Gantt View for Zenkit

Gantt View is rolling out to Plus and Business users today! Here, I’ll cover the main functions of the view, but of course, as always, you can learn more about it in our Gantt View documentation.

Dependencies

You can create dependencies between scheduled items by dragging and dropping an arrow between the tasks on the chart. Click on the arrow to change the dependency type, add a description of the dependency, or add lag and lead.

Critical Path

The critical path shows the items in your chart that determine the minimum time needed to complete the project. If any item on the path is delayed or takes longer than expected, the project will be completed late. When the critical path is activated, the items on the path appear in orange.

Lag and Lead

Lag and lead allow you to add delays between tasks, or allow a task to start earlier than scheduled if there’s no clash of resources. This function is available only to Zenkit Business users. Lag is indicated in red, lead in green.

Milestones

Milestones are used to indicate important points in a project. Usually the start and end of a project are marked, as well as the completion of important phases, and appointments such as external review or auditing, or budget checks. Zenkit displays milestones clearly with a blue horizontal line.

Secondary Date

In some instances, it may be helpful to show one Gantt chart superimposed on top of another, for example, a chart that tracks the actual dates of your project on top of the originally planned dates. In Zenkit, this can be done by creating a second date field and opting to display it on the chart via the Gantt view options. This is available only to Business Plan customers.

Breakdown by Time Period

If your project is very long, it wouldn’t make any sense to view it on the scale of days or weeks. In fact, it may make more sense to view it in months or even years! Zenkit lets you change the scale of the chart, as well as zoom in and out along that scale.

Drag & Drop

Drag items onto the chart, move to re-schedule or drag the edges to change the duration of tasks. You can even drag and drop to change the hierarchy of tasks and subtasks! It may seem pretty basic, but it makes working in Gantt just that little bit more delightful!

We’re extremely proud of Zenkit’s Gantt view, and hope we’ve been able to do it justice! Do you use Gantt charts in your projects? What do you think of our latest view? As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment here or contact our team to let us know!

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post Introducing Gantt View for Zenkit appeared first on Zenkit.

Wikis have been around almost as long as the web itself. The first wiki was published in 1994, a mere 4 years after Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web. Since then, wikis have been used by millions around the world as a convenient way to collaborate on and publish information.

As a content management system, they’re easy to use and give non-technical users the ability to quickly publish content. It wasn’t long before companies and organizations caught on, publishing internal wikis (or team wikis) to keep everyone on the same page, with access to the same resources and info.

Why a Wiki View?

With the wiki view, we wanted to make it easy for teams to be able to quickly and easily disseminate information internally, or publish it for others to see. Wikis are so ingrained in our use of the web (who hasn’t ever checked Wikipedia?) that they’re very easy for anyone to understand in terms of structure and readability. While you could use a normal Zenkit collection to create a team wiki in, say, Kanban or list view, published or not, there’s something special about being able to read the text in the same way that you would elsewhere online.

So why not something else? What happened to Gantt? (I knew you’d ask.) Don’t worry Gantt is coming very, very soon! But while we’re waiting, there’s nothing better than a wiki to tide you over.

Why Wikis Are So Great

Successful companies owe their success, in part, to high levels of team collaboration and connection across departments. When there is effective knowledge management and sharing in an organization, individuals across the company are able to act based on a common vision, understanding of the company, and shared resources.

Whether you’re a distributed team or working at the same desk as your boss, the reality for many of us is that we have multiple roles to fill, juggling different responsibilities and priorities across different apps and devices. A centralized wiki or knowledge base keeps everyone, from new employees to old hands, on the same page and updated with the latest intel.

Onboarding New Team Members

Onboarding new team members is always a bit more work than you’d expect. New employees need to get to know the company culture, norms, rules, and regulations. Then there are the processes that keep the company running day to day, and new projects they need to get up to speed on. Often it’s difficult to impart all of this information to someone without completely overloading them.

A well-organized onboarding wiki can help employees learn how things work, and gives them a clear idea of where to find answers to any questions they may have. An internal wiki that points the way can relieve the burden on managers and other team members, and even improve first-year retention rates!

Cross-Training

Companies that are able to cross-train their employees can strengthen engagement and performance throughout the organization. Team members who have a more holistic view of other roles within the company are ultimately more valuable as they learn new skills, are able to work effectively in multiple roles, and even perform the same role with higher engagement and customer empathy.

An internal wiki can act as a repository for customer support material, training documents, business policies and best practices, how-to guides, and much more. Having all this information available in a central location means that it’s easy for team members to access the info they need to get up to speed in any area of the organization.

Collect and Preserve Company Knowledge

Another key benefit of wikis is that they offer a dedicated place for employees or managers to record knowledge they’ve gained over years on the job. If a key team member leaves the company without recording their knowledge anywhere, they’re effectively taking all that knowledge with them. It’s very difficult to find someone who has the same experience with the company, projects, team, and strategies that the leaver had.

Internal wikis become a vital way for companies to retain the knowledge and expertise of their employees. If you’re able to create a culture where team members regularly update an internal wiki with their ideas, research, strategies, and anything else they use on a day to day basis, it becomes much easier to train replacements.

Improve Internal Communications

If it’s not become clear in the last couple of points, I’ll state it again: wikis can play a huge role in improving internal communication, especially when it comes to collecting and imparting company knowledge. The more transparent and easily accessible internal information is, the easier it is for individuals in a company to act as one, with shared goals and vision.

A wiki can be used by project managers to keep everyone informed of project statuses, by HR to notify the team of updated policies or procedures, by designers to share design materials and brand guidelines, by managers to introduce new people to the team, or inform everyone of the details for the next company party.

Basically, whenever you want to send a team or company-wide email or make an announcement in a Slack channel, or need to ask someone for a resource, consider a wiki instead!

The Zenkit Difference: How to Use Uour Zenkit Wiki

“But wiki software already exists!” you may be saying. But that’s where the Zenkit difference comes in. Our wiki view enables you to quickly and intuitively create and publish wiki pages from your existing Zenkit collections. As such, you can benefit from everything else that makes Zenkit special, without having to outsource this integral tool to other software!

With the Zenkit wiki view, you can create, edit, and publish from any device, anywhere. From the desktop, web, or your phone, if it’s in Zenkit, it can be published. If you’re already using Zenkit, then you already know how to create a wiki with it—just use the same tools and techniques you’ve been using to run everything else, then switch to the wiki view. Done!

Ok, maybe not completely done yet – you can optionally add intro text, embed images or media from other sites, change the width of the page and text, and modify the table of contents based on label, hierarchy, or member fields.

One of the best things about the Zenkit wiki is that wiki readers can use the same powerful filters to quickly pinpoint the exact information they need. You can even create saved filters that can be accessed by readers so they can find relevant subsets of wiki articles without a thought.

You can learn a lot more about using Zenkit’s wiki view in our Knowledge Base (which has been an alpha version of the wiki for years!).

Three Tips for Setting Up Your Team Wiki

If you haven’t already started creating some form of internal knowledge base or wiki, it can be hard to know where to start.

1. Find out what you don’t know

If you just start writing things down without first figuring out what exactly needs documenting, you may end up only covering a small part of what’s needed, or even worse, wasting time documenting stuff that isn’t necessary. To make sure you’re off on the right foot, you can send a survey around the company asking for documents that everyone needs but are hard to find, or polling teams for the resources they regularly use. Better yet, get people from different teams and departments to collaborate with you! They’ll be able to pinpoint things that you might overlook.

2. Collaborate, but control access

Many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth. The more people you get collaborating with you on the wiki, the richer and more diverse it’ll be. That being said, some people don’t need full access to create, edit, and delete articles. Brand new employees, interns, consultants, or temp workers may need to be able to read articles, but they likely won’t be able to contribute. Additionally, members of the marketing team won’t need access to the dev team’s resources, and the dev team don’t need info about HR’s internal processes. You need to be able to control who has access to what.

3. Encourage engagement!

Don’t just publish it into the void and expect people to start using the wiki straight away. A wiki is only effective if it’s used regularly and kept up to date, so you need a strategy to get everyone on board with using it. Getting people from other teams to help you build it from the very beginning is a great way to start spreading the word, however, an internal marketing campaign, sharing links to new pages, or posting it in group channels can all help.

Adoption will increase if it becomes part of the day-to-day routine, so it’s also important to consider how the wiki can be included in existing processes.

We’re really excited about the wiki view, and have been using it ourselves for a while! Do you use an internal wiki? Please feel free to share your top wiki tips in the comments below. We hope you’ll enjoy using wiki view as much as we’ve enjoyed building and testing it!

Cheers,

Siobhan and the Zenkit Team

The post Introducing Wiki View for Zenkit appeared first on Zenkit.