iCal in Outlook 2010

Hello!

We’ve been using Nozbe as a task list as well as to schedule tasks for 8 months, with a team subscription for 6 people. We’ve decided that the calendar and scheduling features of Nozbe are not meeting our needs, and need to implement a separate calendar and scheduling system. We’re deciding on whether we will keep Nozbe for a task list, or move to something that is designed for teams.

For now, we’re trying to use Outlook’s calendar feature together with Nozbe. We’re using the iCal feed to import the read-only Nozbe calendar into Outlook’s calendar. We’re having a few issues we’d like to see addressed. I understand you are working on eliminating iCal, perhaps your alternative once it is gone will solve these issues for us.

1) When the iCal feed is imported into Outlook, tasks are showing up regardless of who they are assigned to (everyone has everyone’s tasks on their Outlook calendar). In fact it appears that EVERY task for the whole team is assigned to the person whose iCal feed is used. Contrast this to the Outlook calendar if you first export from Nozbe to Google Calendar, and then export from Google Calendar into Outlook as a Gcal format; with this method, only tasks assigned to the person whose calendar it is show up. This is much preferred, but we can’t deal with the update delay when going Nozbe->Google->Outlook (we’re seeing half hour delays, this is the difference between double booking someone!)
a) We’d like to see tasks only for the person whose iCal feed it is (maybe a filter option)
b) We’d like to see the true delegation of tasks – who is assigned? Not the iCal feed owner..

2) lack of project titles in the task names (this has been brought up before)

3) Option to default tasks that are marked for a specific day to have a time, say 5pm instead of being “All Day” tasks in outlook. Outlook interprets this as being a task taking the whole day, which becomes an issue because there are frequently many of these (compounded because we can see everyone’s!) and they take up a lot of room on the outlook display, blocking half of the outlook calendar. Outlook’s shortfalling is that you cannot adjust the amount of screen-space “all day tasks” takes up, they are listed at the top of the day. As well it generates task conflicts.

Thanks for reading folks. Nozbe is great for single-user, and we’re happy we’ve given it a try, but as our business grows it is becoming impossible to use it to communicate in a team environment. We’ve seen minimal team improvements in these 8 months. The “delegating before accepting” feature is incredibly useful, but that’s the only feature that added value for us (I’m sure the server improvement was also very beneficial). We need something that works well, and we need it within the next few months. Outlook calendar + Nozbe might be the solution, or maybe not.

Cheers,
Christine