Over the past decade the our staff and many of our friends explored many tools for organizing, tracking and prioritizing tasks. We didn't set out to develop a product. We were looking for a tool for our own use. We spent thousands of dollars buying software that looked promising. Installing, learning and using a number of products. Some were better than others, a few were quite good. Every one of them was missing a feature or function we needed. Over the years many new products have come on the market. They have improved tremendously over the past generations of tools. But again each product we evaluated had at least one major deficiency. We would find a product that could organize our work well, and it couldn't handle collaboration at all. Tools that did allow multiple users did it badly. It seemed as if the focus of all the products was to create good to-do list tools, but collaboration was an after-thought.
It eventually occurred to us that our list of requirements, needs, demands, must-haves, and would-be-really-great-ifs could be used as a foundation to develop a tool that would fill our needs. It also occurred to us that perhaps we weren't alone in our search. With all of this in mind we decided to build a prototype of our perfect tool.
A key difference in the way we were going to approach building Task101 was that we made collaboration the cornerstone of the product design. It was obvious that we could build a good to-do list tool, we had so much practice evaluating other products that we had become experts in what not to do. The key, we thought, would be to create a simple and effective way to share tasks. To us it seemed that a good solution would need to be flexible enough to let everyone share work, yet secure enough to keep private tasks invisible to those who shouldn't see them. We also insisted that Task101 work on mobile devices and smart-phones so we could share tasks and notifications while we were on the go.
As it turned out, our prototype worked. Fairly well as a matter of fact. It was a bare-bones attempt, but it did prove that what we thought could be done, in fact could be done. We played with our new toy for quite a while before we took the next step. We formalized the set of product requirements and features and nicknamed the new product. As time went by and features and functions started coming together we began to search for domain name for our new product. Purely by chance we hit upon Task101. And that was the beginning.
A lot has happened since we began this venture and much time has passed. Now our first version of Task101 is up on the web at www.task101.com. It doesn't have all of the features or functions we set out to put into Task101, but those will be coming soon. We decided in the very beginning that would be better to have a well designed, fully tested and secure product that doesn't crash or do odd things with your data rather than a full featured cool looking product that is buggy and unreliable. So there you have it! We will only publish features, functions and enhancements when they are ready to be released.
Give Task101 a try. We will be publishing the list of features and functions that are coming. We will be adding and enhancing Task101 often. If you like it, tell us. If we could do something better, let us know. If you have an idea, suggest it. We want to create a tool that will satisfy all of our needs. Please help us!
Now, about the price; we think most people will be happy with the Community Edition. The Community Edition is FREE and includes all of the features that an average person would need! There are features that are limited, but most users won't need them. Business owners, executives and managers will find the collaborative features very valuable. These features are available without restriction in the Premium Edition and Professional Edition. Not to worry, the cost for these editions is modest, really. We prefer to have many users paying a very small fee than a few users paying a large fee. We think keeping the price low will encourage more people to use Task101.