Task2Gather review

Dave Oliver

We review Task2Gather, a cloud-based time management tool

Published on Sep 7, 2009

Vito Technology's Task2Gather is aimed primarily at small companies and offers a way to organise tasks and projects among groups. There's no need to sync developments with your desktop since it all happens via the Task2Gather website.

Once you've downloaded the software (£3.99 for version 1.3) and opened an account you can create as many projects as you like and manage them just as effectively either from your desktop or your handset.

Task2Gather has a clean, neatly laid out UI that's devoid of clutter, offering only what you need. Its hierarchical structure allows you to see different groups at a glance and you can then burrow into these to find day-to-day tasks assigned to various colleagues.

You can divide overall projects into sub tasks, and add as many of these as you like, assigning them to different colleagues who you can invite to a project from your contacts list.

You can also share tasks with others and discuss them instant messaging style, with the date and time of each comment. All comments will be shared with all team members though, since there's no option to send individual messages within Task2Gather.

It proved very easy to create tasks and edit them either on the website via the desktop or on the handheld. Changes updated almost instantly (within a few seconds) which makes it possible to keep on top of things. Usefully, you can colour code your tasks either to differentiate them, or to imply urgency, with six options: white, yellow, green, blue, violet and red.

You can log the amount of hours you've been working on a project, but unfortunately deadlines can only be set for days, not times, which is a trick sorely missed. There's no alert system either, so you won't be told by email, alarm or pop-up if someone else makes a change to a task – you'll only see it when you get around to checking the tasks on your handset.

None of the info is saved on your handset either, so if you happen to be somewhere without internet access, you won't be able to review any of your projects – a little offline functionality for back-up would have been useful.

As a day-to-day task manager, it's probably a little cumbersome – you'd be better off with TasksPlus or Remember The Milk. But for organising projects it makes perfect sense - it's easy to set up and use, you can organise new or existing projects on the hoof and discuss them with your colleagues as you go. Notifications and alerts would make it more useful, with an alarm or an email to inform you of changes, but even so, it's a decent, no-frills project organiser.