Our latest release is out and ready for you to enhance your external collaboration. This is part 2 of our Tips & Tricks series around our new collaboration features from the March 2022 Release. If you haven’t read part 1 about Collaboration Connect, check it out here. Today I will be talking about Collaboration View, an enhancement on a classic: External Sharing. Collaboration View provides more context for your customers or partners throughout the project lifecycle. Now, they will be able to easily view project details in multiple ways, such as an overall project plan, team or individual to-do lists, or just a project snapshot with Project Insights. Your external stakeholders will be able to get the information they need in the way they want.
Before looking at the best ways to use this feature, you’ll want to activate it for your org. There is a similar utility to the Collaboration Connect that you will want to walk through when setting up this feature to ensure it is done correctly and everything should run smoothly from there. Let’s get acquainted with it.
Note: This feature is part of our Public Collaboration Licenses that are provided to all of our Standard and Premium Editions in order for you to take full advantage.
There are a few fields you will want to check out now that Collaboration View is enabled: “Viewable in Collaboration View”, “Collaboration View Link”, and “Collaboration View Notes. “Viewable in Collaboration View” is a checkbox that needs to be checked in order for a link to populate the “Collaboration View Link” field. You don’t have to worry about creating the link. By checking the box, the link is automatically created. Finally, there are the “Collaboration View Notes.” This field is filled out by the internal user and is visible within the Collaboration View for your external stakeholders to see. This field can be updated throughout the project, so if there are new notes you need the client to see, you can update the field and on the Collaboration View side, they will see the update. When it comes to the checkbox, once you uncheck the box, the link will disappear, however, your external stakeholder might have the link. Not to worry, once the box gets unchecked, the link will no longer work, so they won’t be able to see anything.
If you’ve used the External Sharing link, you’ll notice some similarities and differences with Collaboration View. The Gantt chart is staying, as well as being able to view Project and Task details if you double click on one of them. What’s new is the expanded Project insights sidebar and a new section for Project Notes.
With Collaboration View, you have the same ability to control the level of information that is viewable by external stakeholders, such as making a Task “Internal Only” or controlling field-level security through the profile or permission set of the site guest user. You’ll notice in that screenshot that there are multiple projects in the dashboard, New Project Plan, Product, Marketing, and Engineering. By popular demand (like, really popular!), you can now include subprojects in the same Collaboration View as the parent project. All you need to do is make sure that each subproject is marked as “Collaboration View.” You can also decide not to share one of the sub-projects, just make sure “Collaboration View” is unchecked. You can even only show a subproject and not its parent, by only sharing that specific project link.
Something new that we’ve introduced in this Collaboration View is a new view, called “To-Do”. This pairs with the Collaboration Connect feature from part 1 of this Tips & Tricks series. You by no means have to use both of these features, although when used together, they create a workflow for managing, assigning, and completing tasks. . The external stakeholder will get an email alerting them to tasks they own, and from that email, they can click into Collaboration View to see the Project Plan for full project context, or the To-Do tab to see all of the tasks they own. Once they’ve completed their work they can go back to that email to mark it completed. We’ve modeled the To-Do view off of our My Work tab so it will only show them the tasks they own externally. This is still a read-only view, so they will not be able to take any action, but everything is available to view when necessary. Here is a short screen recording outlining this tab:
That’s right, next-level collaboration!
From the screenshots and gifs, you can also see that there is nothing referencing “TaskRay.” This, similarly to the customization options ofCollaboration ConnectCollaboration View, was on purpose. We have made it possible to add your own branding, so as to not confuse your clients or partners when they view the Collaboration View. In the bottom setup utility, there is a section where you can upload your own logo and change the header color with a HEX code to match your branding colors. Additionally, when setting up Collaboration View, you can choose task fields to be displayed as columns in the Gantt chart and you can pick a default view, between “Project Plan” and “To-Do”, so that whenever someone clicks the project link they are always brought to that view.
Enhance your external collaboration with Collaboration View and take your implementations to the next level. We are really excited about these new features and we hope you are too! To learn more and get a demo of Collaboration View, watch our Feature Focus Webinar here.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or success@taskray.com.
