Features
Grindstone Sync
Task Force and Grindstone are designed to work together. Grindstone makes it nearly effortless for the members of your team to stay on top of their tasks and time. Task Force makes it just as easy to see the results, and make use of the data. Like magic, Grindstone and Task Force keep each other up to date automatically without any need to remember complex steps or security information.
And when you have a new team member join up, getting them started couldn't be easier. In fact, it's just as simple as logging in to Task Force. Once Grindstone and Task Force complete the pairing process (which takes only seconds), Task Force will tell your new team member's copy of Grindstone all about what you're working on and how you organize your tasks.
As Grindstone helps your team members track their time, discretion and privacy are strongly observed. For example, Grindstone constantly reminds users to submit their time to Task Force, but will wait until your team member says she is ready to submit her time before it actually does. We've found that any other method will make your team members think of Grindstone and Task Force as things to be managed and considered constantly and carefully, rather than as tools to help them track time accurately and easily. In the end—without giving the user complete control over when and how their time is submitted—you will be left with less productivity rather than more.
Project Management
While introducing the paradigm of a team working together to architecture put forth by Grindstone, Task Force differentiates between the time logged by Jim and the time logged by Susan. In addition to that, it keeps separate track of their estimates, due dates, and complete dates for each task. This information is available to Manager users in Task Force to see how the team is doing.
You can issue assignments for tasks to users on your team, modify or remove those assignments, observe how much has been done, when it was done, and where you're running late or over estimate—all within Task Force. Your changes to users' task assignments, due dates, and estimates are automatically relayed to Grindstone, which gets the attention of your users to notify and remind them of the details of your scheduling.
Administrative users have full control over what Task Force permits users to do. If you work in a very open environment, you might prefer to allow anyone and everyone to change the organization of tasks, modify time segments from several months ago, or change the names of custom fields. However, in more structured environments you may prefer to reserve those powers to yourself. You can also specify that Task Force only divulge the tasks to which a user has been assigned to work, rather than all the tasks in your account.
Dynamic Reporting
The amazing power of Custom Fields and Grindstone's unbeatable timing accuracy combine in Task Force to produce a reporting experience unlike anything you've ever seen before. The level of detail and the number of perspectives from which you can look at your team's time are just incredible.
Filter out time by text found in the task's name or in any of your custom fields, by which user or users were working, or the dates and times it was logged. Then, choose how you want the time to be broken down or delineated: by task, by user, or by any of your custom fields. The upshot is an approach that allows you to see what you want to see in virtually any way you want to see it: from the combined timesheets of everyone working on tasks for just one of your clients by which task, to a breakdown chart of all the time spent on a particular project, in a given month, by which team members did the work.
Cloud Computing
Task Force runs within a Cloud Computing Environment called Windows Azure. What this means for you is that Task Force is protected from just about anything that could cause service interruptions, such as power outages and Internet connection issues. Even if the data center in which your team's Task Force data resides was destroyed by a comet, a giant lizard, or Magneto—which would be kind cool even though inconvenient—Windows Azure would react by using backup resources in other locations to keep Task Force going, and you'd never know the difference—unless the giant lizard was also on the news.
High Performance Framework
What's supporting and coordinating all of Task Force's incredible features and functionality is Epiforge's very own web presentation framework. It's a custom-designed layer of logic between the web server software and the Task Force core feature set. And what that gets you is a remarkable user experience without the need for anything other than a standard, out-of-the-box web browser.
For client-server communications, the framework uses a very advanced technical process that minimizes the size of messages going back and forth between your web browser and Task Force, and eliminates any waste of bandwidth. So, all of the hard work that's been put into making every part of Task Force so useful, usable, and beautiful, is presented at the highest speed and with the greatest efficiency.
Web Standards & Device Support
On top of everything else, we use the latest web technologies (HTML 5 & CSS 3) and browser-based vector graphics (SVG & VML), so you get the most engaging experience on every device you use—whether it's your desktop at work, the iPad on your couch, or the phone in your pocket. No Flash plug-in required.
