The holiday season is here! And with it, the end of (yet another) unprecedented year. Chances are you’ve learned a great deal over the last year. Whether that growth came in the form of rethinking your business processes or rethinking your life choices, TaskRay is here to help! Okay, maybe we can’t help with the second thing but we can definitely help streamline your business processes.
As the year comes to a close, it’s easy to find yourself thinking back over the last year – What fostered growth and improved performance? What didn’t? How can these lessons be applied to the year ahead?
One of the easiest ways to prepare for growth in the new year is to clean up your workspace. Out with the old and in with the new! TaskRay’s Fall 2021 Release introduced a multitude of excellent features that will help you stay organized in the new year. In this blog post we will do a deep dive into one specific Premium feature that is designed to help declutter your users’ views: the Excluding Modal Tabs feature!
Out-of-the-box, TaskRay comes with preset tabs on the task and project detail panes, along with the ability to configure custom ones to tailor the view to each organization’s use case. Chances are, not all of the standard tabs on a project or task modal are going to be useful for all the different types of users in your organization. Maybe not all users track time, maybe not everyone uses chatter. Maybe there are even certain types of users that you don’t want to be able to view information you’ve surfaced in a custom tab. Whatever the reason, removing unnecessary tabs can foster productivity and streamline visibility. And that is the exact thinking behind this newly introduced feature.
Excluding modal tabs can be done on the Project, Task Group, and Task level. You can set this up globally to set the same views for all TaskRay users, or you can tailor this to specific users or profiles.
For example, at Santa Claus Global Inc. (SCG), the internal (corporate) users have a very different set of needs than the external (local contractor) users. Modifying the tabs that each of these users have access to has greatly improved their experience.
While it’s helpful for internal users to share Files with each other, see who’s part of the Team, and check their Checklist items (maybe even twice), external users have no use for those tabs. Instead, they just need to see the details of the job, a way to log the time they’ve spent building and delivering products, and a way to use Chatter with internal users for collaboration. Here is how SCG set up the task views for their different users:
Internal Task Modal Tabs
External Task Modal Tabs
Because SCG Inc. wants their external community users to be adding Chatter at the task level, why give them the option for Chatter at the project or task group level? Removing tabs in places they shouldn’t be used helps guide the user and set them up for success. Let’s see how SCG set up their different project tabs:
Internal Project Modal Tabs
External Project Modal Tabs
Similarly, internal users should only be adding Files and posting Chatter at the project level or the task level – so to make sure posts aren’t being missed or misplaced, SCG Inc. has removed them from the Task Group modal, like this:
Now, let’s look at some additional specifics of this configuration. In SCG Inc.’s org, the internal and external users are assigned different profiles. This is important to note because the organization used profiles for configuring specific tab settings for the different subsets of users.
More specifically, all internal user profiles have the following tab access in the org:
- Project: Details, Team, Insights, Chatter, Files
- Task Group: Details
- Task: Details, Chatter, Files, Checklist
And all users with an external community profiles have the following tab access in the community:
- Project: Details
- Task Group: Details
- Task: Details, Time, Chatter
While that is how the team at SCG, Inc. set their users up for success in the new year, it is just one application of this new feature. There are many other use cases that this functionality can be applied to. Tailoring which tabs are surfaced in which modals to how the users manage their work will help you teams stay focused and organized in the new year! Want to learn more? Check out the instructions laid out in our support article on Excluding Modal Tabs.
Excluding Modal Tabs feature is only available on the Premium edition of TaskRay. If you have any questions about any of the functionality described in this blog, please reach out to support@taskray.com.
