OmniFocus is a project management platform for iOS: Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It has features such as task management, Siri capture, and workflow automation.
$4.99
per month
PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
N/A
Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
1) Great for managing your work and personal activities. 2) One of the best implementations of the Getting Things Done method. 3) Not really suited for collaborative work management; OmniFocus is managed on a per-user basis so you can't share/assign tasks.
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects). With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
Ease of viewing what tasks need to be done at the present moment and the sorting of those tasks by availability, due date, start date, needed resources, and project.
The visual interface is really nice to work with, the UX/UI is intelligent and intuitive.
It's the most extensible software I've used. There is a community of people that publish compatible scripts for Omnifocus at no charge.
The code is robust and I've almost never had a bug or a glitch that resulted in issues.
The software syncs in the cloud between MacOS and iOS seamlessly and faster than other To-Do software. The sync aspect is available free of charge.
The development team at Omnifocus is on top of bugs and they have been adding releases regularly to increase functionality and performance.
While OmniFocus adheres to the GTD (Getting things done) principles, it can be used in almost any manner and you aren't stuck with just that methodology.
We love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
I would really like to see graphic presentations of how I allocate my time, what categories of tasks don't get accomplished, etc.
I would like to see OmniFocus include Gantt chart functionality, such as allowing me to see how long it took me to accomplish a task from start to finish. Allowing me to actually input time spent, and seeing it on a Gantt chart, would be icing on the cake.
Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
(The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
OmniFocus has excellent user forums. They're active as well as mature, since the product has been around for years. I've never needed to actually contact customer support because OmniFocus is popular enough that I've always been able to find an answer in the forums, or in an article, or in a YouTube video.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
OmniFocus is built for the user with a lot going on - consequently, it does a great job at organizing lots of things in a manageable workload. It's perfect for taking a project and breaking it down into small tasks for yourself or teams. Once you get past the learning curve, it's quick at adding new tasks. Overall, it's an excellent product.
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
OmniFocus keeps our tasks moving forward. Using a free script you can search all your current projects for projects that have no next step assigned to it to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
When we serve our clients, the attention to detail we are able to give them comes from accurate tracking of what we need to deliver.
We complete projects 25% faster than before and we can see where the bottlenecks are immediate. We have also been forced to document tasks in a more concrete manner which allows for better execution.
Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
