Trello from Atlassian is a project management tool based on a Kanban framework. Trello is ideal for task-management in a to-do list format. It supports sharing boards and cards across users or teams. The product offers a free version, and paid versions add greater automation, collaboration, and administrative control.
$12.50
per user/per month
XaitPorter
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
XaitPorter is a co-authoring software solution for teams to collaboratively create, manage and produce documents. With it, users can streamline and optimize document production to maximize revenue from bids and proposals and other business-critical documents. XaitPorter is designed to enable co-authors to focus on creating bid-winning content so that teams can become more efficient while production time and costs are reduced.
It is well suited to my job requirements as I bring employees in, and I help offboard them as well. This tool helps me when I need to make sure all items are completed by a certain time frame, so I would say it holds us accountable. Someone who doesn't manage a group of people may not find this as useful when dealing with others but could use it for their own accountability when needing to track their accomplishments.
XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
It helps make various workspaces. Each workspace can be used for a different set of task management and can be shared with the people involved.
Creating task lists. We can create various task lists, the list title could be the status of the task, for example, In progress, approval, completed, etc. You can slide your task cards from one list title to another.
Trello cards have a huge set of features like adding the heading and description of the task, you can also attach certain associated links and documents to the cards as well.
This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision.
We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away.
We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word).
Allow tables as content for comment or description in Cards
Assign priority to certain cards (easy for sorting)
Create an open invite link for others to join/view the Trello board, without edit rights (so people don't need to install/use Trello if they want a quick glance on what's going on)
It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions.
The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation.
The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins.
The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool.
Word import/export could be cleaner.
The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too.
The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better.
I am very likely to renew Trello, because it doesn't cost anything to do so. I am also very likely to use Trello's upgraded features in the future because a lot of my team's data is stored on there and they have already gotten used to the platform. Trello is very easy for new team members to pick up, making the onboarding and usability very streamlined.
Overall, Trello is a great tool to use. It's very user-friendly, very powerful and we've set it up to work well for our team. I've recommended it to others who need something free or very cheap and it's worked well for them too. If you're wanting something with more muscle, then I'd suggest looking at either monday.com or Airtable.
I haven't had much need to contact their support because the product is easy to use and pretty bug-free. I did reach out to them about swimlanes and I was able to find the information I needed very quickly and it was thorough and accurate information about current functionality. I love that they use their own product. That's always a good sign.
He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
For our small business, getting a few of us started well on Trello was the key, I think. As long as a couple of us were really comfortable with the interface, we could lead others and help them with any questions. From now on, anyone who works with us just naturally uses Trello for information sharing - it's just part of what we do.
Trello is easy for a non-technical person to use. Other management systems, like MS Project, frighten away less computer-savvy users. I've found this to be instrumental in getting volunteers to agree to step in and get fully involved with projects--particularly those that might span the entire year or involve many different pieces to completion.
The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
Trello keeps me organized, focused, and on track. I could filter the Trello board to only see my issues and understand what I needed to work on and when.
Trello helped our team implement an agile structure. It's a very simple kanban method of viewing all of your team's tasks and statuses. You can completely customize the columns to your team's specific workflow and create tags relevant to your work.
Trello helps reduce unnecessary communications between teams. When I want to request translations, I simply create a card on the localization Trello board -- no need to directly message anyone on the team, and I can watch the status of the card change from "in progress" to "in review" to "translated," all without having to directly ask for updates.
Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in.
Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications.
