Steve Dotto here and some kind of thrilled that you’re joining us today.
We’ve got a terrific demo lined up.
We’re going to take a look at another of the terrific to-do list managers that are
available online.
Now I use Asana and I showed you a demo of Asana in the past, which is a terrific team-based
task and to-do list manager.
We’re looked at other ones like Wunderlist and we’ll continue to look at this class
of software for a long time, I imagine.
I’ve got one planned coming up for a product called Todoist, which I’m very impressed
with.
But the topic today is a tool called Trello.
Now the thing about task and to-do list managers is most of the ones that I’ve used in the
online world are terrific.
They really do work well and allow you to work in a collaborative environment but each
one kind of has their own philosophy, their own flavor.
Now while Asana is kind of spartan and it’s got a very dialogue box-based metaphor, Trello
has an entirely different feel.
Trello has the look and feel of index cards and corkboards, which I love as a metaphor
because for me, it hearkens back to when I used to produce my TV show.
I had a business partner, a producer that worked on the show with me that was a long
time veteran TV producer and he brought this system to us which we used colored index cards.
We’d line the entire wall, all the walls of the office with corkboards, and each color
of index card represented something and we put down each and every detail of our TV show
on these index cards.
So it was like a team-based to-do list manager or task manager because we could all see the
corkboard at any time because we all worked in a shared office space.
We could go and we could modify things.
We could move them.
We could all see the results right there and it was a great visual representation of the
project that we were working on.
The reason that I like Trello so much is it really works with the same metaphor.
You can sign up for free and use it.
There are premium features which I will talk about in a few moments but the free service
is fairly robust and rich.
Now when you sign up for free, you’re brought into an area where you create different task
boards or different boards that are project-based.
Now I’ve got a few listed here.
It’s not really a rich environment as far as this demo’s concerned because I really
only use Trello on one main project that I work on which is I’m part of a team that
does publicity for a local theater company.
We use Trello and you can see our Trello board down here.
But regardless of if you’re using it by yourself or you’re using it with a team,
you can create your own boards and each board then becomes a project of its own.
This is the demo board that I’ve just created for us, for this particular demo.
If I go into the Demo for Trello card that I’ve already created for this board, I’ve
already gotten what I want to cover in this demo listed out.
So I’m using the tool here to keep me on track in this demo.
The talking points that I wanted to talk about are talking about labeling, how we use it
in a multi-user environment with members, due dates, notifications, including attachments
which are all really good things around basically putting together a team to-do list.
Let’s start with the basic card itself.
I created the card and I’ll show you how we created a new card before I go on.
Just add a cart and here is More important stuff.
Of course I spelled “important” wrong because I always make spelling mistakes when
I do these demos.
And then you just click ‘Add a card.’
Once you’ve added the card, you’ve got basically a blank card.
It’s like you’ve taken a blank index card out of a package and you’ve written ‘More
important stuff’ but you haven’t added any information to it.
As soon as you’ve created the card and then when you click on it, you can then go in and
you can start adding extra content and extra value to that particular card.
Now I’ve already started this card here so let’s work off of this card to see the
different things that we can do.
The first thing we can do is we can add members.
Now I’ve only got a couple of people signed up for this particular business but you can
see me and Dave are available here.
You can assign different tasks to different individuals and the more members that you
have of course here, the more people that will be engaged in that particular project.
So each of you is an individual and you could be accessed at all times from the different
cards which is great for assigning responsibilities to other people.
You’re going to love that feature.
This is one that I really like, the ability to label it.
This tool, Trello to me is a tremendously visual tool, where you can see again, like
we have in our corkboards, we can see the entire project outlined before you.
You can do that by changing the different colors of labels and actually changing the
label titles, actually adding titles.
I made this one “Important Stuff.”
You could add different colored labels to everything so you can recognize right away
what part of the project that card is reflecting.
You can also add checklists.
You can see I have a checklist added here.
You could just click on the checklist, you create a new checklist and add it, and then
you create different bullet points.
As you go through and do each of the bullet points, it checks off what’s happening within
that particular project.
The one nice thing that Trello does is it actually monitors everybody’s activities.
So if I close this down right now and then I take a look at a side bar, it’s going
to have all of the different things that I have been doing in Trello listed out.
So we’ve got kind of a narrative of what’s been happening.
If I checked off those things, one would think that if they were tasks that I had done what
were being assigned and you can see that I’ve completed different things within Trello here
and it’s giving us the activities.
So you can go in and you can see what other members or what you’ve done on the project
at any time, which is a great kind of junior project management tool.
Whoever owns the account can be going in and seeing who is interacting with the account,
what they’ve done with a quick snapshot placed in the side bar.
I like that feature.
Again, very visual.
The other thing that you could do within the different cards themselves is you can create
attachments which really adds a lot of flexibility.
You can add spreadsheets or graphics or word processing documents.
You can add them from your computer or shared documents in Google Drive or Dropbox.
There are lots of different ways to incorporate additional information into the project.
You can be adding invoices or waybill numbers or waybills themselves and scans.
You can add all sorts of different types of data into the project, anything that you basically
need in order for the project to move ahead.
At any point as well, you can add different comments in the cards of where you are with
things.
You could say, “We did that.
It worked.”
That note is then added into the comments so that people can see that the comments are
there and of course they’ll be reflected in the side bar as well.
So you see just from this list here that we’ve got some tremendous control over the type
of information and the type of tasks that we’re going to share within Trello.
The fact that it’s multi-user, the fact that we can have multiple users engaged, means
that it’s just that much more valuable.
It’s not just a personal task manager but it becomes a team task manager and that’s
really for me where it all begins.
We don’t have to be in the same office looking at the same corkboards.
It’s an online presence so we can all get to it at any time from our computer, and not
only from your computer but you could also—let’s just quickly jump here onto my Smartphone
and I’ll show you that we could also get access to Trello on our phone.
Yes indeed, we can.
Here’s my phone set up and let’s go in.
There, I’ve got Trello open up here and let’s just refresh it.
There’s the project that we’re just working on, the Trello project right there.
The exact same index card that we were just talking about, look at it, it even looks the
same.
It’s got the same color coding.
It’s got all the same stuff and it’s got, if I go down and if I take a look at the checklists,
I have to expand it.
It doesn’t have it all reflected in the same window because of course we’re talking
of a small phone screen but if I’ve done that last task, now 100% of this is done and
now all of those tasks in that checklist have been taken care.
So you see we have access to the same sort of information on our smartphone.
Bottom line, I think Trello is an outstanding tool and it’s one that if I’d actually
seen it before I saw Asana, I think it would be my preferred tool.
It would be one that I’d be doing an awful lot more with because I do really feel comfortable
and like this card-based metaphor.
As a matter of fact, even just doing this demo right now, I’m going how much work
would it be for me to move everything out of Asana and into Trello?
I’ll give it some thought.
Now I promised that I would talk to you about the premium services because Trello as a basic
free service is incredible full-featured.
Everything that we’ve done here, you can for free which makes me a little bit nervous
actually.
I like to see people charging a little bit more for things because I want to make sure
that they’re around.
But they think that they’re going to be fine so that’s all good.
If you go into your Profile, you could see there that you could get Trello Gold which
says “Support Trello and you get extra fun and functionality.”
This is their kind of second tier.
Free does everything that we’ve seen.
If we choose Trello Gold, if you invite new members, they’ll give you extra time for
free or you can spend $5 a month or $45 a year to upgrade.
For that, they give you some nice backgrounds to your images.
I guess you can create a real corkboard environment.
You probably can anyways.
They add stickers which you can add to your cards.
Oh boy.
Here’s something.
You can add 250 MB larger attachments so you can have larger attachments which might well
end up being very useful, especially if you’re working on graphics projects or something
like that and custom emojis.
So okay, that’s all fun.
And then they encourage you to share, which is absolutely fine if you like the product.
The nature of using Trello, everybody that you work on projects with, you’re going
to be proselytizing to because you’re going to be asking them to sign up so you’re going
to be able to add and help Trello to go.
Now if this was the only upgrade path, I would be concerned about this product because one
thing I always want to see is a business case that tells me that they are going to be around
in the future.
But fortunately, they also have Business Class and if we look at their Business Class Service,
it costs a fair bit more but it’s for much larger installations.
$500 a year but it does have some really nice features such as extra control of the board,
the ability to export data out instantly and this is the most important one – syncing
within your Google apps integration.
So if you’re using Google Apps as an office tool, then you link your Google Apps to Trello
and then Trello becomes just another tool in your app area.
I think that that is a way that it will really integrate nicely within a corporate environment.
You can also create an observer only role which is great so that you can have people
who just see what’s happening with the project but can’t actually post and make changes
to the project.
So here we see it’s starting to kind of grow into a real business tool that organizations
and enterprises might be looking at and entrenching it as part of their own corporate process.
Bottom line as far as Trello is concerned is if you are in the market for a task and
to-do list manager and multi-user is important to you, which I think it should be, Trello
is well worth a look.
It’s not the only one by any means that’s worth a look.
Asana is a tremendous robust tool and all of these guys keep adding extra functionality
all the time.
As I said, the other one that I think is really hot these days is one called Todoist, which
I’m going to be doing a demo on very shortly.
But they each have their own flavor.
They each have their own feel so you’re going to find one that fits and speaks to
your organizational soul that is exactly what you’re going to be looking for.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed putting it together and as I say, Trello, I’m really tempted
to migrate everything to Trello.
I might just end up just closing the office door and spending the next couple of days
moving all of my projects onto Trello.
It’s that good of a product.
As I said, I hope you found this video to be useful.
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