I recently spoke with Russell Mix, CEO; Reichart von Wolfshield, CTO; and Gabriel Blanc-Laine, VP Sales and Marketing at Qtask. The firm was spun off from Prolific Publishing, Inc. in 2007. Russell and his team developed Qtask to meet the collaboration needs they recognized at Prolific. Their firm had 30 employees in multiple locations and needed an effective means to communicate and collaborate around multiple projects. Not satisfied with what was available, they recognized a market need and set out to develop and bring to market an integrated suite of collaboration tools that provide all the needs of dispersed teams in one application. It is initially designed for the small-to-medium sized business market.

Qtask is a SaaS offering that is available for immediate use without any development efforts or maintenance requirements. The organizing principle for Qtask activities is a project. You first set up a project and invite team members to join. Then the team can share information and knowledge, communicate, collaborate, and view the status and results of their efforts. The transparency allows for personal and team accountability and makes it clear who is responsible for undertaking and completing a task or assignment. This is a one of the great features of enterprise 2.0 that I have written about on a number of occasions. Because of this transparent nature, Qtask fosters a higher level of work, ownership and trust among co-workers. It is ironic that the use of social software within enterprise 2.0 actually increases accountability, despite some concerns over opposite outcomes.

This accountability is facilitated by continuous and accurate updates of a task or project. Every team member is just a click away from obtaining a complete picture of a project’s status. In addition to automatically logging information changes, Qtask immediately notifies the project team of those changes. Discussions are facilitated as content that can be automatically organized by thread (or in threads) and pre-filed per project, services, and topics. New input is sorted and displayed at the project level. Discussions can be attached to other services such as meetings, tasks, forms and compliance. Discussions can also be private or threaded into forum topics to be more focused. Three different views offer flexibility as to how discussions are displayed.

Gabriel walked me through the application and it was very clear. Everything is searchable and I liked their search capabilities. You can filter by projects, people and time. You can look into discussions, files, wikis, forums, tasks, calendar items or all of the above. Then you can further focus in within these categories. See the search box displayed below.

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The Qtask dashboard is organized around tasks, schedules, wikis, invites, members, compliance and files. Compliance refers to the tasks needed for such requirements as Sarbane-Oxley. See example of a dsahboard below.

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Qtask’s includes an Automatic Version Control that records any changes made to an existing file. Those changes and their author are identified and logged, while all the previous versions are saved and made available. Because information can never be permanently deleted it can never be lost. You can view things at a global level or at the individual project level. This gives senior executives an enhanced ability to monitor the complete activities of the firm or a division. You can be alerted to tasks that are late, but also to tasks that are at risk of being late before they actually become late. Qtask and all its alerts are also available through mobile devices such as Blackberry and iPhones (or any cell phone with a web browser). Here is a team compliance screen.

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I think the integrated nature of these tools will be an efficiency boost. Here is what ReadWriteWeb said, “Qtask offers a variety of services that make it competitive with other enterprise-friendly team collaboration portals…With its comprehensive tool set, projects can be created, managed, maintained, and tracked. Because all the information relating to various tasks is online, new team members can get up-to-date quickly on the status of various projects just by signing into Qtask.” I think it is classic example of what enterprise 2.0 can bring to the workplace with a great mix of features.