With so many project management and team collaboration apps in the market, I’m fast running out of words for the opening paragraphs of my reviews! After three years of watching the web app space closely, it’s easy for me to spot trends from time to time.
These days, each and every individual uses a bunch of cloud apps to communicate, collaborate, share, and store data. Apps that tend to integrate with popular third party solutions to create a productive synergy have a bright and lucrative future ahead.
Azendoo positions itself as one such productivity app that taps into the power of popular cloud apps like Evernote, Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. It’s a useful tool that brings together everything else your business is using for productivity so you can use that data in your projects.
Pricing
Azendoo Plans
Azendoo is decently priced. It follows the industry standard user subscription model that comes in two variants. Basically, the amount of storage space determines if you have to pay $5 or $9 per user. The free tier lacks some of the bells and whistles, but comes with a generous 5 user limit.
Getting Started
Azendoo offers a true one click sign up option using your existing Google Account. Once you signup with Google, the app automatically gets access to the content available in your Google Drive.
Creating a workspace is a four step process, which is made further easier by a help wizard. Except for referring to tags as Subjects, the process of getting started is fairly simple.
A Colorful Workspace
The user interface of Azendoo is gorgeous and is definitely the most colorful one I have seen in quite sometime. The background in particular is a riot of colors and is a nice change from the regular light and pale color schemes.
Before connecting to the cloud services, I wanted to load up the workspace with a good amount of tasks. And, it was incredibly easy to do as well!
Organizing Tasks
Like every other team collaboration application out there, tasks form the basic building blocks of all projects. Usually, tasks will be created under milestones and surprisingly that feature is still in development and will be available in paid plans only when it’s ready.
Adding Tasks to the Calendar
When you add tasks, you don’t have to fill in any meta data. In fact, you are not forced to add any in the first place. Type in a task and hit Enter and all tasks are automatically added to the current date. Later, when you need to add more details to a task, double click on it and there is a whole bunch of useful extras to add to it. Recurring tasks and reminders are two that got my attention. The rest of the standard features like adding comments, deadlines, description etc. are all there.
Got tasks that have deadlines other than today? Just drag and drop them in their respectives dates or weeks in the calendar views. It’s a very practical decision to show the days of the current week in one section followed by rest of the weeks in the month. Makes a lot of difference from organizational and design standpoints!
Cloud Connections
You can connect to Evernote, Dropbox, Box and Google Drive accounts from the Settings page. It goes without saying that Azendoo doesn’t store your login credentials and all authorizations happen using OAuth.
Sharing Files from my Dropbox
Connecting these accounts won’t change anything in the user interface. The controls for social sharing are all there at the right places. Once you activate the integrations, the share buttons in the task metadata and comments sections come to life. Hit up the respective icons of the cloud accounts you have connected to and a sleek a file explorer will present itself.
Sharing from my Google Drive
From the file explorer, it’s just point and click to share with the team. I connected to all services except for Evernote. I have to admit that the UI design of the sharing design perfectly crafted and is a pleasure to use. Azendoo file explorer respects folder organization and you’ll find the files where you have stored in the first place.
In addition to communicating with the team via comments, you can also ask for feedback and opinion using polls. It’s a pretty basic yes or no question that masquerades as a poll, but is more than enough in most scenarios.
Final Thoughts
Azendoo makes it easy to keep your team in sync on projects by sharing updates, files & ideas. It’s a fairly decent task management app and is priced attractively. Azendoo strives hard to be visually appealing to the user. The calendar view in particular is a great example. Graphical representation of task division, progress etc. will add to this effect and to differentiate the app further from the ton of competitors.
And, I wish they keep adding more cloud apps to their toolkit. Springboard integration is one thing that I am very much looking forward to in the future updates. Azendoo for sure is a great companion for teams that lean heavily on the cloud for collaboration.