View/Compare Past Versions of a Task — Status and Details.
Abigail Larsen
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This, along with the need for push notification of task updates, has been identified as a very real need by our team after working with stacks for a couple of months.
For the task details to work most efficiently, they should only contain information appropriate to next steps. However, tasks needs change over time and the inability to access past versions of task statuses and details has been an issue for our team. We have made an internal decision to work within Stacks abilities and never delete the notes of others, but this results in long and unwieldy task details that can be as bad as email chains when sifting for currently actionable informaiton.
The ability to view and/or compare past versions of task status and details would be a boon!!!
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Support Staff 2 Posted by Bruce Clark on 18 Dec, 2009 08:33 PM
Abigail,
Thanks so much for this feedback. We have similar issues with tasks that get extended over a long period of time. The ongoing alterations of tasks and the ability to not have a logged "discussion" or "history" of them is a bit rough. The solution you are using is the one we are using as well, this is not the most ideal (although it works) and we plan to address it in the future.
It won't make launch. That said, it will be something we focus on because we feel that need as well.
Thanks again for your feedback, we're glad to hear you're using Stacks.
Support Staff 3 Posted by Bruce Clark on 18 Feb, 2010 08:58 PM
I wanted to give you some more clarification on this. We've continued discussion internally and started out towards a few solutions.
We're considering logging task detail changes and status changes in the history, and making the history a bit more "filterable" in order to find these changes quickly. It's not quite discussion thread, but it is a way to check and see the iterations of who said what when.
Another option, which we're more hesitant of, is to implement a straight up task discussion thread. There are a few downfalls and advantages to this. The big concern is that it will add weight and time to the task, as people will have to parse through the discussion and not have one single field which contains all relevant details.
We will have a solution for this in the near future. Until then we just wanted to let you know we're still working on and thinking about it. Cheers!
4 Posted by Abigail Larsen on 18 Feb, 2010 09:08 PM
I’m in total agreement with you about the approach. I think the history should simply be a list of the different stages of evolution of the details, the different versions, who edited 'em, etc. One should be able to keep the details current at all times, but have the ability to browse through the past versions in case something was mistakenly deleted, or if old versions of the details had useful info that needs retrieving. (Not infrequently, tasks get passed from one person to the next by the project manager who will "clean up" the details for the next person, only to find that the person who held the task previously needed some bit of info that was "cleaned up".) I think a discussion thread would be too much. We agree!
— Abby