Adding Functionality directly into Asana like Harvest via custom UX/UI

When you sign up for Harvest a Timer Icon shows up in ASANA on the tasks. This level of integration is crucial for 3rd party apps as the whole point is to stay in ONE application and add value to it. This seems to be the issue with a lot of the 3rd party integrations and justifying the exorbitant fees to use them. The complaint is “if we have to exit out of Asana to a 3rd party app why use Asana as the middleman”? Integrations are typically a one-trick pony and you can end up with multiple of these just to get basic PM tasks done that could just as easily, and cheaply, do in a traditional/online PM application.

So my question is can we as developers do the same thing like Harvest where we can add value in terms of UX/UI customization’s along with the integrations. I don’t see anywhere in the developer documentation about “adding icons to Asana that tie directly to your integrations” and hacking the UI through chrome extensions seems wrong.

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Harvest integration is produced by Asana itself, this is why it “feels” natural. Other providers extend Asana with Browser Addons/Extensions, like Toggle, Timeneye or Everhour, but these sometimes break and you rely on developer to update their extension after Asana changes their UI beaking integration.

The proper way would be for Asana to define integration API and stick to it, keeping strong relationship with developers relying on that API, but probably community of Integrations developers is not uniform enough to push Asana to this decisions.

My guess is that Asana will allow other “deep integration” in the future. I hope so :sweat_smile:

Hmm, great question… You know, maybe you should get in touch with the guys from TMetric - they have the same built-in integration with Asana.

I think TMetric is “unofficial”, Harvest is really “hard coded” inside Asana.

Are there any updates to “My guess is that Asana will allow other “deep integration” in the future. I hope so :sweat_smile:

Would like to create a time tracking integration but the api of the target time tracking system does not allow cross origin requests so the browser extension is a no go :frowning:

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No updates, but do keep in mind that Asana has a policy of not announcing things before they’re ready.

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