We need an easy way to integrate clients in our asana workflows without having to force them to get an asana account. In fact we even work for and with people, that might have no permission to integrate external systems in their workflow (i could name some in pm, if this helps). Others simply are not willing to make the step away from emails and we are not in the position to put any pressure on them.
The perfect way to integrate everyone would be a new kind of “collaborator” or “guest”, who gets email notifications about new comments and can directly answer to those notifications, just as others that have an account - but without ever seeing asana itself. They don’t need and they should not to be allowed to do more than that, reading and answering comments via emails is perfectly fine.
The biggest profits for me and my micro-business: by far less emails, the whole communication is consolidated in a task forever, clients get an even better service …
The biggest profits for asana: well, you know them all. … I pick this one: no other comparable system can do this trick, asana would have a really big and important stand alone feature.
@Stefan_Neumann would be nice to have this option, in fact about a year ago i so desperately needed this i found a plugin http://onboardify.com/ which is doing just this, but by then they were still in beta and i didn’t have the time or resources to stick around so you might look into it
Thank you, a great tip. I checked it, they have a video showing exactly how they solve this. Maybe i have a closer look, but before that i try to gain motivation for asana to solve this.
Thanks for the feedback, @Stefan_Neumann. I’m going to capture this in the Product Feedback category with a few tags so we an capture this for the Product team as we work on additional levels of permissions and user accounts in the future.
This is a needed feature. ALSO ALONG WITH THIS FEATURE: if you share a task/project with someone who belongs to a DIFFERENT Asana organization, they should be able to participate through the account they already use.
Bottom line is that clients and subcontractors need a way to participate in Asana.
a HUGE two thumbs on on this one. Our clients keep getting confused and resistant to have to work through an Asana interface, particularly when they need to download files. If there was a way to have them completely interface with tasks, comments and attachments through email, and without having an Asana account, I would pay even MORE of a subscription fee. Conversely, I may have to take a look at these competitive offerings, it’s just too compelling.
I would add to this that having shared task comments show up as “private user” is a huge turnoff for our clients and a barrier to wider adoption. Yes, I know I can make people members of projects so they can see names…but sometimes that’s just not appropriate. I want to share the task, but not the project on many, many occasions.
Hi Guys, i have the same problem too. I love asana but it is a problem when try to involve external even for communication or share part of the work. Untill now we force external resources to get into asana but for clients what i have create a private project known as CRM with a task for each client, so when i need to send them some request of update i use that chanel. Note when you add a client as a guest they will receive always notifications from asana even if they do not complete the registration process and they just need to hit reply bottom to update the task or the comments in asana.
Please note we handle tickets and contracts too, so for tickets we have zendesk too that send an email to asana creating a task for each new ticket and at the same time a task at the CRM project too so we keep updated our clients on each of their requests.
I’ve abandoned sharing with clients as guests because it’s too burdensome and they did not like having to login to access files. If not accessing files, I believe adding a client as a guest does notify them by email as desired in the comment.
Thank you for sharing your workflow, maybe i find a similar setting until asana comes up with a solution. In fact this is the only real problem we face in an otherwise excellent product, i hope they close this gap in an “asana-way”.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. As said in my opening, part of the problem is that we have clients, that are not allowed to use their email for making external accounts and lots of them are happy with mails and don’t want to use anything else. If asana would have an option to add a guest without sending an invitation, well, that would be a starting point. Until then, the invitation alone is too much.
In my experience, here’s the issue: even if Asana doesn’t encourage them to sign up, it’s still coming from an Asana email address. So unless Asana went all-out, duplicating Onboardify’s functionality, with a full Gmail (for me, maybe Outlook for others) integration that reads and syncs your email, it’s still going to cause confusion and frustration for customers.
I once hoped for a solution from Asana like what you’re talking about. But since I’ve worked with Onboardify through a lot of their development and testing to get to stable place, I can say it’s a ton of work and logistics, and dealing with other people’s API’s. All that makes it and very unlikely that Asana will want to go there. It’s a side project at best, since not everyone wants it, and so makes more sense as a 3rd party service like Onboardify. I guess we can always hope. But I’d be extremely surprised if we see this. It’s just not as easy of a task as it might seem.
On the other hand, something that might be easier or feasible, is if they synced only 1 email. So for example, maybe you have a support@ email address and that one gets fully synced with Asana. That’s how Helpscout does it (I believe) and takes away a lot of the moving parts involved in syncing everyone’s email on the team. However, even that would mean Asana wanted to position itself in the helpdesk arena and in a sense go head-to-head with the the other players in that arena that are much larger than Helpscout.
I guess I’m saying, I love this idea, and have some small hope it’ll happen. It would empower Asana in new ways. But I wouldn’t expect it, especially not anytime soon.
Hi there… I want o be able to request a task from a 3rd party outside of our organisation; which is easy with ASANA as an e mail will be sent… But the default message shows like this:
Test Task
Simon’s ENGLANDER changed the due date to May 2 — 8:52AM on May 2
Simon’s ENGLANDER assigned to you — 8:52AM on May 2
Task Details
ASSIGNEE
SY
Simon YAHOO
DUE DATE May 2, 2018
COLLABORATORS Simon’s ENGLANDER, Simon YAHOO
I don’t want to speak to a supplier using the terminology “Task Details” - this is frankly demeaning for someone that perhaps I have never met. Can this be removed.?
This is something that I would also be very keen to see and this type of functionality - plus better and more flexible control over member & guest permissions - would be enough to convince me to upgrade from the free to the paid version.
Like many others, I’m a service provider that wants to use Asana to manage client work. I’m a copywriter so it’s helpful to be able to work collaboratively with clients and get their feedback and approval on the record - but without forcing them to open a new account.
Some of my new clients have never even heard of Asana and just see it as another new techie thing to wrap their head around. Others will already be using their own CMS and project management tools and are reticent to commit to another.
So it would be super handy to be able to communicate with them from Asana, but have these messages simply show up as emails for them to respond to, without having to first respond to an invitation, enter a password and pick a project title. The emails coming ‘from’ Asana is OK with me - I can get most clients to get their head round the fact that I use online software called Asana to talk to them. Getting them to sign up to it is freaking some of them out and proving a barrier to use.
I know I can record client conversations in Asana by forwarding emails, but it would be so much easier, quicker and neater to be able to just copy them in to an Asana project conversation by entering their email.
… I pick this one: no other comparable system can do this trick, asana would have a really big and important stand alone feature.