MS Outlook task tracking vs. VIP Task Manager task tracking

Notifications

MS Outlook uses e-mail accounts for sending and receiving task notifications. Task notifications come to Inbox folder of Mail Window together with other emails. Such email notifications settings are not very flexible. For example, you can notify assigned user of new task, or get a status report when this task is complete, but what if the task priority has changed from Low to High or you want to get notifications but you are neither owner nor assigned employee.

Besides email notifications, VIP Task Manager has a built-in Notifications Panel which allows managing Notifications users receive directly within the program. You can set the types of notifications you would like to get for almost all task attributes including Custom Fields and you can specify the folders, tasks and employees you would like to be notified of. Also Notification panel lets users to filter and sort multiple notifications by Date, Creator, Folder, etc. Notifications Panel helps to highlight a task related to received notifications in one click or open the task by double-clicking on its notification.

Comments

MS Outlook features Notes to specify tasks by detailed instructions, however, very often assigned employees need to ask some questions regarding the task or report a trouble they faced, and task owners need to get immediate feedback to initiate some corrective actions. Notes are not very good for that purpose, and email communication is very slow in this situation.

VIP Task Manager features both Notes and Comments panels. Notes panel is used for giving additional information required to successful task completion. Comments panel is like a real time chat where task owner and assigned employee can discuss the task details. Once assigned employee added a comment to a task, the task owner will immediately receive a notification of it and can add a comment in reply. This is an excellent way to track urgent issues and improve the overall performance.

Task history

MS Outlook creates tasks as files, so you can review when a task was created, received and modified as well as its size in bytes, but it is insufficient to track history of task changes. If you need to find out what changes were applied to a task, by whom and in what chronological order, you will hardly do this in MS Outlook.

VIP Task Manager features Task History panel which will be perfect for tracking tasks assigned to employees. You can use this panel to track which employees changed a task, what changes were added and when these changes occurred. For greater usability, you can filter, sort, preview and print out history of task changes.

MS Outlook task reporting vs. VIP Task Manager task reporting