This week we have completely revamped tasks and introduced a preferred name field for contacts, which allows you to better personalize your automatic client task emails.

The changes that have been made to tasks allow your team to better collaborate on what needs to get done, and seamlessly view what's important. These changes apply to tasks and sub-tasks on work items and work templates.

Add comments and notify colleagues

You can now add internal comments on any task in Karbon just like you can against an email. You can notify chosen team members by mentioning them, and carry out discussions about the work that needs to get done, right where it makes sense.

Whether you need to ask for a colleague's input, request for something to be reviewed, or notify someone their own task is ready to begin, comments make it a lot easier to communicate, collaborate and work more effectively.

Formatting options

By popular demand, the description field of a task now allows for you to add full formatting. Create a bullet list, paste a screenshot image, draw attention to something with a different color, or add an emoji.

Upload files

Along with formatting comes the ability to upload files. If a document is relevant to a task or sub-task, you can add it there reference. 

Opt-in or out of task notifications

If you are an active participant in a task comment thread, are mentioned by another colleague, or you are the task's assignee, you will be notified in Triage of any task comments. With a new toggle, you can turn these notifications off (but you'll still be notified when a team member mentions you), or you can opt-in to receive notifications about other tasks that you are not already a part of.

Task information panels

The interface of tasks has been updated to provide you with more critical information at-a-glance, and to keep things consistent with other areas of Karbon (such as the interface of emails). Tasks now have three side panels for general information (assignee, to-do date, due date, status, notification preference), work (the piece of work that the task is associated with), and colleagues (all team members who have access to that work item and task).

More intuitive Triage notifications

The information panels outlined above are particularly useful for giving the task context when you are viewing it as a Triage notification. Before you expand the notification, you'll also see details at-a-glance of the task's work item, contact, and task section name. 

Audit activity history

Tasks now give you a full audit history of any activity updates. This includes details and time that a status or assignee was changed.

Contact preferred name

Contacts now have a new field—preferred name. As well as giving you another way of keeping track of the personal preferences of some of your clients, it offers greater personalization for your automatic client task emails. By default, these will now default to send to "Hi <preferred_name>".

If a contact does not have a preferred name specified, it will send to "Hi <full_name>" instead. And if you have made any changes to any client task email templates, those changes will be retained.