So what’s happened to the company since it made a big splash at last year’s conference? (This year’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco is just a few weeks away on  December 8^th.) In short, they’ve become a piece of a larger puzzle, being acquired by Mindjet to help create a broader solution that takes ideas all the way from inception to execution.

Around a year ago Mindjet, known for its mind mapping and brainstorming solutions, decided to expand from just helping people generate and capture ideas to also helping them realize them. To do that they needed some new technology, and after keeping a close eye on the project management space as well as pondering building a product themselves, they happened upon Cohuman, which met their needs and which had been struggling to find funding.

The acquisition went through in August of this year, with Mindjet releasing a rebranded Mindjet Cohuman on September 22. But don’t worry if you loved Cohuman last year, explained Blaine Mathieu, Mindjet’s chief product’s officer in an interview. The new product is still very similar to the one that won raves at Net:Work 2010.

“If somebody was a historic Cohuman user they would recognize Cohuman today other than some enhanced feature functionality and the Mindjet logo on it,” he reports. But the company plans bigger changes going forward.

We’re working through a phased integration between Mindjet’s other products and Mindjet Cohuman. In fact, we’re just a few weeks away from releasing our first beta integration between our application for information mapping and project planning called Mindjet Connect and Cohuman, sharing data back and forth. Then during the course of 2012 we’re going to be merging these applications more and more closely together, so users of either application will see additional functionality being borrowed from the other one. We’re moving down the path in 2012 of making them one thing.

Thos who originally came to Mindjet for a brainstorming app and those who chose Cohuman hoping to manage their projects socially will, hopefully, see the functionality of both products expand until they morph into an integrated offering that handles your projects from first inspiration through to the details of making them reality. The freemium business model will remain the same.

Besides logically expanding Mindjet’s offerings and solving Cohuman’s funding woes, the acquisition also brings Cohuman’s technology to Mindjet’s already existing large user base. “That’s the cool thing,” says Mathieu. “As Mindjet’s been around since 2001, we have over two million paying users today for our applications already, so obviously the first thing we’re doing with Mindjet Cohuman is taking that application to our existing user base and saying, ‘hey, look at this great new application we have for you.’”

“There are a lot of interesting little startups in the social task management area doing some interesting things,” says Matthieu, “but the big advantage that Mindjet has is we’re not a startup starting at zero – zero users, zero viral effect. 80 percent of the Global 2000 use a Mindjet solution today.”

That should mean more exposure and more users for a rebranded and expanded Mindjet Cohuman in 2012.

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It’s an approach you’d imagine would appeal to a couple of ex-Facebookers now tackling the enterprise task management and productivity tool space. But as Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz launch their new web-based product Asana out of beta this week, they’re actually out to prove the opposite: When it comes to getting things done at work, social is the wrong thing to focus on.

So what’s the foundation of professional productivity if it’s not breaking down org chart divisions, building relationships and easily sharing information? For Rosenstein and Moskovitz, that answer is deceptively simple: the work itself.

Tasks not people

In your personal life, your focus is naturally on building relationships, so “it makes sense to have a product that is fundamentally social,” says Rosestein, but to apply that same principle to your professional life just doesn’t work. The chatter on your Facebook account is the point; random comments and exchanges help you get to know people and stay in touch. At work, where your goal is, say, meeting a project deadline, chatter is just distracting noise that breaks your flow, wastes your time and limits your creativity.

In a professional context, the ultimate aim is not to get to know people (though surely that’s a facilitator and by-product of good work) but, as Rosenstein puts it, “to create interesting things.” So when it comes to professional productivity tools, “it makes sense to put the work as the fundamental unit, and for us, tasks are those atomic elements of productivity.”

Rosenstein elaborates: “Much in the way that email makes a message, the core notion, the fundamental unit that is being moved around and operated on, or say a social network makes people the fundamental unit, Asana is about making the task the fundamental unit.”

In essence, “Asana is basically a shared, collaborative task list,” he says, “allowing users to reference the product and know what everyone on the team is working on, as well as having all conversations, files and artifacts around those tasks collected in one place.”

By “following” a task, users are kept up to date on all actions and comments related to it via email, as well as who is assigned responsibility for the task. You can easily “unfollow” tasks that aren’t pertinent, set tasks as private or search the system for past comments and actions. Users can view tasks by project, including information on project priorities, group a project’s tasks by assignee, or sort by person and see all tasks an individual is involved in across all projects. A mobile version of Asana is a new improvement on the beta.

Eroding barriers to adoption

Other more social productivity tools based on following people or conversations not tasks are often simply too noisy and too slow, frustrating new users who then fall back on old standbys like email, and in-person chats, according to the Asana team (and, to be fair, my personal experience as well). For this reason, Rosenstein feels their main competition isn’t other offerings in the space, but the inertia that drags down new tools:

When we think about who our competition is, it’s not really the other productivity tools or enterprise collaboration tools because that’s not what people are using. Even among the early adopters who have been trying out Asana, 75 percent of them prior to using Asana were using email and documents to keep themselves organized. Email, documents, white boards, notebooks, in-person meetings, that’s the competition. Those are the tools people are still using today in order to try and keep themselves on the same page.

We have certain people who signed up for the beta who said, ‘I’ve tried a dozen different tools for project management, for group collaboration and could never get any of them to work. None of them would ever stick. I couldn’t adopt them. My team couldn’t adopt them.’ And so I think the big differentiator from those tools is this is the only one that actually works.

Will it work? The team is striving to make Asana as fast, flexible and easy to get started with as possible, minimizing the number of keystrokes or clicks to accomplish anything and making sure the signal-to-noise ratio is high so users get only relevant information. Asana can also be used as a personal, rather than team, task manager and grows virally as a single user assign bits of work to others, though Rosenstein warns that managers looking to lead a top-down adoption of Asana for their teams think carefully before proceeding.

“The biggest failure mode for adoption has been when someone comes in, plays around for a minute, doesn’t think about how they want to organize things, say ‘everyone, hey, come use this,’ and doesn’t set up any structure ahead of time,” says Rosenstein. “You need some sort of order.”

The future

In short, Asana’s future is vague but hopefully populous. The team’s immediate goal is getting users signed up rather than bringing in revenue. “We’re really focused on going for ubiquity, for mass-scale adoption,” says Rosenstein, “so at this point in time, we don’t even have a pay model. That’s something we’ll announce later. The product is free and will remain free for teams of 1-30.”

The product was beta tested by everyone from a sports management firm to a political campaign (plus, obviously, plenty of tech companies) so Asana is aiming for a broad market, though one that’s not without serious competitors, including major players like Microsoft and Cisco, as well as alternatives from other startups.

Will Asana’s streamlined, task-centric approach and limited use of social be the secret sauce that makes its tool the irresistible pizza of task management rather than another worthy but unappetizing product your boss nags you to use? Check it out and let us know what you think.

Do you agree with the Asana team’s general point that excess sociability and noise makes many productivity tools hard to stick with?

Image courtesy of Asana.

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SocialBase “is a team collaboration, tools integration and task management system to bring your social media workflow into one central dashboard.” Tasks related to social media can be managed through the dashboard, and team members assigned to specific tasks. The interface also includes a “tools” pane where users can log in to social media directly.

The developer has some interesting suggestions for how to use SocialBase, but I’m not sure what sorts of businesses it will appeal to. I doubt that those already using one of the many project management tools that we’ve covered will want to pay a hefty monthly fee for another system to manage (and another login to remember). Organizations that aren’t using a project management system will probably be better off looking at other enterprise-oriented social media solutions like HootSuite and CoTweet.

SocialBase has three pricing plans: a “Solo” plan for $50/month, a “Team” plan for up to 10 users for $200/month, and an “On Call” plan with unlimited users for $2,000/month. A 30-day trial, a video tutorial, and more information is available at oneforty’s website. You’ll need to log in with Twitter.

How do you monitor and manage your organization’s social media presence?

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Rather than trying to cram in all of the functionality that’s present in the web app, the iPhone app concentrates on the tasks that a user is likely to need when out of the office. Matthew Work, Cohuman co-founder and CEO, notes that the app was developed for “those times when we’re getting ready to go to work or have just left the office — usually the times when we’re the least connected.” The app concentrates on providing access to tasks, co-workers and activity; the home screen offers users five options: Add Task, My Tasks, Cohumans, Projects and Activity, but there’s no access to calendars or search functionality, as there is in the web app.

I tried the app on my iPhone, and it works well, enabling fast and easy access to team members, upcoming tasks and updates to projects — all of the data I’m likely to need while away from my laptop. Tasks added using the app can be delegated to other users, commented on, added to projects and have due dates set, just as with the web app. Files attached to tasks can be viewed in the app, but there’s no facility for uploading files. I can imagine the lack of a search feature being an issue for users with lengthy task lists or large numbers of co-workers; those users will probably need to use the web app to access the search feature to find particular tasks or co-workers. The app should also theoretically work on the iPad, although I haven’t tried it. It would probably look odd, as the app is designed for use on a smaller screen and it cannot be used in portrait mode. I’d recommend sticking with the web app for iPad users.

The Cohuman iPhone app is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. An Android app is also in the works and should follow in a few months. To use it you’ll need a Cohuman account. A Cohuman Basic plan offers 1 GB of storage and is free. A Cohuman Pro plan provides greater control over permissions, HTTPS connections and offers 10GB of storage at a cost of $19.95 per month.

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SmallTask has a clean, minimalist interface that’s designed to look like a notepad. There are only two buttons: one for creating new tasks and the other for setting up Dropbox sync. Tasks created in the app can be given a due date and time: Reminders for tasks that are due can be delivered by both the iOS app (via push notifications) and the Mac app (only while it is running). Tasks in the list can be edited by clicking or tapping them.

I’ve tested the apps, and the Dropbox sync works very well. But even though I’m normally a fan of minimalist apps, I find SmallTask a little too basic for my needs. There’s no feature for marking which tasks have been completed (you can only delete them), nor can you set up tasks that don’t have a due date or time associated with them. Additionally, there’s no support for more-advanced task management functionality such as tags, additional task lists or projects. It doesn’t have a search feature, which means it probably won’t be much good for users with lengthy task lists, and it almost certainly won’t be suitable for use in a GTD-style system. However, if you’re a Mac/iOS user and all you need is a very simple task list you can access anywhere, then SmallTask is worth a look. The Dropbox sync means that, unlike web-based task management apps like Google Tasks, your to-do list should always be available, even if you don’t have an active Internet connection; tasks will simply be synced next time you get online.

SmallTask is free for both Mac and iOS. The synchronization feature requires a Dropbox account; a 2 GB account is free.

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Teamly takes a different approach to most collaboration apps. Rather than assigning tasks to the people on your team who will get them done, Teamly encourages your team to look for the priorities in a project and exercise a little autonomy. It focuses on creating very short priority lists — consisting of just five things — and allows for the setting of daily, weekly and monthly priorities. It also allows managers and team members to review those priorities and provides real-time feedback for managers.

Two new multi-user plans are available. Teamly Professional costs $8 per user per month, and includes access to everything, including phone support. Teamly Starter is free and includes access to most functionality, but is ad-supported and doesn’t have access to some of the more advanced features, like data export and SSL encryption. Current Teamly beta users will be transitioned onto a trial version of the Teamly Professional plan that will last until May 9.

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WorkWyze’s task assignment system is built around around a simple task request/response workflow. Anyone can create a task (complete with tags, a description and a due date) and delegate it to anyone else; they can then mark the task as “accepted” if they’re ready to add it to their task list. Once a task is done, the person carrying out the tasks marks it as “Complete” in WorkWyze and a notification is sent to the task requester asking them to confirm that the task is actually done with. WorkWyze makes it clear who owns each task and what its status is at any time.

It’s possible to keep track of everything that’s going in the team via an Activity Feed that’s reminiscent of Facebook’s newsfeed; it  displays all of the team’s activity and can also include status updates.

I like WorkWyze’s straightforward workflow approach, but the app is still in beta, and it feels like pre-release software in places. Some features are a little rough around the edges, and the design of the site could definitely do with some work. In particular, I’d much prefer it if tasks were identified by name rather than by ID number, as it would make it easier to see what’s going on. There’s also some additional functionality that I’d like to see included: when creating a task, for example, you can only add a link to related documents, not upload the actual documents themselves. The site is supposed to work best in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but it worked OK for me in Chrome.

WorkWyze is currently free to use; a Google account is required to sign up.

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The instant appeal for me with Thymer is the straightforward data entry process. Thymer uses a natural language parser, so I can type simple statements and it knows what I want and where I want it. There’s no tabbing through multiple selection boxes needed; a single carefully-constructed statement can tell the system everything it needs to know about my task.

The key to productivity in Thymer is learning the syntax needed to enter your tasks. For example:

Write Thymer Review @WWD @today @review @1.5 @important @waiting

will assign myself a task, due today, called “Write Thymer Review.” It will add it to my WWD project and tag it as a review, with an estimated time of  1.5 hours. The other items make use of built-in flags to show that the task is important and that I’m waiting for someone or something to complete it.

While keyboard entry is prominent, the interface makes nice use of drag-and-drop functionality: Move and reorder your tasks as needed. One of the slickest features allows you to move the input box down to the specific area of the page where you want your tasks to appear.

There is a bit of a learning curve to getting used to the syntax, and to set up the searches and views you will use on a regular basis. It’s a very freeform system, which makes it flexible enough for a lot of different task management processes, but some may be put off by the lack of structure, at least when getting started.

As a one-person shop, I didn’t have a chance to test the team features, but planning functionality is built-in and you can easily assign tasks to others. Each task can also handle discussions and comments.

While expected features like emailing tasks into Thymer, daily reminder emails and even Twitter integration are done well, I’d really like to see some better auto-complete options for predicting existing tags and projects.

There is a lot more to Thymer that I haven’t even begun to implement yet — specifically, the time tracking. Each task can be given an estimated time for planning purposes and individual timers can be set to track work completed. Additionally, multiple time entries can be added to a task and totaled upon completion for billing purposes.

Mobile access is proving to be an issue for me, though, — perhaps even a dealbreaker. While an iPhone app is available the site doesn’t seem to function on any of the mobile browsers I tested it on. Ubiquity of the data entry and access is key for me, so I’m struggling to keep up when away from my computer.

Pricing starts at free for a basic no-frills but functional account, while paid accounts start at $5/month for a solo plan. A 30-day trial is available.

I’m undecided if it’s worth the time and effort to move over from Toodledo — but Thymer is something I’m watching closely.

How do you track your tasks? Is Thymer right for you?

For a while, I’d sync Outlook and Palm Desktop, and then Outlook would update the BlackBerry (I didn’t actually use Outlook at all, it just acted as the middleman). It worked great. But then my dependence on Google Calendar  grew, because I could access it from any computer as well as my BlackBerry, and it wouldn’t work with my sync setup.

I investigated many tools and synchronization applications to find a perfect sync solution. I didn’t want to use lots of different applications to syncing needs.

The almost perfect solution was to find a dedicated synchronization app. Mine comes from CompanionLink. This method cuts out Outlook for good. CompanionLink now has a Google edition available that synchronizes all of Palm Desktop’s features with Google, too. For updating my BlackBerry, I use Google Sync for Mobile. It’s still not perfect, but it works and I can access and update my information in Google or Palm, while my BlackBerry just has access to the information.

If you’re struggling to find the perfect syncing app, here are some options (some free and some paid):

• Chapura: PocketMirror has been around for a long time, and syncs Palms with Outlook. Its Echo and PocketMirror work with Palm Pre.
• CompanionLink: Syncs Google, Palm Pre, ACT!, LotusNotes, Outlook and many others.
• Google Sync: free Google syncing applications for Mac, Linux, Android and others.
• gSyncit: Syncs Outlook and Gmail.
• Mark/Space: Sync apps for Macs.
• Sync’Em: Connects Macs with Exchange and Outlook.

How do you keep your data in sync?

Photo credit: djwudi

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The web app has two key features: adding new to-do items and setting reminders. It also lets you set up email or SMS reminders.

The service provides an iCal link so you can incorporate your reminders into an iCal-compatible calendar. Google Calendar, for one, can import Superminder’s tasks and due dates. In my tests, this worked, although not perfectly: It doesn’t look like it transfers recurring tasks and it sometimes takes quite some time before Superminder updates Google Calendar with tasks, or maybe it’s the other way around. Refreshing the calendar doesn’t speed up the update process.

Superminder can send reminders by SMS and every account receives two free reminders. If you want more, it costs $4 to buy 15 SMS credits or $13 to buy 50. Google Calendar has its own email and SMS notification, so you can work around these charges if you import Superminder into Google Calendar.

Although Superminder doesn’t come with instructions, it’s so simple you don’t really need them. However, it would be nice to know why the iCal feature doesn’t update as regularly as I’d like. Superminder offers a viable solution to those needing a simple to-do application that’s accessible over the web.

What reminders app do you use?

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