eWEEK - February 21, 2011

Tasktop Technologies and prepopulated with Bugzilla and Hewlett-Packard Quality Center repositories. I used this environment to collaborate on several tasks with my contact from the vendor.

I also tested the product on my production notebook with a handful of pending projects, including a project for the writing and testing required for this review. For this latter scenario, I stuck mostly to a local task repository that ships with the product, and I integrated my Tasktop installation with my Google calendar and e-mail accounts to test those integration points.

Configuring Tasktop 1.8

The first step in configuring Tasktop is adding a task repository via an available connector and configuring the repository with your account information for the system. Next, you create a query to grab some portion of the tasks stored in the repository.

With Bugzilla, for instance, I could create queries using the same drop-down options and search fields that appear in the system’s standard Web interface, or I could provide a URL to define the query. Since each repository type stores different information, the interfaces for building queries and for individual tasks look a bit different.

However, once configured, tasks
from various sources all automatically
synchronize with the local Tasktop
installation, with each appearing in
the product’s task list under a folder
for each query. I could also apply
my own categories to each item so
that tasks from different sources
could appear together in my list.

In addition, I could schedule due dates for my tasks and synchronize the events with my external calendar. In my case, that’s a Google calendar, though I could also synchronize with an Exchange-based calendar from a Windows machine running Outlook.

My tasks appeared alongside other events in my calendar in a schedule applet docked at the bottom of the Tasktop interface. Also on the scheduling and time-management front, I was able to track the amount of time I spent on each task, create reports based on this information, and export the reports in a CSV or HTML format.

When I selected a task to activate, Tasktop tracked the files, Web pages and source packages I used while working on the tasks, and stored that information alongside the task. I could remove elements from the stored context and adjust, with a slider control, the amount of context displayed. When I worked on tasks backed by an external task repository, I was able to attach the task context I’d assembled to the external task source, so that people collaborating with me could access that context.

For the Web-browsing tracking,
I could use a browser
embedded within
Eclipse. Or I could
use Firefox 3. 6, which
(when combined with
a Tasktop extension)
would track the pages
I browsed while work-
ing on a particular task
and add them to my
task context. When
I switched to a new
task, Tasktop directed
Firefox to close the set
of tabs and open the
tabs from my newly
activated task.

I ended up writing this review into

Google Docs, using the embedded Web-browser configuration. When I was ready to work on the story, I activated my Tasktop review task, and my review document at Google opened in the middle pane of my Eclipse instance. I configured my Tasktop instance to connect to my Gmail account— though I could have accessed any IMAP-based mail account—and created a query that matched messages with a “task” label. I could then label mail messages I wished to act on, and those messages would automatically sync to my task list.

From there, I could categorize and edit the e-mail-based tasks, but unlike the issue-tracker-based task repositories, the editing relationship was one way. I couldn’t see the modifications I’d made in Tasktop from Gmail, nor could I attach comments or context back to the Gmail messages. ´