A Calendar (Or Checklist, File Folder, IM Channel..) Alone Can't Manage A Project

Opening up functional silos for simplicity and integrating them for better execution

Inspiration for There.App came from professional and social experiences when groups of us would be somewhere, with some things to get done together, and lacking a well organized resource that provides relevant info, keeps us in contact, and tracks how things are progressing. From earliest mock-ups we’ve anticipated There.App would solve these problems with balanced access across calendar, file sharing, task checklists, team directory, live chat, live map views of who’s where and what’s happening where, and more. All of those perspectives and capabilities are essential for effective teamwork on-location.

Assessing lay of the land as we got started, it was remarkable how there’s no popular software that balances across those needs. The few suite-oriented options feel disjoint, making their different capabilities effectively packaged as different, siloed applications. Most popular collaborative apps these days are overwhelmingly used for just particular functionality like calendar management, or messaging, or cloud storage, or charting project milestones, but not combinations of those. Managing multi-faceted activities usually means working across a few environments, reducing productivity and increasing distractions, and with the diversity of teams that tend to assemble on site, there may be multiple, redundant apps used by different sub-groups within that team.

We’ve been determined to build an environment that’s egalitarian in its balance of different functional modules, fluidly availing each one for selection, with immediate familiarity within each one through simple and consistent design and features. For fast learning curves and to limit attention demanded in screen (/maximize attention available for where someone is and who's with them), we strip out some more wonky, intensive and module-specific features – for example there’s no folder siloing in our FILES module, or sticker / emoji / Giphy buttons presented in our CHAT interface, or view toggling in our TASKS module for presentations like Gantt Charts.

Although, for those more inclined to power usage, effectively all of these sorts of capabilities are available through overarching features consistently available across all of our modules, and ways modules integrate with each other and with outside systems. Back to those examples, the tagging construct available throughout There.App, which may be employed to categorize people by role in the TEAM module, can also be employed in FILES to effect folder organization, actually with richer flexibility than conventional file-folder systems. Devotees of emoticons etc. tend to be familiar with calling up fancier buttons right on their device keyboards without our having to clutter our CHAT interface with extra buttons, and also URLs can be chatted to convey rich content that way. And, combining There.App modules, TASKS  (along with FILES, EVENTS, CHATs and more) can be assembled within a BOARD and dragged between sections for Gantt or Kanban perspectives on projects.

Scope creep is a dilemma in professionally oriented software. There are always real-world use cases that can benefit from some expansion of choice and features. But, this makes selection processes less efficient and forces more to look at on-screen, so these expansions can diminish broader experiences by the users not concerned about the particular need. Incremental diminishments add up to bloated problems. There.App’s approach is to present thorough and well organized collection of functional modules that are each clear, familiar, lightweight, and essentially consistent with each other. They can be selectively implemented for particular projects, immediately mastered, and fluidly combined, including integration with outside systems, to ultimately fulfill practically any power usage desire, without distracting or overwhelming those less power-hungry.