Do.com Adds Contacts and Deal Tracking For Facebook Style Task Management

Salesforce.com has added contacts, deal tracking and public APIs to its do.com platform for task management.

Initially, Salesforce.com is adding the capability to integrate Facebook and Google contacts. It will soon after add Twitter and Salesforce.com. The deal management capability adds to the do.com lightweight CRM environment. Do.com is also opening its APIs for integration into third-party apps or into a customer's own environment.

Do.com is a task management service built on the Manymoon technology that Salesforce.com acquired last year. Manymoon coined the term "social productivity," for the platform environment. I don't fancy the phrase for describing the service. Anything with the term "social" in it these days makes me cringe. I see do.com as about getting things done with tools that also helps augment your ability to manage the data deluge that we increasingly face.

Regardless of my curmudgeon ways, the do.com team is getting closer to providing a sense of community in its task management service. Contacts has to be a core functionality for any service to have some sense of community. It's that and the need for personal profiles that act as the foundation for features which add value to the experience and enjoyment of using a task management system.

It's that capability that do.com executives like to say gives do.com its Facebook like capabilities. I agree to some extent. But it's only because of the addition of contacts that sells me on this idea.

With do.com, contacts also create ways to add different paths for building a community environment. People have their contact data distributed across multiple platforms. A flow emerges when these contacts get connected into a service. Do.com gives the the ability to manage that flow. Customers decide who gets permissions to be part of an individual's network.

You can see the contacts from Google or Facebook but only do they become part of your do.com network when you check the box by their photo icon. Messages can be sent through contacts by using the @ symbol, which is becoming more universal with these types of services.

With the new deal tracking, Salesforce.com has added a visual representation to see where the deal is in the process.

The customer can assign tasks to the deal. The layout can be customized. Reminders can be added.

Do.com competes with companies like Asana. I had lunch today with someone who really loves Asana for task management. I've used it myself. It's okay but it feels like Outlook to me. Do.com has a more unstructured feel that I like. But I am not sold on it, either. I am a fan of Kanban style apps like kanban2go that allow me to drag and drop tasks.

But overall, do.com does work. It serves well as a platform that allows for its different features to interconnect. I like that in a service. Add a kanban capability by dragging and dropping tasks into different priority buckets and the service would have some more muscle.

Do.com serves the prosumer market. It can be used as much to manage tasks for a product deployment as for a 50th birthday party.

I think that reflects the new reality we face. Our lives and work are interconnected and we need services that help us manage both.