Filemaker Tasks

Like Filemaker Meetings, Tasks is a ready-built database to load into Filemaker (FM) Pro 6. It's designed to manage allocation and tracking of tasks for an organisation, with priorities, tasks, teams and individuals.

Tasks can be assigned keywords, labels and priorities, in addition to due dates and assignees.

The database comes loaded with templates and sample data that you'll be well advised to spend some time playing with. We did find Tasks a little fiddlier than Meetings, especially when it came to using the Find function, where the manual would be helpful.

That aside, there are lots of useful tools here, including reports to view outstanding tasks by creator, or everything that a particular person hasn't yet completed. It makes it easy to keep on top of individual workloads.

As with Meetings, it's simple to mail task information to people using templates.

It would be good to see support for recurring tasks - allowing automatic assignment for things such as preparing accounts or making backups. And, while other applications will work well managed by a secretary, a task system like this needs to run on a network, so everyone can check their tasks easily.

That's an additional expense to bear in mind if you don't already use FM Pro and, of course, existing Personal Information Managers users may be reluctant to have another tool to keep track of their tasks. If, however, those caveats don't apply, this is a powerful and fully customisable way to organise the assignment of tasks.

Contact:Filemaker 01628 534 158
www.filemaker.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows XP SP1
• 300MHz Pentium
• 128MB of memory
• Filemaker Pro 6

Price details:
RRP: Download £46.94 (£39.95 ex VAT); CD £52.81 (£44.95 ex VAT)