Task tracking system vs. tool

What is a task tracking tool?
It is a standalone software product that supports group collaboration and helps users to review, track, control, and analyze tasks. It allows keeping information (like schedules, templates, documents, files etc.) associated with tasks in a single location (a database), and it also offers options to monitor parameters of tasks, so in general you get a powerful solution for job monitoring. Such tools are convenient to manage task-driven events, such as projects, processes and workflows, when you don’t need to synchronize data with external applications (like MS Excel and HTML editors).

What is a task tracking system?
It is a complex software solution for managing tasks and jobs within projects and workflows. Such a system allows creating to-do lists, planning project events, and monitoring pending todo items. You can use task tracking systems to create project tasks, plan project calendars and organize project documentation, and keep all this information in databases. Then you can easily track status of tasks, monitor project events, and share project documents. Task tracking systems help control task performance, conduct job analysis and build task reports, so they contribute to better management of projects, processes and workflows.

Differences between task tracking system and tool
Task tracking system is a more powerful solution than a tool. As a rule, it has all features particular to any tool, plus it contains functionality to export-import data to/from external applications. For example, VIP Task Manager is a task tracking system that allows importing tasks from MS Outlook to its database as well as exporting its task lists to Excel spreadsheets, HTML files and text files. Data exporting-importing functionality is the major difference between system and tool.

Besides, system has advanced options to manage projects and workflows. These options may include the following:

• Workflow Editor to customize task workflows and create task sequences
• Permissions Manager to set user access level to information in a database
• Project Tree Builder to create multi-level structures and hierarchies for projects and task lists

Kinds of tools and systems

They can be web based (online), mobile and desktop based.

VIP Task Manager
If you want to track and control tasks as well as you need to use synchronization capabilities to export-import data, you can use the task tracking system VIP Task Manager. This desktop-based solution uses client-server technologies to manage tasks, teamwork and projects. It has Workflow Editor, Permissions Panel, Custom Fields functionality and Database Manager to allow you controlling and monitoring information (tasks, schedules, and files) in the best way.

VIP Task Manager allows exporting tasks to Excel spreadsheets, HTML files, XML templates and text files. The system also supports data importing from MS Outlook, so if you have tasks, journals and contacts in Outlook, you can import this information to databases of VIP Task Manager.

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