Hey everyone
With the new changes coming up, I realized we use less and less of the new features, and sometimes it feels like our way of managing Trello differs a lot from the norm.
[We're a social and cultural community network and my job is managing a literary project called Shared Reading. Been on Trello since 2012 and a Business user since around 2015.]
How we work
Our usage is mainly 1) archives (libraries of sources and texts), 2) internal working boards (where I plan ahead), and 3) shared boards (for our reading groups, per season or theme).
Cards have one text, annotated with labels as keywords, a preview and a downloadable attachment. Lists have three cards, meaning one set for that weekly session. Thirty-or-so lists make up a season's board. Most collaborators are volunteers and board observers, with only a few members.
In the field, the reading group leader sees what list is up, prints out the attachments, and sometimes leaves a comment after. We also have a list of sessions with dates, to use as a calendar.
Everyone here loves Trello.
We switched to it because early on, a hundred PDFs were still manageable, but after a while we had thousands of resources and multiple boards to share.
A kanban board like Trello still offers us the best way to share the material visually and accessibly with little technical know-how required from collaborators.
Internally, all the files are stored in SharePoint and I've looked into its sharing features but I am, to say the least, not impressed with MS Planner.
To come to the point!
I was very happy with card mirroring and collapsed lists--because I benefit from that a lot.
But other than that, we don't have targets, planners, inboxes, tick-boxes, product catalogues, assigned tasks, project tracking, due date reminders... no clients, shareholders or contractors. We don't use Jira or Confluence, or Slack.
What I'm increasingly seeing (and I will leave some comments on the Beta Community) is Trello evermore drifting into the technical/commercial side of GTD and Business Management: teams with very active project workflows.
That is of course where Kanban comes from, but even early Trello actively pushed for personal use with Holiday Planners or Christmas Ideas. We're somewhere in the middle.
We ourselves would be more interested in better label management, better search options (in collections for instance) and even more granular control in sharing and presentation. The less fluff our collaborators see, the easier for them, the better.
Our partners in Holland are already planning to switch, due to cost vs usefulness. But they have only a fraction of the archive we have; to us Trello is our library, our database, our "anthology compiler" and our front-facing 'website' to share with collaborators. It is way more practical than Files & Folders and more shareable than Cloud Storage Services.
Conclusion, questions!
So, just take this as a testimony, or do share and respond if you too work outside of the typical market for Trello and Kanban boards.
How do you 'hack' Trello for your users?
What alternatives have you considered?
What features are you not seeing, or which ones are entirely useless to your workflow?
Is Trello still getting better for you, or do you also feel left out at times?
Cheers!
Update: I posted on the Beta forum about what our use case actually implies and how today's changes are making us consider if this actually improves tings for us: How the Beta is Causing Us Doubt and Are We Still in the Right Place?
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