Benko Board: Everything in one Kanban-ient place

[#1]

I'm pleased to announce that our product Benko Board has been approved for inclusion in the Trello integrations section:

https://trello.com/integrations#benkoboard

Enjoy email again

The primary functionality of Benko Board is to provide a complete integration with Gmail across all devices.

All existing email integrations for Trello are based on Chrome or Gmail extensions, so they don't work on mobile devices.

Likewise, all existing Gmail plugins that create a "Kanban-like" email interface only work in the browser with a subset of this functionality being available via a companion mobile app.

Benko Board creates a "behind the scenes" Gmail integration using Google Apps Script that allows you to not only see all your emails in Trello but also to send emails directly from Trello cards from *any* device.

You can reply, reply all, create new emails, cc, bcc and attach files all from Trello. All the emails still go via Gmail so if there's something that's not quite right in Trello you can always fall back to it, but about 95% of your email communication tasks can be done directly from within Trello.

Improve Trello notifications

The majority of Trello users that I speak to don't have the notifications turned on, or they get so many of them via email that they never really read them all.

I think that's why the combo of Slack and Trello has become so popular: because, out of the box, Trello's notifications are very, very noisy.

There is "one simple trick" to improve notifications, though:

Every time you're added to a card, immediately unsubscribe (or "Unwatch") it.

That way you only get notified about being added to a card, removed from a card or mentioned in a comment.

This makes Trello's notification frequency, even in busy teams, way more manageable.

Everyone can have Trello notifications turned on on their mobile and desktop without being swamped, and more of the discussion can safely happen inside Trello rather than splitting it out into a separate system.

Additionally, every time you're mentioned in a comment, Benko Board will create a card linked back to the original in your Inbox list that sits alongside all your emails. Interface-wise this presents very similarly to Trello's Notification interface, with the key advantage that you can drag the cards around to prioritise when you will reply to the comment.

Improve Trello's Cards view

A very common question among new Trello users is "where can I see a list of everything I'm assigned to".

This is of particular note because one of Trello's biggest competitors Asana does this quite well out of the box.

Trello does have a Cards view that shows you everything you're assigned to, but you can only "sort by board" or "sort by due date", and you can't drag the cards around to reprioritise them from that view.

Let's assume you have 5 projects with 5 different clients. Each client has access to their own board, but not each others' boards of course, so you want to add yourself to cards in each board and prioritise the tasks in the context of that project, then go back to some central place and prioritise your tasks across all boards and in the context of all the other things you need to do (emails, Trello Notifications, ideas, recurring tasks etc.)

I always thought that the Trello Cards view should just be a Trello board, so that's what Benko Board does!

Whenever you are added to a card, a copy of that card is created in your board and linked back to the original, so you can drag your copy around to prioritise the work across all your boards, then click through to the original to interact with your clients.

Secure, robust and owned by you

Benko Board is a Google Apps Script that is installed inside your own Google Drive account for a one off cost. There are no ongoing fees to use it and it doesn't contribute to your board's power up limit. No third party site has access to your emails (apart from Trello) and the software can't be updated without your consent.

This method of deployment is a bit clunky, and we are trying to improve that, but above all we want to keep security and privacy at the top of the list.

You can even run your very own internal versions of the Benko Board libraries. This is the ideal solution for enterprise Trello users with security concerns about sharing board permissions with 3rd party extensions.

Special offer for Atlassian community members

If you've read this far you're probably pretty excited to try out Benko Board.

If you email team@benkoboard.com by 31 December 2018 and mention this article I'll set it up for you at no cost. You can easily disable it if it's not right for you or keep using it as long as you like at no extra cost.

Note that this software requires G-Suite, but works with any level of Trello from free to enterprise.