Gemini 5 has been a ground-up development that was driven by a common challenge faced by enterprises: deploy a single tool for task and project tracking that can be used by software development teams, help desk, project manager, QA teams and anyone else requires project participation.
“Over the years we’ve listened to our customers who put Gemini to a wide variety of uses – ALM, help desk management, email-to-ticketing, project management, procurement, job management, consulting engagement control and more.”
“People are growing tired of running multiple tools for team and project collaboration. We’ve all seen an explosion of such tools but they suffer from the same problem: narrow, niche focus. Typically, software development teams will deploy an Agile or Scrum planning tool and the QA guys will deploy their own Issue Tracking tool. Up until now, no single tool has had the depth of capability to go across multiple teams and solve those hard departmental process challenges.” says Harvey Kandola, founder and CEO of Countersoft.
“Every team has their own way of working and their own processes. If your tool of choice doesn’t cater for multiple working methods then you will hit process friction. Different teams will simply look for tooling that works for them”, says Kandola. Gemini introduces best-of-breed Project Templates so different teams can set up projects that work the way they work. Central to this capability is the support for different taxonomy per project such as “Scrum” for agile projects, “Issues” for Issue Tracking projects.
“Gemini provides taxonomy per project because such tooling needs to respect each teams unique speak. There is only so far you will get by shoe-horning a regular issue tracker into different teams. That’s what we’ve been hearing from marketplace. So we designed Gemini 5 to ensure customers can consolidate all tracking and workflow across all teams, and dispense with multiple tools like Jira, FogBugz, OnTime, Rally, VersionOne, TeamPulse and Zendesk. The alternative is to continue investing and managing different tooling and then hope you can ‘connect the dots’ with initiatives like the Networked Help Desk. But in practice people would much rather settle on a single tool than hunt for tool connectors.” concludes Kandola.
A unique aspect of Gemini is the AppNav approach to interacting with gives prominence to those things that are important to you. “AppNav is our way to ensure that you pin, share and navigate around projects, tasks and views that matter to you today. It’s innovative and most people will love the new badge notifications”, says Kandola.
Another area that has received major focus is planning and managing large backlogs in agile deployments. “We see time and time again the challenges faced by large teams running Agile: how to scale. Gemini 5 brings another first with Swimlane Scrolling – the ability for teams to visually manage large backlogs by bringing additional data into view the planning board”, continues Kandola.
Gemini 5 can be downloaded or used in the cloud and introduces a number of new capabilities:
• No practical limits on projects or data – built to scale and perform as your tracking needs grow beyond the basics
• The fastest data grid – results are returned instantly on every change of the filter without caching tricks or limited filters
• Intuitive drag-drop task sequencing and dependency show/hide – just as you would expect
• Rapid planning enabling quick entry of items with dependencies – document brainstorming sessions in seconds
• A Planning Board that can actually plan beyond small teams – innovative paging ensures that large workloads are managed effectively
• Visionary navigation with unique AppNav cards that place your universe front-and-center
• Badge notifications with AppNav cards meaning instant change notifications without email interruption
• Share AppNav cards that represent views, reports, filters, with co-workers and stakeholders
• Optimized for speed with support for loading assets through any Content Delivery Network (CDN) – faster page loads, happy users
• First to market with Project Templates that deliver per project taxonomy – respect every team’s jargon and workflow
• Introduction of the Gemini Marketplace allowing technology partners to build extensions that bring new capabilities into Gemini (showcase coming soon!)
• Introducing Breeze, a Gemini extension app that brings email-to-ticketing to any project or team
• Support for social user login with Facebook, Google and Open Id
• Fully user timezone aware for localized dates and times
• Smarter inline editing that allows you to change more than one field at a time
• …and more!
Gemini is free for 3 users with no-hassle team trials available on the website.
Gemini has been deployed by over 8,000 customers in 75 countries. It is used by small, large, government, not-for-profits and even by individuals leveraging our free 3 user license. Gemini enables organizations to consolidate and streamline all project tracking and tasks into a single place.
