How do tasks REALLY work?

How do tasks REALLY work?

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating Zoho for a new start up, and overall I think it's great, but I'm really struggling to understand how tasks actually work.

What I want to be able to do:   
  1. When I create tasks, I want them to be visible to all the users in my organisation.
  2. I then want to be able to assign the task specifically for an individual in the organisation as the owner of the task.
  3. The owner(s) should be the one managing and updating the task.  However the rest of the organisation (or possibly subset group, though this doesn't matter to me personally) should continue to have visibility of the task so they can monitor the progress - however it should be obvious to all who is actually owning and overall responsible for the task.  So multiple users can see the task, but it has 1 or more 'task owners'
  4. I would also expect a drop down filter for choosing view options such as either: a) My assigned tasks b) My groups tasks c) My organisations tasks d) All tasks
What happens currently:
  1. When I create a task it is visible by default only to me.  No one else in my organisation can see the task.
  2. If I 'assign' the task to somebody, then that user has visibility to, but it is then no longer obvious who the owner is, as I would have to assign EVERY USER in the whole organisation to the task just so they can see it in the first place.  Nobody will then know who is supposed to actually do anything with it as everyone's named as the assignee.
  3. At the moment only those assigned can see the task, so the rest of the organisation does not have visibility on the progress of tasks within the organisation, only the ones that have been assigned to them.  This is not practical.  For example, say I assigned a task to "John" and then next week John was off sick - no one else would be able to see John's tasks so we would not even know what things he was working on in order to cover his actions.
  4. Currently we are only able to filter based on task "status" - i.e. all, completed, open etc.   This is ok, but really you should be able to filter on a bunch of criteria.  In addition to the views mentioned above (my tasks, organisation tasks, group tasks, all tasks), I would expect to be able to at the least sort the tasks by i.e. assignees (so I could filter on all of John's tasks), date opened (so I could work on the oldest tasks first), date due (work on the ones with highest priority first), etc. Columns should also be customisable.

I really think there needs to be a differentiation between "Task visible to..." and "Task assigned to / Task owner...". These are 2 very different things and the current implementation with only "assign to" does not cover these requirements as far as I can tell, unless there is a workaround?

I have read in the help files that you can create personal OR group tasks.  Maybe this solves the problem, but despite trying for some hours last night I could not figure out any difference in creating tasks, it all seemed to work the same way, even though I created an organisational group with multiple users. Still the only way for the group to see the task was if I went in and individually added every single user in the 'Assign to...' area.

Hopefully I'm just misunderstanding how this works and the functionality exists already, but if not I see this as a severe limitation.  Assigning tasks to people and then losing visibility of the task once it's transferred is quite useless and dangerous.  Equally, assigning EVERY task to EVERY user is counter-productive and very unclear.

Thanks in advance for your reply.

James