Asana has announced a new version of its team task management solution intended for larger organizations, called Organizations:

Kenny van Zandt, Organizations In Asana

Today, we’re excited to be launching a collection of new features aimed at helping companies use and support Asana across their entire enterprise. We call it Organizations.

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There’s a lot of important work being organized in Asana.

But we’re still just getting started – there remain teams that we haven’t been ready to support: the largest teams, those that grow from 100s to 1,000s of people. While it would be remarkable if it only took a small number of coworkers to design and manufacture electric cars, synthesize DNA, or deliver healthcare to villages across the globe – these missions are complex, and require more people to be involved in them to succeed. Many of the teams using Asana today are inside these bigger organizations, and they’ve been asking for Asana to work at enterprise-scale. So for the past several months, we’ve been working on just that.

Organizations create a new sort of context into Asana, different in a few important ways from the non-organization version (which shows a problem with the name: It might have been better to call this the enterprise version).

The non-organization version has “workspaces” to which people can be invited, and those workspaces can have “projects.” Tasks — the central information object of Asana (and most other task management tools) — can be defined in the context of a project or outside of all projects, at the user’s personal task list. It is also possible to invite guest users to see only a project or just specific tasks. But those who are invited to a namespace can see all projects in the namespace and can access any of them and all the information in the nested projects.

This is one of the motivations for Asana’s organizations: to limit visibility and also make on-boarding easier.

First of all, the creator of an organization can associate an email domain to it, like www.bar.com, so that anyone with a domain email address, like foo@bar.com, can instantly gain access to the organization without the need for invitation. Also, there are now admin users, who can control the access levels of all information, provision and deprovision users, and the like.

Here’s the upgrade screen for changing an existing account to the organization level. As you can see there are now controls for visibility to projects, basically implementing the public/private/secret levels that most enterprises want.

Organizations are further partitioned into teams, which could be used for functional departments or for collections of people pulled together to share access to a group of interrelated projects. Projects are defined in the context of teams.

Teams come in two flavors: Premium teams are the ones that can declare projects to be private or hidden (secret); otherwise, projects are all public and visible to the members of the teams. Making a team premium involves a monthly fee. A premium organization is one in which all teams are premium, and that involves a different fee structure. The fees for premium are a function of the size of the organization. I suggest you look at the Asana pricing page, but the fees start at $50 per month for 15 users.

In a premium organization, teams can also be hidden, public, or private.

The bottom line

I didn’t upgrade, since I don’t want to pay $50 per month to share with the handful of people currently working with me within Asana — which is like five — so I can’t explore the features, and at any rate, I really wouldn’t get the experience of working in a 1,000 person Asana-enabled company that way anyway.

However, I can look at the left panel of the hypothetical Moon Landing organization and get the feel of how it might be different.

The biggest difference is that all users may see projects that are visible but require them to ask for entry. Users won’t see hidden projects or teams that they aren’t a member of, so that doesn’t feel different. And, once users click into an actual project or their personal task list — where users spend over 95 percent of their Asana time, it will be the same old experience.