What is Asana?

Asana is an application produced by Asana, Inc., intended to help groups of people organize and manage their work. It was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. While at Facebook, the two of them were tasked with improving employee productivity, and developed Asana with the same goal in mind.

The Asana application is both web and mobile compatible. It is designed to be a single tool that encompasses a multitude of functions for teams to manage projects and tasks. Asana’s functions include: project creation, work assignment, file sharing, reporting, and more. It can also be used as a pure communication tool.

The Origins of Asana

When Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein left Facebook in 2008, they started the development of Asana. They had closed their angel round of investment in the spring of 2011, and a Series A round of investment in November 2011; the beta was launched around the same time. It has continued to receive funding, with the last round being valued at 1.5 billion dollars.

Since its commercial launch in 2012, Asana has been continually updated and upgraded. By 2015 it had launched native iOS and Android apps, and redesigned its base application.

About Asana

Asana enables you to structure the work being done in a way best suited for your team. Set projects, and follow the progress of each team member. Impose deadlines, and check whether they are being followed.

The ease-of-use of Asana and its many automated features will free up your time, allowing you to more closely monitor the work being done, identify the problem areas and fix them, before they could derail your project in a major way.

The Asana mobile app allows your remote teams to always be available and in touch. You can communicate through Inbox, conversations, task comments and status updates, helping everyone to stay up to date. Any changes to the project or team are easily shared, removing confusion going forward.

One of the main advantages Asana has over other similar apps is the visualizations of the work being done. You can set it up so that everyone in the team can clearly see what other members are working on, allowing you to plan ahead, and, if needed, make organizational changes at a moment’s notice.

It has administrator features for its users, including team management and security controls. Asana allows status updates, and integrates lists and boards into its app. Since 2017 Asana can be integrated with Microsoft Teams and Gmail. One of the newer additions to Asana is the Timeline – an interactive feature that helps users map and visualize projects.

As far back as 2012, Asana had released its application programming interface to third-party developers. This allows Asana to be used as a basis for other developers, and gives users the ability to customize Asana to their team’s needs.

PC Magazine gave Asana a 4.5/5 mark, and called it “one of the best collaboration and productivity apps for teams“. Currently, the Asana app can be used in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.