A New Way to Create, Collaborate, and Keep Work Moving

Outlign has just rolled out a major new feature designed to make managing long-form content inside projects faster and more seamless. Introducing Docs, a flexible, built-in document tool for everything from creative briefs and strategy docs to internal notes and client-facing content.

With Docs, teams can now create and manage detailed content without needing to jump between platforms, keeping everything connected to the work it supports.

A more connected way to work

Docs are fully integrated into your projects, making them easy to access, share, and embed wherever they’re needed. Whether you’re outlining a strategy, capturing ideas, or collaborating with clients, Docs bring everything into one place.

Key features

Docs come with a range of powerful capabilities designed for real-world agency workflows:

• Real-time collaboration with your team

• Continuous auto-save so nothing gets lost

• Version history with the ability to review and restore changes

• Inline comments, replies, and resolution tracking

• Easy embedding into tasks and messages via simple links

• Pin important docs to project resources for quick access

• Flexible access controls for internal, client-view, or full client collaboration

• Export options in Markdown or PDF

Built for how agencies actually work

Docs are designed to support the way creative and project teams operate day-to-day. From early-stage thinking through to delivery, everything can now live inside Outlign, reducing the need to switch between tools and keeping context intact.

Get started

Docs are available now. Simply jump into any project and start creating.

For a deeper dive, check out the help article on how to get the most out of Docs.

As always, feedback is welcome!

We’ve been busy to start the year working on some major new features as well as the usual small improvements to help make Outlign better all the time.

The focus for this update is one major feature - enabling internal chat with your agency teammates right inside Outlign! As with all our major features, we’ve put a lot of thought into what to include but also what to leave out to help keep you focused on the wonderful creative work you’re actually here to do!

Internal chat

The chat feature works like many other work chat apps, with a few key differences:

• No “online” status

• No “Dave is typing…” indicator

• No over-the-top notifications when you receive a new message

• No client access

Why leave these things out you say?

It’s all part of our ethos to help you stay focused on the work that matters.

In our opinion (and experience!), most work chat tools create pressure to be online all the time, respond immediately to every message, and make yourself available to everyone.

So while we find it useful to be able to ping a direct message to someone on the team for a quick chat, we want to do it in a way that allows everyone to reply on their timeline without creating a whole lot of noise.

You can create one-on-one chats or different group chats with your other team members, so there’s plenty there to keep the internal communication flowing while not taking over your life.

For discussions with clients we recommend keeping this to the Messages section within each project to keep a bit of separation and focus to your client comms.

Other updates

Since our last update we’ve also pushed a few little improvements:

• Added a view switcher in the Clients list so you can view all projects at once so you don’t have to click into each Client to see a list of projects you belong to. You can still click the client link to access all their projects.

• Other bug fixes and small improvements to help keep the creative work flowing

As always if there’s anything you’d love to see in Outlign feel free to reach out - we’re always up for a chat about making your creative projects run smoother.

We’ve just pushed some fresh updates that we think you’ll love.

User Roles

We’ve added the ability to set different role types for the users in your agency team:

• Manager - has access to everything

• Team member - has access to most things, but can’t see billing info or manage the roles of other agency team members

• Freelancer - has limited access to the agency side of projects, and can only see clients and projects they’re assigned to

This should be a great help to a number of agencies we’ve talked to who want to bring in freelancers they collaborate with to Outlign, but without giving them access to everything the other agency team members can see.

We’ve set this up so that the first user in each agency is set as the Manager by default, and then others are currently marked as Team Members, but if you’re the manager, you can easily edit these roles how you see fit.

Client users will remain the same as they currently are now, so no changes there!

For more info on roles, view the article on our help desk.

Calendar view in projects

Each project now has a Calendar view where you can get a birds eye view of all Client & Internal Tasks that have due dates, Phase due dates, and Milestones.

You can also easily add new due dates, or drag to update existing ones.

The client can also view the calendar, but will only see Client Tasks with due dates, nothing internal.

Attaching tasks in Schedule

We realised it was a bit painful to attach tasks to a user assignment in the Schedule view when you’re planning out your projects and capacity, so we’ve completely updated the experience.

Now when you are attaching tasks to a time block on the schedule, you can see all the phases and tasks from the project in one streamlined view, to easily navigate to the ones you want to attach.

While you’re there you can also update due dates, assignees, and tick things off, making it easier to update things as you plan.

My Tasks view

We’ve given the My Tasks view a design overhaul to make it easier to scan everything that’s assigned to you. You can now also easily update the assignments, due date and completed status from this view too.

And for Manager and Team Member users, we’ve added a highly requested feature where you can now toggle to see the task lists for other users on your team. So now you can get a sense of what everyone is working on, and better manage the team’s workload.

You can also drag and re-order the tabs, so if you prefer to see the Due Soon tab each time you hop into tasks, now you can make it your default.

We’ve got some more ideas in store to further improve this section that will be coming in the next couple of months so stay tuned!

And more…

We’ve made a number of other improvements as well, including:

• A refreshed design for the files section of each project, giving you greater visibility - including a link to where the file was added - as well as the ability to download or delete multiple files at once

• The Project Info button now brings these details in via a sidebar rather than always taking you to a new page, so you can easily reference things like strategy docs, project goals, SOW agreements etc - all without losing the context of what you’re working on

• A clearer user invite experience, with notes about the access level you’ll be giving different user types as you invite them into your teams and projects

• A new and improved Help desk with more helpful articles and an easier navigation to make finding the answers to your questions much simpler

As always we’re super committed to continually improving Outlign to make it more useful for the creative teams who make up our thriving community, so with this lot of improvements released, we’ll get straight back to work on the next batch!

From us over here at Outlign …

Mark, Dave, Ruby & Ant.

We’re back with another product update as we continue to make Outlign more useful for the creative community.

New Embeds

We’ve added the ability to embed a few key services into the main content area of a task and in comments, both to allow users to preview some content without leaving Outlign, as well as tidy up those ugly share links to keep things feeling more professional and organised for clients.

Services that provide a preview include:

• Figma - design files, prototypes and slides

• Dropbox files

• Google Drive files - pdfs, videos, etc

• Whimsical boards

Services that provide an attachment style and pull in the relevant title include:

• Dropbox folders

• Google Drive folders

• Google Docs, Slides and Sheets

We’ll continue to add more services to this list over the coming months - feel free to reply and let us know which ones you really want to see.

We’ve also created embeds for popular calendar booking services Calendly and Cal.com - for these you can choose to embed the full calendar booking widget in the content, or a simple “Book Now” type button that opens the full calendar booking UI in a modal when clicked.

To get started with any of these embeds, simply paste in the share link from the external service and you’ll be prompted to paste as a preview or you can always still paste it as a URL if you prefer.

Improved Approvals

We’ve also added a couple of key improvements to our Approvals feature:

You can now customise the Approval Message that your clients will see when they go to approve a task. So now you can make it extra clear what they are agreeing to when they are marking something as Approved

We’ve also added the ability for you or the client to mark a task as Not Approved. This way if the client needs more changes, you can still complete that task but with a clear status that it was not approved at the time

We think this will help even more with reducing scope creep - by making it clearer what clients are signing off on, as well as a clear status when things aren’t approved and additional changes are required (i.e. more scope is needed!).

We’re excited to share a number of updates that should help to make running creative projects even smoother.

Task Templates

We’ve had a few requests for this one, and we think it’ll make running consistent workflows that much easier… you can now turn any task into a Template, and then create new tasks from that template across any project.

This is great for any individual task that you find yourself repeating over and over, and want a consistent starting point. You can even make them visible to your client, for board projects where the client often creates tasks and you want them to use the same format.

Some examples we’ve been seeing already include:

• A standardised set of form fields for a New work request from a client

• A Social Post template that contains sections for all the details you need to create a new post

• A standard Project Overview task that gives the client a rundown of what’s included or excluded within any given project

To turn a task into a template, just view any existing task and look for the new option in the 3-dot dropdown menu on the right.

Reactions

Sometimes an emoji can express a thousand words, or at least one reaction anyway… So we’ve added the ability to react to comments.

This one is great when you want to celebrate the wins, or simply let someone know you’ve seen their comment without having to post a whole comment.

Just hover over any comment and you’ll see the button for adding your reaction.

Duplicating tasks from client to agency side (or the other way)

One thing we’ve found happen a lot is a task will get created on one side of the project - either the internal or the client side - and you then need to create a matching task on the other side… which can be a bit of a manual pain.

Now we’ve made it so you can easily create an internal task from a client task, and vice versa - and once you do, the two tasks will be linked together so you can easily jump back and forth between the two. Sometimes it’s the little things…

Plus much more…

Speaking of little things, we’ve made a number of other small updates based on requests and things we’ve noticed that we hope will make things just that bit easier - getting you back to the creative work quicker.

Some highlights include:

• A new Callout block in the content editor when you really need to draw attention to what you’re trying to emphasise

• Setting email notification preferences so instead of receiving each one immediately, you can get an hourly or daily digest, or turn them off altogether

• The ability to turn an existing project into a template - so you don’t have to start from scratch when templating your ideal process

• The ability to move a task to any other phase or side of a project - allowing you to groom tasks internally before moving them to the client side, or just quickly move a task to “Done” from within the task view

• Automatically collapsing long comment threads so it’s easier to get to the latest updates and continue the conversation

• Being able to search for tasks on a board project

• Keeping any filters you’ve applied to a board even as you leave and come back, so if you never want to see completed tasks you don’t have to

Plus a few more…

We hope you enjoy these updates and as always keep the feedback coming.

We’re really stoked to have a thriving community of creatives and seeing all the different ways you’re using Outlign to streamline your workflow, so a big thanks for your support.