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.

Since we began, Asana has been on a mission to help great teams achieve more ambitious goals. We started 18 months ago with our free service, targeted at smaller teams and even individuals – helping them get and stay organized.

When we launched our first premium tiers six months later, we enabled medium sized teams and companies – think 10s to 100s of people – to go further with Asana. In the year between then and now, we’ve been continuously amazed by all the places and ways Asana is being used to organize a team: in industries as diverse as education, healthcare, finance, technology, and manufacturing; in companies from two-person partnerships to Fortune 100 enterprises; and in dozens of countries representing every continent but the frozen one. 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.

What’s new in Organizations

When we talk with bigger teams using Asana, we find they share common themes. The first is that they have multiple different teams working together, each doing their own work, but depending on each other in important ways. The second is that there are more people who are in multiple teams – especially management – who need to see across those teams at the same time. The last theme is that they often have dedicated IT professionals supporting them, with security and data access requirements. With Organizations, we’ve addressed each of these areas.

There are four new things you’ll see in Asana when you’re in an Organization:

Teams Teams are groups of teammates inside your Organization and the projects they are working on together. We’ve seen that teams don’t always map to a strict company org chart, so anyone in your Asana Organization can create a new Team, and invite existing or new Asana members to it. The Teams in your Organization are listed in the left pane, in an area we call the Team Browser. Premium Teams can even decide how their membership is controlled, and whether the Team is visible to others or not. The options include:

• Public – the team is open for anyone in that Organization to join immediately

• Membership by Request – an existing team member approves new members

• Hidden – the team is invitation-only and isn’t visible in the Team Browser

Unified my Tasks, Inbox and search across all Teams If you work with many separate teams at the same time – as managers, executives, project managers, and client services teams do, just to name a few – we’re making your world much better. Within your Organization, you have a single view of your tasks, a single Inbox, and can search and save your searches across the entire Organization. This will keep you connected to more of what’s going on, with less effort.

Auto-joining your Organization Now, new users who sign up for Asana on their own, using their @yourcompany.com email address, will be automatically joined to your Organization. They’ll be shown all the teams listed in the Team Browser, and can join or request membership to any of those, or create a new Team. This will be a much quicker start for new teammates, while also answering the common question “are there other teams in my company using Asana already?”

Centralized administration A big part of supporting bigger teams is making it easy for IT to support. Organizations on premium plans can now can designate “admins” for an Organization, who are able to configure some security settings, manage users, and centralize billing. Admins can also see account activity, easily remove users from the Organization, and require access to Asana through Google Accounts.

How do I get started?

Starting today, Organizations is built into Asana for everyone. New users who are the first from their company to sign up, will be creating their first Team inside a new Organization. Over the next day or so, we’ll let most of the existing teams convert their Workspace to an Organization themselves, so you start creating Teams right away. If you have multiple Workspaces you want to merge into an Organization, or any questions about converting your Workspace, you can read more in the Guide, or contact us.

We’ve also made it easier for companies to decide when and how they want to upgrade Asana. You can upgrade any Team by itself, starting at only $50/month for up to 15 users. Or you can upgrade your entire Organization, making all your Teams premium. There’s no difference in the price, and we have the same user tiers for both. All Asana Premium plans give you private projects, public and private teams, ability to add external guests, and a higher level of support, in addition to more users. Upgrading your Organization also gives your IT teams the administration capabilities listed above.

We’ve also strengthened our free tier with this update. Free Organizations offer unlimited projects and tasks, and unlimited Teams up to 15 members each, with most of the features listed above, including Teams, single view of My Tasks, single Inbox, and auto-joining for new users.

Another step

With Organizations, we’ve addressed the most important requirements of bigger companies, an important piece of the larger puzzle. But over the next several months, we will continue to launch new features that make Asana an even more powerful way to coordinate your team, organize your work, and track progress towards your goals.

Our goal is to be the tool all the world’s best teams rely on to do great things, and we won’t rest until we’re there.