You can move your live clients and projects into Outlign in hours, not weeks. Connect Outlign and your old tool to your AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any tool that supports MCP), and let it do the copying, mapping and tidying for you.
Your AI can study how you run projects today, turn that into Outlign templates, then rebuild your live work on them. Projects already underway can either finish in your old tool or move across with their history, so nothing gets dropped mid-job.
Set up the structure first and bring people in later. Clients can't see anything until you invite them, so you can build everything quietly and invite them once their projects are ready.
Connect Outlign to your AI tool. Add the Outlign MCP in your tool's connector or integration settings and sign in.
Get your old tool's data to your AI. Either connect it as well (best, because your AI can read it directly) or export it and upload the files. The next section shows the options for the most common tools.
Sort out your templates. Use Outlign's pre-built templates, or let your AI study how you run projects now and design templates around that (Step 1 below). Use a process project for work that follows your agency's method and a task board for retainers, small jobs and internal work. See Use Project Templates.
Let your AI create your clients and projects. That's Steps 2 to 5 below.
Invite your team and clients when you're ready. Team members also need adding to each project they work on. Clients can come in at kick-off, or whenever you're ready for them to see their project.
Have a short list of your team and client contacts ready (first name and role). Your old tool's comments refer to people by name or by internal ID, and your AI needs the list to match them up.
New to Outlign? Read Getting started for agencies first.
Most popular PM tools now have their own MCP server, so you can connect them to your AI right next to Outlign. Where there isn't one, export your projects and upload the files instead. Find your tool below, get your data in, then follow the steps further down.
Switching from | Connect it to your AI | Or export it | Becomes Outlign phases |
|---|---|---|---|
Asana | Official MCP server | CSV or JSON export from each project | Sections |
Basecamp | No official MCP yet (community servers exist) | Account owner exports the account or a project as an HTML backup | To-do lists |
Monday.com | Official MCP server | Export a board to Excel | Groups |
ClickUp | Official MCP server | CSV export | Lists or statuses |
Trello | Official Trello MCP server | JSON per board, CSV on Premium | Lists |
Notion | Official hosted MCP server | Export as Markdown and CSV | Database groups or statuses |
Jira | Official Atlassian Rovo MCP server | CSV export of issues | Epics or statuses |
Wrike | Official MCP server | Export to Excel | Folders or sub-projects |
Teamwork.com | Official MCP server (paid plans) | CSV or Excel export | Task lists |
Productive | Official MCP server (Ultimate plan) | CSV export | Task lists or workflow stages |
Using something else? The same steps work for any tool. If it has an MCP server, connect it. If not, any CSV or spreadsheet export will do.
MCP availability changes quickly, so check your tool's help centre for the latest setup steps and plan requirements.
In your old tool | In Outlign |
|---|---|
Client, team or workspace | Client |
Project with a set method (a rebrand, a website build) | Process project, built from your closest template |
Retainer, ongoing or ad hoc work | Task board project |
Sections, lists, groups, stages | Phases (process project) or columns (task board) |
Tasks, cards, to-dos, issues | Tasks |
Subtasks and checklists | A checklist inside the task |
Comment history | Carried over as comments (hard switch) or one summary comment |
Message boards and updates | Messages |
Docs, notes and briefs | Project docs |
Due dates and key dates | Task due dates, phase due dates and milestones |
Anything shared with clients or guests | The client side of the project |
Internal-only work | The project's internal space |
Your old tool already shows how your agency runs a project. Let your AI study a few typical ones and design Outlign templates from them, or match them to Outlign's existing templates.
We're moving from [your old tool] to Outlign. Before we move any projects, I want our Outlign templates to match how we actually work.
1. Look at [3 to 5] of our typical projects for each type of work we do: [e.g. rebrands, website builds, retainers]. Include some finished ones.
2. For each type, show me the stages we usually go through, the tasks that repeat on every project, what we share with clients vs keep internal, and roughly how long each stage takes.
3. Check our existing Outlign templates. Tell me which ones already fit and what's missing.
4. For anything that doesn't have a good template yet, design one: process project or task board, phases, tasks with short descriptions, and which tasks are client-facing vs internal.
Give me each template as a clear outline I can review.Once you're happy with the outlines, build them in the template builder. Keep client-facing template tasks as drafts, so nothing goes live to a client until you publish it.
Start with an audit, so you only move what's still live. Nothing gets created in this step.
We're moving from [your old tool] to Outlign. [It's connected / Here's our export.]
1. List every project that's still active. Group them by client.
2. For each project, count only these tasks: open tasks, plus tasks created or completed in the last [12] months. Ignore old completed tasks that were only edited recently.
3. For each, give me: client, project name, how far through it is, task count (open and completed), longest comment thread, next due date, and who's working on it.
4. Flag anything that looks finished or stale, so we can leave it behind.
5. For each active project, recommend whether to finish it in [old tool] or move it across now (see Step 3), and why. Projects close to the finish line usually stay put.
6. Check which of these clients already exist in Outlign, which of our templates best fits each project, and whether it should be a process project or a task board.
Don't create anything yet. Give me the migration plan as a table.Every project that's mid-stream gets one of two paths. You can mix them, so pick per project.
Run it down | Hard switch | |
|---|---|---|
What happens | The project finishes in your old tool. Only new projects start in Outlign. | The project moves to Outlign now, history and all. |
Best for | Projects close to done, or with a client who's mid-approval | Long projects with months to go, or when you want one tool from day one |
History | Stays in the old tool | Completed tasks come across marked done, with comment history carried over where possible |
Future work | Not in Outlign until the next project | Set up as a process project or task board on your templates |
Effort | None now, but you run two tools for a while | A bit more up front, then everything's in one place |
For a hard switch, add this to the Step 4 prompt:
This is a hard switch, so bring the history across too:
- Recreate completed tasks in the right phases and mark them complete. Note the original completion date at the bottom of the task.
- Carry over each task's comments as one "Comment history" comment, oldest first. Start each message with the original author and date, e.g. "Sam, 3 Sep 2026", because they'll post under my name with today's date.
- If a task has more than 20 comments, write a short summary of the earlier discussion, link back to the original task, then copy the latest 10 to 12 comments in full.
- Set up all remaining and future work in the current and upcoming phases, ready to assign.Pick a project you know well, so you can spot anything that comes across wrong. If it's a hard switch, add the history instructions from Step 3.
Migrate [Project] for [Client] into Outlign using the [Template] template.
Our people: [Name, role], [Name, role], [Name, role].
1. Create the client if they don't exist.
2. Create the project from the template, then map the old sections/lists to the template's phases (or columns, for a task board). Add phases for anything that doesn't fit.
3. Bring across all open tasks, with their descriptions and due dates. Put subtasks as a checklist inside the task. At the bottom of each task, note who created it, when, and who owned it, so we can assign it once the team is in.
4. For each open task with a long comment history, add one comment summarising where it's up to.
5. People: use the list above to turn any user IDs or profile links into first names. Write names WITHOUT the @ symbol, so nobody gets notified about old comments.
6. Images and attachments: replace them with "[image in old tool]" so we know where they were.
7. Anything the client could see in the old tool goes on the client side as an unpublished draft, linked to its internal task. Everything else goes in the internal space.
8. Copy key docs and briefs into project docs (internal).
9. For every attachment, add a link to where the original file lives, and give me a list of all attachments per task so we can upload the important ones.
Don't invite anyone, publish client tasks or post client messages yet. Show me the plan for this project first, then build it and give me a before/after count of tasks per phase.Once the pilot looks right, reuse the same rules for everything else.
The [Project] pilot worked. Using the same rules, migrate the next [5] projects from the plan: [list them]. Do one at a time and give me a short summary after each one, including anything that didn't map cleanly.What the AI does across the five steps: reads your old tool (or export), plans the move, rebuilds each active project in Outlign on your templates, carries over open work with dates and owners, and summarises history instead of copying it.
Plan for hours, in batches. In our test, a project with 68 tasks and its full comment history moved across in about 10 minutes. A whole account takes a few hours, plus your time to review each project. Move a few projects per batch rather than the whole account in one go.
Files and screenshots don't move through MCP. That includes images inside descriptions and comments, which come across as placeholders. The quickest workaround: have your AI add a link on each task to where the file lives (your old tool, Drive or Dropbox), then drag in the few files that really matter. The pilot prompt already lists every attachment per task, so that becomes a quick checklist. Direct file transfer is on the Outlign roadmap.
Some details don't carry over. Migrated comments post under whoever connected the MCP, with today's date, which is why the prompts write the original author and date into the text. Completed tasks lose their original completion date, and subtasks may lose their done or not-done status.
Watch out for @mentions. Outlign notifies anyone @mentioned in a comment, so make sure old comments come across with plain names, not @names.
Keep the old tool until your run-down projects finish. After that, it's your archive for finished projects. Start every new project in Outlign from day one, so the old tool only shrinks.
Check before clients see it. Review each migrated project before you invite the client, and publish client tasks when you're happy with them. The AI Playbooks article has a prompt for a client welcome message.
Assign tasks once the team is in. After you've invited your team, ask your AI to add them to their projects and assign their tasks using the owner notes from the migration.
Exports are a snapshot. If work carries on in the old tool after you export, re-export before moving that project, or connect the tool directly instead.