New Wrike Beta: Backlog

Published by Dasha   |  Monday, 30 August, 2010
Do you see more overdue tasks appear on the dashboard every day, even though you and your team members are working really hard? These days we often have to deal with uncertainty, so it’s not always possible to specify fixed due dates for some tasks. Later, when you don’t meet the set deadlines for these tasks, you need to reschedule them again and again. Maybe there are some items that don’t have an actual deadline. For instance, they can be not actionable items, but valuable ideas to elaborate on sometime in the future. Whether they are tasks or ideas, in order to prevent them from slipping out of your sight, you need to record them in your plan. In a multitasking environment, it’s hard to keep them all in your head when it’s overloaded with information. Occasionally, you may miss something important in the workflow under such pressure.

To free your brain from the pressure of remembering too many things and to avoid stress, you need to get the ideas and tasks with no deadlines in safe storage as soon as they pop up. After you and your team cope with urgent matters, you can then turn to that list to develop your ideas or tackle some action item. Now Wrike allows you to keep these items neatly organized, so that none of them gets lost. If you use the new beta version, you may have noticed that now the tasks can not only be planned for exact dates or set as milestones, but also marked as “Backlogged.” Let us give you a view into this new, important feature of Wrike. 



Generally, a “backlog” is an accumulated list of work that still needs to be done. In terms of Getting Things Done (GTD), a personal productivity methodology that can be rolled out companywide with Wrike, a backlogged task can be defined as an item from the Someday/Maybe list. It means it’s a task that you will possibly pick up and complete sometime in the future. Backlogged tasks have no start date and due date. Backlogged tasks are not tied to the timeline and not visible on it. In the new version of Wrike, backlogged tasks are shown on a separate widget of the dashboard, so that you have a clear overview of them and don’t miss any item in the workflow. However, Wrike doesn’t include backlogged tasks in the daily to-do emails.

To see the tasks marked as backlogged in a certain folder, hit the “Backlog” button. Then you can easily rank your tasks by priority using drag-and-drop. As simple to implement as it sounds, this feature is a powerful tool that will help you to turn a long, messy list of unsorted tasks and ideas into a valid, agile plan. You can change the sorting order whenever your priorities change. 



With the new backlog feature, you take the load of too many things to remember off your brain. Wrike takes care of them and remembers them for you. You and your team members can store and prioritize the items in your workflow, gaining a clearer sense of what to focus on while moving toward your goals. In addition to a personal backlog, Wrike also allows you to accommodate backlogs for your projects, products, departments, etc.  Thus, this feature not only boosts your personal productivity, but turns into a very helpful tool for building your long-term strategies. For instance, you can record all your ideas about the future development of your product in the backlog. Keeping them in a neat, prioritized list that is not tied to inflexible or unfeasible deadlines, you can build a transparent roadmap of your product development and tackle the items one by one when the right time comes.
Try the new backlog feature and gain extra bonus points on your efficiency! 
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Keep Your Team Members on the Same Page with Wrike

Published by Dasha   |  Thursday, 26 August, 2010
Monitoring project statuses, sorting out responsibilities and deadlines, managing documents – how much time and effort do you need to invest in these routine tasks? Tipton Communications, an award-winning company providing PR services, estimates that project administration consumed up to 10% of their working hours. As more new members joined the team and the complexity of business grew, it was getting really challenging for the company’s managers to keep an eye on all the ongoing projects. Team members sometimes duplicated tasks because they didn’t know what exactly their colleagues were working on. Manual project-tracking methods used by Tipton didn’t prevent slips in the workflow. The company’s managers realized they needed a reliable project management application to prevent further problems that would be a potential threat to the corporate image.

Adoption of Wrike brought quick improvements both to managers and team members. “Wrike has been the most productive tool we have added to our arsenal since I started this business nearly five years ago,” says Dan Tipton, president and CEO at Tipton Communications. Read the whole interview with Dan to find out why Wrike turned out to be the best match for the company’s needs and how the workflow at Tipton has changed since it adopted this project management software
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Wrike Helps Intuit Users Easily Manage Projects and Collaborate Online

Published by Daria   |  Wednesday, 18 August, 2010
Today, we are happy to let you know that Wrike is now available from the Intuit App Center. We’re proud to partner with Intuit, a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and midsize businesses, financial institutions, consumers and accounting professionals. Intuit Workplace App Center is a feature in one of Intuit’s flagship products, QuickBooks Pro and Premier 2010.

From now on, millions of Intuit’s small business customers will be able to manage projects and collaborate online with Wrike’s help. Wrike is one of the few applications on the App Center that lets its users benefit from a powerful mix of project management, productivity, collaboration and time-tracking features. Anyone who has an Intuit account will be able to use Wrike to share files, build project schedules and visualize them on a Gantt chart, create and update tasks from emails, track time spent on tasks, manage 10+ projects in one place, and much more.

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Wrike Is Proud of Its Fans

Published by Daria   |  Monday, 19 July, 2010
Soccer teams aren’t the only ones with lots of supporters. Wrike has its own fans, too! Today, we’re excited to introduce you to one of the most active of them – Jeff LeRoy, also known as @WrikeFan on Twitter.  

Wrike’s customer base is constantly growing, and it’s very pleasing to see that some of our users are actively spreading the word about their favorite project management software. Thanks so much, Jeff! We greatly appreciate your support!


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Hot Summer Tweets

Published by Dasha   |  Monday, 12 July, 2010
Since summer started, it has been as hot on Twitter as it has been outside. In the past few weeks, our multinational customers tweeted about their impressions of activity streams, Google Wave integration and Wrike in general. Thank you guys for your attention and all these comments! Your feedback helps us move forward.

seesarahwrite @leslieajoy have you tried Wrike? Let me know your favorite!

alexsbrown Evaluating wrike project mngmnt system for a client. If you are a user, I would love to talk with you about it.

ResGeek More updates to #GTD Software Comparison List: Wrike now supports real-time updates from team members - http://j.mp/8aMrSK #TRO

pm4girls RT @corneliusficht: Need a tool to manage your projects via Email? Try www.wrike.com - I use it for my team and love it. <-- Wrike rocks!

corneliusficht Need a tool to manage your projects via Email? Try www.wrike.com - I use it for my team and love it.

TourismCollege http://www.wrike.com allows you to come up w/ project plan & assign tasks 2 the resp. people. Great for virtual office.

ken_guru Wrike project management integrating with Google Wave. These kinds of integrations is what will make #wave "mainstream" http://bit.ly/cUHVsS

TiptonCom Tipton Communications recommends wrike.com for project management and planning.

googlewavedev The @Wrike folks have blogged about their 2-way syncing between Waves & Project Tasks - Nice use of the active API! http://ow.ly/1YLjM 

ElPrezAU @kenleefh We use Wrike... I quite like it but I use it more for task management, dunno how it goes for handling projects over a lifespan.

Susan_Low I am so excited about implementing Wrike.com project management for my client. I think I need to do a happy dance.

weareid We've started using Wrike for project planning and resource management - http://www.wrike.com/r/46II8. Have a gander, there is a free trial.

pa1et Probando Wrike. http://www.wrike.es/ Cuales son las mejores herramientas 2.0 de gestión de proyectos que genere gants bien bonitos?

georgedearing Wrike becomes more Yammer-like with activity streams // http://bit.ly/cvVVay | #fb

bionicturtle @wrike love the yammer-like microblog. I'd love if we had option to tweet it out (e.g., if hashtag or something)

venturebeat Wrike merges project management with activity streams http://bit.ly/anUY9v by @CodyBarbierri

armanddp Wow, the new @wrike beta is slick. Just stumbled across the switch to beta button... Very nice. (http://wrike.com)

Follow us on Twitter to keep up with all our news and updates! There are a lot of them to come in the summertime. 


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Focus on Your Goals While Wrike Takes Care of the Project Communication Routine

Published by Dasha   |  Wednesday, 07 July, 2010
When your small team has to collaborate with numerous external partners, it’s an extra challenge to organize effective collaboration. Is it possible to manage the information flow under the high pressure of multitasking so that no tasks are forgotten, no documents are lost and everyone is kept up-to-date? Hildebrands GmbH, a German company that provides shop fitting solutions, works with 30+ external partners, so they’re very familiar with this situation. They found a solution to handle it. “Wrike minimizes the need to make numerous phone calls and send dozens of emails when working on a project. Wrike automatically takes care of a lot of routine communication tasks. Everyone who is involved gets instantly notified about the updates in the schedule,” says Gunter Hildebrand, managing partner at Hildebrands.

Read the whole interview with Gunter to find out how Wrike helped his company to save 25% of time spent on routine project communication tasks and to organize effective project collaboration with numerous external partners distributed all over Europe.
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Wrike in South Africa

Published by Dasha   |  Thursday, 01 July, 2010
It’s been quite a long time since Wrike’s outreach became global. We have users in all regions of the world. So we associate a lot of countries not only with their internationally famous landmarks and significant events, but also with the customers that we have there. For instance, right now you hear everyone talk about South Africa as the Soccer World Cup host country. But at Wrike we also talk about our fast-growing customer community there (which is hopefully enjoying the World Cup matches).

Some of South African Wrike subscribers have become true evangelists! One of the most prominent among them is ChaiFM. It’s a Jewish community radio station based in the Johannesburg area. Since 2008, ChaiFM broadcasts a wide range of programs covering various social matters, business, entertainment and other topics. Knowing how actively these guys spread the word about Wrike, we are sure to see more South African project managers become our customers soon. 
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Synchronize your Google Wave with Wrike Both Ways

Published by Daria   |  Tuesday, 15 June, 2010
Those of you who already tried connecting your Wrike and Google Wave accounts already know how easy, fast and convenient it is to turn your Wave discussions in to tasks with due dates in Wrike. You don’t have to store your project-related information in two different systems. Wrike’s extension to Google Wave seamlessly turns your wave into a task, and your project management software automatically keeps track of all the changes. The feature turned out to be so popular that it also caught the attention of Google Wave developers. They’ve given us a few very helpful tips on how we can make Wrike’s integration with Google Wave even handier.

Recently, we added a few enhancements to this feature and are happy to share them with you.

Setting task parameters right in the wave
We made it simple for you to specify the task details as soon as you turn you wave into a task. When you add Wrike to your new wave, you see a panel, where you can edit your task start date (1), due date (2), status (3), priority (4) and the responsible party (5).
 


2-Way Synchronization

All your task details are synchronized in Wrike and Wave. So if you change something in your wave, the edits are immediately visible to your team members in Wrike. Vice-versa, when you edit your task in Wrike, (for example, add a comment) your comment appears as a new blip in the wave.


 
Easily find your task in the workspace
Your wave now has a link to your task in the Wrike workspace, so that you can instantly find it and go directly to this task, if you need to. When you click on the link, you’re automatically redirected to your task in Wrike.




These enhancements will save you even more time when you collaborate with your team by using both systems, Wrike and Google Wave. We hope that you enjoy them.

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Wrike Fuels Productivity

Published by Dasha   |  Thursday, 10 June, 2010
It’s an undeniable fact that people’s opinions differ. And even if several individuals are united with one goal, they don’t necessarily go the same way toward achieving it. This is as true for project teamwork as for any kind of cooperation. All the team members may have different views of the project, and everyone certainly has his or her own working habits. 

There has to be an opportunity to accommodate a variety of opinions in order to collaborate efficiently, according to Rurik Bradbury, chief marketing officer at Unison Technologies. Unison provides unified communications solutions to help businesses become more productive with their communications.  Aimed at increasing its own productivity, the company was looking for flexible project management software that would fit into the way its international team works.  “A good collaboration and project management solution is essential for getting things done in a team, especially in a distributed one,” says Rurik. It took Unison Technologies quite a long time to find the right tool. Most of the products the team tried had a unified structure of projects, which didn’t provide the flexibility the company needed. Thus, there was no gain in productivity.

However, it turned out to be absolutely different with Wrike. Unison Technologies has seen a major improvement in productivity after adopting the tool. Read the whole interview to find out how Wrike allowed a team separated by oceans to increase the number of completed tasks by 20%. 
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New Wrike Beta: Avatars

Published by Dmitry   |  Tuesday, 08 June, 2010
If you have already started exploring the new version of Wrike, you certainly noticed that your favorite project management software became a lot more social. Avatars are one of the hot additions in the new Wrike. The task bar now shows the avatar of  the person responsible  for the assignment, instead of displaying the full name in a separate column. It will be much easier from now on to see at a glance who is responsible by looking at the picture, rather than reading a name. Plus, avatars take up less space, which is especially notable with our new three-pane interface. We give everyone in your account one of our cool avatars by default, but a user can upload his or her own picture by going to the My Profile tab in the Account Management space.
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"I think it's obvious from Wrike's design that the system engineers all have project management experience. It's seems like they took our feature wish list and built a service around it," said Aaron Anderson, account strategy manager, 3rd Wave Research.

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