Are You Ready to Wave with Wrike? Whether you already using Google Wave, or just thinking of giving it a try, we’ve got fabulous news for you!

Starting on February 3, you’ll be able to boost your project management productivity in Wrike by adding Google Wave collaboration feature set to your project management tool. Wrike is the first project management software that allows you to manage your projects directly from Google’s communication platform.

Wrike’s Google Wave integration will allow you to seamlessly turn your waves into tasks, set due dates, update your project schedule and add your Wave discussions as comments to tasks in Wrike! This instant collaboration combination is a breakthrough in the project management space and an outstanding achievement in team productivity. Give it a try, and you’ll see why.

To start managing your projects in Wrike from Google Wave is as easy as 1,2,3. Just add a new contact, wrike-wave@appspot.com, to your Wave (1).


 
Then create a new wave and add Wrike to it (2).


 
This new wave will be your Wrike task. Immediately, Wrike will respond with a request to connect your Wave account to your Wrike account. (That will appear in a separate wave) (3).


 
Once you follow the link, Wrike will recognize you and create your task in your workspace.
To share your new task with your team members, add them to the same wave. Those who have already been registered in Wrike will be recognized by the system. 

All the comments (or “blips” in Google Wave’s terminology) that you and your colleagues add to your task wave will be automatically turned into comments in the task discussion in Wrike. All the changes you make to the main wave content will be added to the task description, as well.

The next time you discuss a project-related task with your team members in Google Wave, simply add Wrike (wrike-wave@appspot.com) to your wave, and let your project management software keep track of all the changes.

Moreover, you can set due dates for your tasks, place them in the right folders and update your project schedule directly from the Wave. When you create a new task, you can use the wave titles just like e-mail subjects to place your task into the appropriate folder and set the correct due date.

For example, if you need to create a task called “update our Web site” in the “ourwebsite.com” folder, and if you want to set the due date to February 18, you simply need to put ourwebsite.com :: update our Web site by 02/18 in the wave title, and don’t forget to add Wrike to your newly created wave.



Wrike will recognize the familiar subject, place your task right where you want it to be and set the due date. Your timeline in Wrike will be updated automatically. It’s a significant productivity advantage that you and your whole team will benefit from when using Wrike with Google Wave.

Note: At the moment, Google Wave API has a number of limitations that restrict Wrike’s integration functionalities. Hardworking Google developers promise to get rid of these limitations soon. Meanwhile, there are several things that we want to bring to your attention.

1.    When you create a task in Wrike from the Wave, it will not be assigned to anyone, so you’ll need to assign your task directly from Wrike.

2.    For now, the system can sync changes made to your tasks in the Wave; however, it will not translate the updates you made to the task in your Wrike workspace to Google’s platform. So if you create a task from the Wave make changes to the task description in Wrike, and then try to update the main wave content from Google’s platform, the changes that you made in Wrike will be lost.

3.    We recommend that you add your team members to your Wrike account first and only then invite them to the task discussion in the Wave.

We’ll keep you updated on the progress.

Even if you work in a team of two, keeping track of multiple projects can be challenging. What if you need to collaborate in a team of 50 people? Just imagine how hard it can be to keep everyone in the loop and make sure that all the tasks are completed on time, or simply that they are not forgotten by your colleagues.

“As the projects and tasks build up, tracking them all becomes increasingly difficult with no project management software to help you,” says Joe Dean, CEO at Electronic Sports, a company developing interactive fitness games for commercial exercise equipment.  Joe is an experienced project manager, and he knows how it is to be in charge of 50 people and numerous projects running simultaneously. He told us about the challenges of his position, as well as the solution he found to overcome them. Curious to find out what the solution it is? Read the interview with Joe Dean. 

This year is coming to an end, and now it's high time to review the accomplishments we had.

First of all, we're happy to let you know that this year brought us numerous new users! Some of them agreed to share their Wrike experience with us. As a result, we published quite a few new customer success stories, including interviews with:

• Laura Roeder, a popular online marketing strategist and social media expert
• Cornelius Fichtner, PMP, show host at The Project Management PrepCast
• Luther Cale, chief of marketing, HealthStream
• Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager, UKSA
• Nick Doherty, managing editor of television, SBS Online
• and some others.

We hope that we'll be able to publish a case study with you next year. Ready to share your story already? Contact us at marketing@team.wrike.com, and we'll be happy to put it out. By the way, here's a very inspiring SlideShare case study presentation by one of our customers, SayitRight Marketing Solutions. We hope that this slide deck will push you to share your online collaboration and project management best practices with the world.

In 2009, we continued to lead the web-based project management space with our Intelligent Email Engine^TM (smart email integration), which remains the most advanced among project management software solutions. Despite this fact, we never stop innovating in this and other areas. This year has been remarkable in terms of development achievements and new feature releases. Let us innumerate the most important of them:

• new user management engine: allowed you to create your own cost-effective mix of user licenses in your account;
• email-integrated task discussions: let you add comments to task by simply emailing them to Wrike, and  made Wrike's email integration even more robust and universal;
• Outlook add-in: made it easy for you to synchronize your emails marked for follow-up and tasks in your Outlook and Wrike accounts;
• WinMobile app: made Wrike's tasks accessible from your smart phone;
• intraday tasks: allowed you to build a more precise schedule by creating tasks that start and are estimated to be completed on the same day;
• recurring tasks: simplified scheduling of tasks that occur every day, week, month or year for you.

Wrike also was enhanced with 535 "small things," like handy shortcuts, version tracking for files, improvements in task management and daily to-do emails, as well as many other useful features that make you more productive in your day-to-day jobs.

The last, but definitely not least, we delivered Wrike Simple Projects, a productivity application for the My Yahoo! platform.

So the past year brought us a lot of exciting events that couldn't have happened without you. You, our valued customers, continuously inspired us to improve the service and make it an even better solution for your business productivity.

Now, what should you expect from Wrike in the year 2010? Even more amazing news, of course!

We're thrilled to share some of our development plans with you.  The beginning of the next year will be packed with new feature releases. We're currently working on delivering an iPhone app and Google Docs integration. Want even more? You'll get it! Our development roadmap also includes a new user interface, resource management, budgeting, microblogging, BlackBerry and G1 plug-ins and lots of other productivity and management features that will make your team even more efficient.

In addition, we plan to localize Wrike to more than 10 languages! This year, we released the Spanish version of our project management software. German and French versions are next on our list.

We'd like to underline here that our development plans change over time, as they greatly depend on your feedback and suggestions. Your opinion and requests are always welcome in the comments to this blog and at support@team.wrike.com

We wish you and your family a happy, safe and restful holiday season! Your success is our success, and we hope to continue to build our partnership throughout 2010 and the future.

We’re excited to share a presentation that was created by one of our loyal customers – Joseph Andrade, owner of SayitRight Marketing Solutions. Joe is speaking about his best practices for implementing Collaboration 2.0 in his marketing agency. It’s a great pleasure for us to let you know that our project management software became the core element of SayitRight’s online collaboration strategy.

Have a look at this interesting case study and learn a real-life war story of online collaboration done right.

Ready to share your own story with us? Contact us at marketing@team.wrike.com

 We’re thrilled to let you know that the Project Management 2.0 blog written by Wrike’s CEO and founder, Andrew Filev, made it to the project management short list of the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards! The Project Management 2.0 blog is a marketing-free space, where its author shares his views on how the present project management space is transformed by the influence of Web 2.0 technologies, like blogs, wikis, social networks and collaboration apps, as well as practices like collective intelligence. It’s great to see that ideas expressed in the blog were acknowledged by such an influential entity as ComputerWeekly.com.

The event organizers wanted the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards to help professionals from IT and other industries find the best authors, sharing their real-life experiences and useful tips. That’s why they involved the blogs’ readers in choosing the best blogs. We’re honored that the Project Management 2.0 blog was chosen to be among the most valuable blogs in the project management field. Now you can help it get to the top of the list! Go to the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards and vote for Project Management 2.0 now!

What impact does online collaboration make on our everyday lives? We’ll be among those searching for the answer to this question during the upcoming Collaboration 2.0 Conference organized by the SDForum in Santa Clara, Calif. Wrike will be presented at the event, which will be held on October 30 and will gather the industry experts, as well as companies interested in innovating their collaboration practices. Our project management software will be showcased as one of the cutting-edge solutions that streamline collaboration in a corporate environment.

SDForum, the organization behind the conference, is well-known for its successful efforts to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership within Silicon Valley with the help of educational and networking events. The Collaboration 2.0 Conference is one of those events, aiming at exploring the opportunities offered by the innovative Web-based technologies. 

“Online collaboration has augmented current knowledge patterns in corporate environments, improved mindshare, boosted transparency and added a sense of community among coworkers,” state the organizers of the conference.  This is just the beginning of the upcoming discussion of this topic, and we’re looking forward to taking part in it.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the business benefits offered by the innovative collaboration technologies, or if you want to share your own opinion on how Collaboration 2.0 influences the business environment, then we hope to see you among the conference participants on October 30.

Jürgen Oschadleus, MBA, PMP, an international speaker, trainer and consultant on project leadership and communications! He became the winner of the free netbook drawing that was previously announced in our blog. The final phase of the giveaway took place yesterday at the PMI Congress North America 2009. We were thrilled about the vibrant attention of the audience to our drawing. Over 300 people registered for the giveaway, but only one of them turned out to be the lucky winner.

Jürgen came all the way from Australia to give a speech on the role of communications and leadership in project management. We bet he didn’t expect to get a free netbook as a pleasant side benefit. The winner of the drawing held by Wrike is a passionate project management innovator and an advocate of a new management approach focused on conversational leadership. He travels a lot, bringing his knowledge, experience and insight to global audiences. No doubt that Wrike’s prize will be a useful addition to his traveler’s tech kit.

We’d also like to thank all the participants for taking part in our giveaway. We hope to see  you all next year at the PMI Global Congress 2010!

If you were you waiting for the release of Wrike’s interface in Spanish, you will be pleased with the latest updates. Since today, it becomes more convenient for you, as well as your Spanish-speaking team members, clients and partners to collaborate on projects with the help of Wrike. 

To make your experience as pleasant as possible, we made our best to carefully translate Wrike’s workspace, notifications, alerts and help pages. We believe that the possibility to work in the Spanish interface will make your work with Wrike even more enjoyable. Also, it will let you invite more Spanish speaking peers to collaborate with you on Wrike.

“It is very exciting to launch the first localized version of Wrike,” said Nic Bryson, VP of Customer Relations. “With plans for more languages in the future, such as German, French, Portuguese, and Italian, we started with Spanish, the one most called-for by our users. We value our Spanish-speaking customers who have been using Wrike in English to date. We believe that they, as well new Spanish-speaking users, will be pleased with the convenience of using Wrike in their native language.”

How can I see Wrike in Spanish? Visit www.wrike.es or, have Spanish as a high priority language in your Web browser:


 
If you are happy with the release as we are, a tweet or a short blog post about it will become a great “thank you” for our efforts to deliver the Spanish version to you:) Thank you for continuous support and using Wrike’s English version!

Want to see Wrike in your language? Let us know in the comments to this post. Your vote counts!

Every project manager, be it a newbie or an experienced pro, knows that keeping tight control over project operations is essential for successful project completion. However, every manager who has run a project in e-mails, disconnected files and spreadsheets knows how hard it can be to control your operations when they are not transparent. The complexity of a task is doubled or even tripled, if you are trying to manage a distributed team, like Luther Cale from HealthStream.

“We are distributed with a core hub of marketers in Nashville, Tenn., but also have team members in upstate New York, Colorado, Memphis and Baltimore" said Luther. "Being located across five states means lots of collaboration and management challenges. The main challenges were transparency and communication both within the team and outside the team. We were getting tons of work done (somehow!), but the left hand didn't always know what the right hand was doing.”

The situation changed with adoption of Wrike. When it’s clear to a manager what every team member is busy with and what exactly is going on with every project, and when project operations become more transparent, projects become more controllable and project management more adaptable.

Read the whole story of HeathStream to find out why they chose Wrike after having tested about 15 other options.

You want to know more about Web 2.0 in project management and like freebies? Then don’t miss your chance to get a FREE Netbook from Wrike at the PMI Global Congress!

We’ve already mentioned that Wrike will be one of the PMI Global Congress participants this October. This grand project management event will be a perfect chance for us to meet people who are passionate about innovations in project management. PMI Global Congress attendees who are interested in accelerating their project team’s productivity with Web 2.0 technologies will receive a free Project Management 2.0 Guide by our founder and the author of the Project Management 2.0 blog, Andrew Filev.

As a pleasant side benefit, those who will come to Wrike’s booth (#933) will be able to enter an instant drawing to get a FREE NETBOOK from Wrike! All the rules of the giveaway will be announced during PMI Global Congress.