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. 

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.

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.

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%. 

VentureBeat is a leading Web site that provides news about innovation for forward-thinking executives. Last week, Cody Barbierri, a media strategist who blogs about social media, technology and new media startups, wrote about Wrike’s new microblogging feature. The post explains how the activity stream will help combine the project management software with the benefits of real-time chatting and updates. Thanks for the attention to our release, Cody!

Last week, we had an absolutely great time at Web 2.0 Expo, where we exhibited at the Long Tail Pavilion. It was a major milestone for us because we released the new Wrike beta! To summarize our impressions of the event, it was a blast.  We ran out of all the brochures that we printed for the show, and we had to fetch some more from the office. But we ran out of that supply as well, long before the end of the event. Left empty-handed, we suggested that everyone snap a picture of our cool booth, so they wouldn’t forget to check Wrike out. You can see one of those pics sent to us by our customer.

We were totally delighted with such attention from the attendees. Thank you all for stopping by and spreading the word to your friends and colleagues! Can’t wait to see you all at the next shows.

We promised you the big news, so here it is. The last week was marked by several very special events. First, we participated in the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, the biggest and the most popular conference in our industry, and had fantastic success there. Second, we are proud to let you know that our news was published on Forbes.com. Yet the most important thing last week was the spectacular unveiling of Wrike’s new version, which was released in beta.

The new Wrike is here, and it will redefine your project management and collaboration experience. With this new release, your favorite project management software is turned into a top-notch, e-mail-integrated, real-time project collaboration and productivity solution. We totally rethought the user interface and added several very simple, but incredibly powerful, features that will turn your team into project productivity rock stars.
 
Here are the highlights of the newest and best ways to manage your projects via e-mail and the Web:

Faster Performance, Clean and Intuitive User Interface  
The new Wrike is designed for speed and productivity. Every action — like creating a task or a project, assigning it to a team member, sharing project data with a team, or attaching a file — is done in a click or two. The new streamlined interface was developed based on extensive usability studies and deep analysis of Wrike users’ feedback. We want to thank all of you who shared your thoughts and ideas on how we can make Wrike a better solution.

Unparalleled Personal and Team Productivity
We enhanced the dashboard and turned it into a powerful, yet extremely easy to use, personal productivity tool. Upon opening the dashboard, you immediately see what you should be working on today and get real-time updates from your team members. From now on, it will be amazingly easy to coordinate the work of your team and closely follow the progress of multiple projects.

Social Project Management
Wrike’s new version takes the best of social networking and applies it to project management to maximize the productivity of your whole team. We introduced avatars to bring a visual experience to your team’s online interactions and emphasize the social part of your teamwork. We believe that, thanks to this feature, your project management platform becomes more engaging, which unquestionably results in growing efficiency in your project collaboration. Avatars also make your online workplace much friendlier and fun to use.

Real-Time Insight into Projects
The new Wrike gives you an ability to simultaneously see your tasks and projects compiled in a list and visualized on a Gantt chart. The list view provides you with the most important details about any particular task, including due dates, task duration and the people responsible for it. The Gantt chart pane visualizes all of the team’s changes to project plans in real time. The new timeline is the best way to get a 1,000-foot overview of your projects and your whole business.



These are just the highlights of the changes you’ll experience in the new version. We plan to write more about each of the new features and tell you how you can use them to maximize your team’s productivity. The best news is that you are able to check the elegant new design and test-drive the cool new features right now! Simply log in to the beta and explore the new Wrike.

You know that “your feedback is important” is not just a polite phrase to us. We’re building this app for thousands of our users, and every one of you has the power to make Wrike suit your needs better by sharing your opinion about the product with us. E-mail support@team.wrike.com with your comments and suggestions.

If you follow our blog closely, you already know that we’re getting ready for a grand release of Wrike’s new version. It will be unveiled during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The release is going to be unforgettable. We are going to demonstrate a solution for unparalleled project collaboration productivity at the Long Tail Pavilion, booth #17. But that’s not all!

To make the event even more exciting, we’re running a FREE giveaway. The prize: none other than your very own Apple Tablet! It’s not a contest; it’s a drawing, so anyone can enter, and everybody has a chance to win. The only thing you need to do is to register for the iPad giveaway and come to our booth #17 at the Long Tail Pavilion of Web 2.0 Expo SF on May 5. The winner will be randomly chosen and announced at 3:30 p.m.

Don’t miss your chance to win your own iPad and be one of the first to see how e-mail inbox chaos can be turned into revolutionary online productivity for a whole team. Register for Wrike’s FREE iPad giveaway now!

Today, we have a special treat for you. But first let us share the fascinating news: Wrike will be presented at the Web 2.0 Expo, the biggest and the most important event in the next-generation technology world. The conference will take place on May 3-6 in San Francisco. The Expo is a must-see for everyone who wants “to do more with less” and cares about embracing and extending the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies. It engages thousands of participants and promises to offer something for everyone: educational sessions from industry experts and keynotes from leading innovators, showcases of the game-changing Web 2.0 companies, such as Wrike, and first-rate networking opportunities.  

Some of you already know that we’ve been passionately working on a few important enhancements for your favorite project management software. Today, we’re happy to announce that these enhancements will be unveiled during the Web2.0 Expo. We promise that this upcoming release will be groundbreaking and unforgettable, and we invite you to share the excitement of the moment with us. The conference organizers authorized our team to provide Wrike customers with FREE Web 2.0 Expo passes and 20% discounts for any conference package! Please e-mail marketing@team.wrike.com for your Web2.0 Expo registration promo code. See you in San Francisco!

Transparent workflows are a key to successful project completion and efficiency of any organization. However, getting an insight into what each team member is occupied with at any given moment of time may be challenging for almost every manager, to say nothing of a person in charge of multiple international projects, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers from all over the world. Yet, Ryan Wood, COO at Absolute.org, a charitable non-profit organization, helping people in need in different corners of the globe, found an elegant solution to this common problem.  Absolute.org’s team adopted Wrike as a project and workflow management system and the project management software changed the way people were collaborating on tasks.  “Each team member can see what is happening on the projects that he or she is involved in. All the project schedules are up-to-date, as the changes made by other team members are seen in real time,” says Ryan. Read the rest of the story and find out why Absolute.org chose Wrike over other project management tools.