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. 

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 excited to announce the release of Wrike Simple Projects, the first free, real-time project collaboration tool built on Yahoo!’s Open Apps platform, on July 24.

Wrike Simple Projects will become part of Yahoo! users’ everyday experience and the first project collaboration tool available from the customizable My Yahoo! web page. Anyone who has a Yahoo! account will be able to easily create and assign tasks, organize tasks in projects and invite people to work on projects together. Still the most exciting thing about Wrike Simple Projects is that it is the first My Yahoo! app that lets users keep track of changes made in projects by their friends. Thanks to the ability to see who created, edited, reassigned and completed tasks in real time, they can always stay in the loop.

Saving time and making people all over the world more productive while collaborating on projects is a part of Wrike’s mission. We developed the free Wrike Simple Projects specifically for Yahoo! to help millions of people become more efficient in working together on everyday projects like moving, planning a wedding or trip, studying, etc.

It’s worth mentioning that Wrike Simple Projects will not sync with Wrike’s original version and will not offer Wrike’s unique and patent-pending features, such as the Intelligent Email Engine, Dynamic Timeline, or our Flexible Structures. People who are interested in these and other substantial collaboration and project management features will be invited to join our customer community and sign up for Wrike at www.wrike.com.

Project and task discussions are a feature frequently requested by many of our users. We worked hard to create a neat solution that will let you add comments to tasks not only online but also via e-mail. This is a big step forward in project communications, enabling you to leverage the benefits of email and the web interface at full power. Let’s look at the details.

Tasks in Wrike now have a special tab called "Discussions" (1). There you can leave your comments (2) with images (3) and attachments (4) to the task and view messages of other team members (5).



When you update a task via email by adding wrike@wrike.com to the task recipients, Wrike intelligently identifies your comment (6) and adds it to task’s discussions (7).

All attachments to the comments are also visible from the "Files" tab (8). This lets you access important project information from both places.



How much does the useful upgrade cost you? Nothing! The feature is added to your subscription for free.

We have improved the file-sharing system in Wrike, so you can now track versions of files attached to tasks and project folders.

As you know, Wrike lets you attach any kind of files to tasks and folders, so that everyone on the team knows the latest version of specifications, agreements, brochures, logos, etc. When you work on a document together with your peers, each participant can contribute by uploading a new version. To make version-tracking for files more convenient for you, we moved files to a special tab in the task and folder details.

“Files” tab
Now, when you click on the “Edit task” or “Edit folder” link, you see the new “Files” tab.



The number in the tab name shows you how many files are attached to the task/folder. Different versions of the same file are not counted separately.



In the “Files” tab you can attach new files (1), upload new versions of files (2) and download files by clicking on the file name (3). 

The newest version of a file is typed in larger font and placed at the top of the list of files (4). Previous versions are listed below with the information about who and when uploaded the file.



Uploading a new file version
To upload a new version of a file, click on the “Upload a new version” link near the appropriate file (5) and select a file to upload as a new version. You can also add a file description when necessary. Then hit the “Upload file” button.
When you upload a new version, Wrike automatically renames the file to follow the original file’s name to avoid any confusion.

Today, for numerous companies, distributed teams have become a way of hiring the best people, regardless of their location. However, geographically distributed teams face additional challenges when establishing effective collaboration and overcoming some of the frictions of time and geography.

For the marketing and IT consulting firm 3rd Wave Research, the need for efficient, real-time collaboration was one of the main reasons for using Wrike. They needed a system that would allow their distributed team members to share ideas, collect project information and plan their work in one common workspace, as well as allow their clients to get insight into where the project stands. "Without such a system, project efficiency losses would compromise our ability to deliver complex marketing solutions to our clients," says Aaron Anderson, account strategy manager at 3rd Wave Research. Wrike turned out to be the solution that fit 3rd Wave Research’s distributed team in every way.

Read the whole story of how 3rd Wave Research turned into project management rock stars with Wrike.

We continuously add new capabilities to Wrike’s Intelligent E-mail Engine. Today, we introduced the processing of replies to Wrike’s e-mail notifications. As you probably know, Wrike notifies you about changes made to your tasks by your colleagues. You can now reply to those notifications, and your answer will be added to the task description!

Create and send a reply message:



The task description is updated:



The author of the changes and other team members, who are subscribed to immediate notifications, will receive a message about the updates. This increases usability, helps to improve your productivity and brings more information from e-mails into the shared workspace, where it’s visible, shareable and editable.

Patent-pending Intelligent E-mail Engine is one of the strongest features of Wrike. It helps you save a lot of time by letting you manage tasks without logging in to the workspace. You can create tasks via e-mail, update tasks via e-mail and receive notifications about the changes. You can use it on the go or when you are offline. You can plug in to Wrike users  who don’t want to leave their familiar environment (e-mail). With Wrike, you can combine the benefits of traditional e-mail with the benefits of collaboration on the Web.

What is a wiki?
A wiki is a collection of Web pages that allow teams to keep, share and update information. As information is updated, everyone on the team gets a notification about the change. People do not have to ask the administrator’s permission to update a wiki’s page, so contributions to it can be made in real time.

The most successful wiki is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an example of how groups of people demonstrate more intelligence than isolated individuals. In contrast to other encyclopedias that were created by closed groups of people, Wikipedia shows a tremendous growth, thanks to the open approach to collaboration. Wikipedia has been created by hundreds of thousands of contributors. Anyone can contribute to any subject in which he or she has expertise. As a result, each of the 10 million articles contains data collected from multiple sources. This makes Wikipedia comprehensive. According to the Nature journal, Wikipedia is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same in accuracy. High-quality articles attract users every day, making Wikipedia one of the most popular and helpful resources on the Web.

How do businesses benefit from wikis?
Thanks to the support of collaboration, wikis have become a popular business tool. Wikis are often used as an alternative to intranets and other classic software platforms for sharing of knowledge. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes a designing structure prior to use, wikis and other enterprise 2.0 software programs allow people to start with one page and then grow it into a comprehensive knowledge base. The growth happens through many simple interactions. One person creates a page, another person corrects it, the third person adds something, and the first person contributes one more piece of information. As a result, you get a shiny wiki page that reflects a common view of the participants on the subject. This process is also known as emergent structures, the pattern of intelligent behaviors that  emerge bottom up from people with no or little central control.

Companies use wikis to get more team members involved in project collaboration, for knowledge management, as a Web portal and as a content creation tool. With a wiki, team members can easily access the up-to-date project information and work together on shared documents. For example, a wiki is a good way to store a series of phone scripts for salespeople or a presentation that many departments are contributing to at once. Since everyone is empowered to contribute in real time, using wikis facilitates information exchange and improves team productivity. Ultimately, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools make companies more agile and, thus, more competitive. 

For more information about how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and technology, such as wikis, to be successful, you can read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.


How you can use Wrike as a wiki
In addition to its inherent project management features, Wrike has the most important wiki features – collaborative editing, revision history, e-mail notifications about changes and links between pages.

Collaborative editing
Wrike’s tasks can be edited by anyone with whom they are shared. Instead of multiple versions of a document kept in different places, you get a single master document (a task) that everybody can access.

Everyone on the team can view, edit and update information easily, at any time. Your team members can discuss requirements, elaborate on product design, create a conference agenda and find solutions to problems. It minimizes the necessity of meetings and calls to update a piece of work. It also saves team members from having to send e-mails with revised documents back and forth, and it releases your team from the nightmare of comparing document versions.

E-mail notifications about changes
The changes are instantly visible to all of the team members online, via e-mail and RSS. This allows you to stay up-do-date and quickly react to the changes.

Revision history
Wiki is generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. That is why most popular wikis have a built-in version control tool. Wrike’s Premium and Enterprise versions provide version control for tasks, so that no original thought is lost. It keeps the information about what changes were made, when they were made and by whom. You can review, compare pairs of revisions and restore tasks to previous versions.



Links between pages.
Information can be easily cross-linked. Each task and folder has a unique hyperlink, so you can refer to it easily.



Wiki features organically fit in to the overall Wrike experience and help  Wrike better meet your needs. You get a true project management 2.0 experience, thanks to collaboration brought into the planning process. Compared to traditional project management tools that place the project manager in the center of the project communications, Wrike allows everyone on the team to immediately see the latest updates and contribute to the project plan in real time. This streamlines communications and increases the productivity of your team. Meanwhile, the ability to restore tasks to the previous version at any time allows project manager to keep control firmly in his or her hands.

The revision history, which allows you to use Wrike as a wiki, is available with Wrike’s Premium version, Enterprise version and the old Professional plans.

Wrike can help you manage events very successfully.

You are welcome to view a demo in which our users, Darren and Lisa, tell you how easily they manage call for papers, organize their teams, control contractors and communicate with sponsors. They replaced heavy spreadsheets by Wriks’ easy-to-access online database. View a demo:

How Wrike Helps a Conference Manager to Run Events Successfully