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. 

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%. 

If you’ve been bitten by the Twitter bug and were thinking of bringing the social messaging experience to the workplace, we’ve got some exiting news for you. Wrike is adding a microblogging-style tool to its online project management software.

Those of you who have already checked out the beta of Wrike’s new version may have already noticed and tried using the new Activity Stream feature. Wrike’s Activity Stream represents a built-in microblogging tool that allows everyone on the team to instantly share information and links, post information about their progress, report problems, and get solutions. In addition, Activity Stream displays all the team members’ recent actions in real time. You can see changes that your team members make to tasks and projects immediately. When your colleague reschedules a task, attaches a file or changes the task priority, the edits are specially marked in the Activity Stream. All the comments added to tasks are also displayed here. The result is a team productivity boost, better communications and tighter control across multiple projects and teams.

We decided to add this feature after extensive interviews with our customers, and we’re happy to see that the feature turns out to be everything they wanted. For example, here’s what one of our customers, Luther Cale, chief of marketing at HealthStream, says: “I like the built-in Activity Stream component a lot. We used to use Yammer for microblogging on our projects, but it wasn't really worth an extra app for just that functionality. But microblogging built into the online project management system makes more sense and is far more useful.”

What’s your opinion of the microblogging component in Wrike? We’re always happy to hear your feedback.

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.

Ok, this is a very simple feature, but we know that it will bring some of you a substantial productivity gain. Wrike gives you the opportunity to collaborate on your project-related files online directly from your workspace and without attachments. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome online document management in Wrike’s award-winning project management software with Google Docs built-in!
 

Starting on April 14, those of you who have a Google account will be able to create and automatically share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly from your Wrike workspace. If you are already familiar with Google Docs, you will certainly appreciate the ability to link the tasks in your favorite project management software to your online files effortlessly, with no need to coordinate your data in two disconnected systems.
 

To see the power and simplicity of Wrike’s new feature in action, go to your workspace and click on the “Files” tab of any task. You’ll see two new links, one for creating an online document and another for starting an online spreadsheet.
 

As soon as you pick a name for your newly created online file, you’re taken to your Google Docs account, where you can edit your document. You also can upload your existing files to share them with your team members online.
 

After you save the file in Google Docs, a link to this item appears in your task in Wrike.
 

From this moment, your team members who also have Google accounts can access the file from their Wrike workspaces, change it and download it to their computers. It’s that simple! But just imagine how much more productive your team work will become with no need to manage project-related data in two separate applications. Now you can organize your project files directly from Wrike!

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.

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.

Update: Google has released the updated API and now all the limitations are eliminated. Updates in Wrike's functionality are coming soon. Stay tuned!

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