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%. 

How do you get your team to fully adopt new project management software from Day 1? This can be a tricky question, as implementing a new system always involves training of your staff, which can take up to several months, right?

Yet Adrian McDonagh, Managing Director at the U.K.’s leading Internet recruitment service, EasyWebRecruitment.com, was able to find a solution that was thoroughly adopted by his team of 15 people from the first day of use. Does he know some kind of secret?

Well, this secret is simple: successful adoption is not about the tool. It’s about your team being able to use it. Adrian knows that when you look for a new software solution, it’s important to pick an application, which ties in with the technologies your employees already use and love. This lets you sneak the new system into your team members' hands while providing a familiar interface. So if you don’t want to put additional training pressure on your staff, find a system that fits the existing workflows and integrates with apps that your team members already know. This was exactly what Adrian did when he offered Wrike to his team to use for project and task management.

“Our major challenge with all the project management systems was adoption. The team was already working very hard, and we did not want to add something to their day that would take a lot of time and training to get to grips with, or add to their administrative burden. It was completely different with Wrike. I was pleased to see that, once I showed the team how simple Wrike was, even the more skeptical members of the team were quickly convinced, ” says Adrian. What became the key to 100% Wrike adoption by the EasyWebRecruitment team? Read the whole interview with the company’s managing director to find out.

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.

When you create a task in Wrike via e-mail, you use tags to set the task due date and put the task in to the right folder. Now, there are more tags at your disposal:

• To set the task’s due date, type it in the "by MM/DD" format at the end of the e-mail subject. Or, “by MM/DD” if you set another date format in your account.




If the year is not specified in your email, the task will be scheduled for the current year. When you need to schedule a task for another year, you can explicitly specify it in the subject in the following format:  “by MM/DD/YY” or  “by MM/DD/YYYY” or in the international format, if you set it in your account (“by DD/MM/YY” or  “by DD/MM/YYYY”).

 

• To set the task’s start and due dates, type them in the “by MM/DD-MM/DD” format at the end of the e-mail subject. Or, “by MM/DD-MM/DD” if you set another date format in your account. Based on the start date and due date, Wrike automatically calculates the task's duration.





• To put the task in to the right folder, separate the folder name from the task name with a double-colon. If you want to put the task in many folders, you can separate their names by commas or by a double-colon.

 


As previously, you can use square brackets for the task’s due date and folder names.

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.

Wrike's e-mail integration works in two ways:
1) you can CC your e-mails to wrike@wrike.com to create tasks and
2) if anyone updates a task, you receive an instant e-mail notification about the changes.

We continuously improve Wrike's Intelligent E-mail Engine, so you can save even more time. Recently, we released a way to create tasks from e-mails while turning off the feature that would invite the recipients to Wrike. Previously, we introduced processing of e-mail replies. It allows you to update a task by replying to someone’s e-mail that was CCed to wrike@wrike.com. However, many of our users wanted to update tasks by replying to their own e-mails. Therefore, we released this feature today.

Now, your task is automatically updated in Wrike if an email with a CC to wrike@wrike.com contains "RE" or "FW" in the subject. The system searches for the task by subject in the indicated folder and updates the tasks' description. If the task has already been moved to another folder, the system searches for the task within your entire workspace. If several duplicate tasks are found, Wrike asks you to choose the correct task and update it manually.
 
Besides the description, you can also update other task properties:

• Status. Indicate the desired status of the task in the subject line of your e-mail. Simply add the proper tag in the square brackets to update the task’s status: [completed], [active], [deferred] or [postponed].

• Due date. If you change the date in square brackets in the subject line, the tasks’ due date is updated.

• Priority. If you change the priority of your e-mail, the tasks’ priority is updated.

• Responsible person. If the system gets an e-mail with "FW" in the subject, it reassigns the task to the e-mail recipient.

This way, Wrike works whether you reply to someone's e-mail or your own e-mails. Stay tuned; we are working on processing replies to Wrike's e-mail notifications.

By default, when you CC an e-mail to wrike@wrike.com, the task is instantly created in Wrike and shared with the e-mail recipient. You and the email recipient can work on the task together. If one of you updates the task, the other person become instantly aware of the task progress, thanks to email notifications.

If the recipient is not a Wrike user yet, he or she gets an automatic invitation to Wrike. It is very convenient because you are freed from the additional job of inviting people on your own. Wrike does it for you.

Our users love this feature, especially when they want to show the progress of the task associated with the client’s projects. You just need to CC an e-mail with a task to a client, so that he or she can view the progress.

However, some users were slightly worried that some clients might find this feature unnecessary. After multiple customer requests, we have introduced a way to create a task from an e-mail while turning off the feature that would invite the recipients to Wrike and share the task with them.

For example, you may want to keep track of a lead with the help of Wrike without inviting the client to share the task.  So you simply send an answer to a client’s request for proposal and BCC the e-mail to wrike@wrike.com. The task is created in Wrike and is not shared with the client.


Certainly, when necessary, you can easily invite the client to join Wrike, so he or she can keep track of the project progress. To do so, simply type the person’s e-mail in the “shared with” field. Read more about how to share a task and how to share a folder. 

We are often asked ask about how to email a task into the hierarchy in the Wrike workspace. There is a very simple way, which some of our users intuitively use.

If you want to email a task into a subfolder with the unique name, you can simply add the folder's name to the subject line of your email.



If there are several different folders with the same name in different parts of your Wrike workspace, you will need to provide a complete path to the subfolder. In the example, [folderA/subfolder] will put the task in the right place.

Now you can set the priority of your e-mails, and your tasks in Wrike will be prioritized as well. Recently, we offered you the ability to create special folders for tasks with high priority, so that you have quick access to them. Wrike now helps you pay even more attention to high-priority tasks.  Let me show you how it works.

You create an e-mail, cc it to wrike@wrike.com and mark it as of high importance. For example in your outlook:



The task is immediately created in your Wrike workspace and marked with the exclamation mark. The same applies to low-importance tasks. However, they are marked with the downward arrow.

Then you can sort your tasks by their importance within the folder by clicking the grey arrow in the top panel (1).



You can also work on tasks with one type of importance. To do so, you click the small letter under the top grey panel (2) and choose the appropriate priority. “A” means all types of importance, N-normal, L-low, H-high. It’s easy.  

Certainly, you can change the importance of the task. You simply double click the exclamation mark (downward arrow or empty field to the left from the task title) and update the priority level:



Alternatively, you can click the “edit task” link and choose the priority that currently suits your task: