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.

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.

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!

Worried that marketing through social media is taking up too much of your time? It’s a reasonable concern. Living in the world of social media means you spend hours on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and others. It’s very easy to lose sense of time while browsing blogs and newsfeeds.

Well then, how do social media gurus manage to be productive and get things done right on time? They have their own productivity tools and techniques that help them stay efficient in this vibrant environment. The good news is that social media professionals don’t mind sharing their tips. For example, one of them, a popular social media marketing expert and coach, Laura Roeder, told us what helps her stay on top of multiple projects and effectively collaborate with her team members.

“Getting things done fast is perhaps the most important skill you can have to make your business move forward,” says Laura. “Wrike's flexibility allows us to be super-productive, and it helps our own business grow rapidly.” Read the full story and find out how Laura’s social media marketing team benefits from Wrike’s unique features.

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.

Wrike is a project management software provided as a service. Every day we work hard to make our service even better and more valuable for you.

On top of small enhancements every week or two, today, we are glad to introduce a significant system upgrade that will bring a great productivity gain to you.

Today, we present several new productivity features that are added to your existing user subscription for free, as well as extra features that can be additionally purchased with the new pricing.

Among the new free productivity features added to your subscription are 1) project and task discussions and 2) estimation of tasks in hours.

Finally, we’ve enhanced our user management engine and pricing model and made it more tempting for you to invite more co-workers, clients and contractors to collaborate with you on Wrike.

Click on the links above to find out more details about the new features and the pricing.

This year, Wrike has been awarded as one of the Red Herring Top 100 Global Companies! Out of 1,800 successful and highly eligible companies, the Red Herring editorial team deployed a detailed process to drill-down the best companies first to 200 finalists, then to the top 100 winners of this global award.

Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration. The announcement of the winners was made at the Red Herring 100 Global taking place in San Diego from January 14-16, 2009. Present among the finalists were elite executives and venture capital leaders from around the world.

“We were so pleased to announce Wrike as a Red Herring Top 100 Global Company,” commented Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux. “Wrike  has proven to be a company excelling in their industry and its ripples have turned into waves.  It was difficult for us to narrow down, but we are pleased to have included Wrike in our list of promising companies.  We look forward to the changes it make to its industry in the future.”

We decided to make it easier for new users to sign up for Wrike. Now you can try the product without entering your credit card information! You fill in several simple fields, confirm registration via e-mail and get a full-featured Wrike account. It takes only seconds to sign up for a 30-day free trial. During the trial, you can easily switch between versions (Enterprise, Premium, or Professional) and invite as many users as you need. You can share your project plans with those users, collaborate on plans together and much more.

Overall, the subscription to Wrike is risk-free: no credit card required during a 30-day trial, no cancellation fees, and you can upgrade at any time.

What are the advantages of a 100% virtual office? First, it’s inexpensive. You don’t have to pay for rent. Second, it gives people from different locations an opportunity to work together easily. Third, you can access your business data 24/7 from any computer.

Yet, to be truly productive, a virtual office has to be well-organized. This can be hard to achieve when you get heaps of e-mails every day, which ruin your productivity. This is the kind of problem many small and midsize companies that are trying to run 100% virtual offices face nowadays. One of these companies was an Internet marketing firm, VOCO Creative. Its employees were struggling through their inboxes without having a sense of priorities or action items. This influenced the team’s productivity a great deal. However, VOCO Creative managed to find a solution with Wrike.

Read the story about VOCO Creative’s virtual office and find out how they keep it efficient.

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.