Gone are the days of the once-stuffy office space with stacks of files filling up your in and outboxes. Technology has brought an entirely new look to today’s modern office. Below, I’ve outlined three trends that I think greatly innovate our workplaces and define what they look like in the sleek modern era.

Going Paperless

An office free of paper is a happy one indeed for several reasons. From an organizational standpoint, electronic copies are much easier to document and store. Keeping files organized in folders or by project allows you to always know where to find what you’re looking for. Isn’t it handy to have access to a document in the context of a particular assignment? No more sifting through stacks of papers or file folders, and, what’s no less important – no post-it notes covering your computer monitor or the walls of your office. Last, but not least, a paperless office is not only about your comfort and productivity. It’s also green!

I once had a very stylish coworker who was in the habit of printing out emails. Our boss was very eco-conscious, so she sent out an office-wide email that stated “Printing emails went out of style with the fanny pack!” The email included a really funny picture of people wearing fanny packs. The entire office got a laugh out of the image, but more importantly, my coworker stopped unnecessarily printing out emails.

Using Social Media

Building a business takes time, but with the recent penetration of the web into our work and the popularity of social media, the process can go easier and quicker. Social media are a useful channel for informing your customers of what’s happening with the company and sector.

Interaction is key for social media to be a success. Customers want to know there’s someone behind the face of the company. By engaging customers online, providing company transparency and asking for questions and feedback, a company’s reputation will start to build online.

Social media also helps companies collect information about what their customers want and build their businesses. The t-shirt company Threadless is a great example of how a Facebook profile can be maximized. Customers can buy t-shirts straight from the Facebook page. They can also comment on items and share those comments on their own Facebook walls. This approach has led Threadless to gain over 100,000 fans.

Taking Advantage of Mobile Apps

Another driving force that impacts modern office is the popularity of smartphones and tablets. People are constantly on the go, so they’ve become reliant on getting information from their mobile devices. When you have leveraged a mobile app that lets you keep up with work, things can continue moving along even when your employee is, say, stuck in traffic jam.

Apps can be a huge help when other technologies fail you. My husband and I were on vacation this summer when he got a panicked call from one of his employees. The power went out at his job due to a thunderstorm and his staff was about to be visited by an important vendor. My husband was able to share all of the information his staff needed without leaving the Jacuzzi!  

No longer are we glued to pen-and-paper ways of communication. Technology is making an office portable, with the traditional four walls and a desk being replaced by smartphones and electronic communication. The entire landscape of the “office” is changing before our eyes.

Bring your office into the modern age. Create a paperless work environment to declutter your work space and help the environment. Take full advantage of social media instead of using it only to chat with old high school friends. Use mobile apps to connect with your customers and coworkers anywhere at any time. These small adjustments can help adapt your business to meet the current trends and keep you from being left behind.


This article was provided by Erin Palmer on behalf of Villanova University’s online programs. As you take your office to the web consider taking your education online as well. Villanova offers a wide range of programs and prep courses online. 

A few weeks ago, we encouraged all of you to have your say in our “Working Habits” survey. Thanks to your very active participation, it turned out to be a blast, with 1,000+ responses received. We really appreciate your input, and soon we’ll share the interesting findings about virtual work that you helped us to discover. For instance, we were surprised to learn that as many as 57% of the respondents don’t use Skype, IM apps and social communication tools at work. Did you expect that? We assume that Wrike replaces all these tools for you! ;-)

Also, as we promised, we did a drawing of 10 funny, yet useful, prizes (including the awesome grassy lawn charging station that we basically fell in love with ourselves!) among everyone who took part in the survey. 

How can you achieve customer service so fine that clients actually comment on it and spread the word about your company? Learn from the benchmark experiences of other companies, and benefit from the latest technologies to facilitate your work.

123 EDI, a leading provider of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), has been offering a variety of robust, cost-effective EDI solutions since 1991. Projects of 123 EDI are typically complex and require coordination between sales, accounting and programming departments to ensure the company meets and even exceeds customers' expectations.

According to Bernie Murciano, President at 123 EDI, the following principles, supported by Wrike's features, help to achieve top-notch customer service:

Attention to detail
Being thorough in performing clients' requests, minding the details, no matter how small they are, is crucial on the road to customer satisfaction. But can you take the load of remembering too many things off your brain and still deliver everything and more to your clients?

Yes, you can! Wrike stores all the short-term and long-term commitments of 123 EDI, providing "a view of the big picture without losing sight of the many details" says Bernie. Thus, 123 EDI stays ahead of the game and ensures that even minor customer needs are not overlooked. "Positive customer feedback doubled in a couple of months after we adopted Wrike," shares Bernie.

Seamless collaboration
To achieve excellent customer service, a unified effort of all the organizational departments is required. 123 EDI chose Wrike for teamwork with its enhanced collaboration features: real-time discussions, handy ways to follow tasks, and a cross-project newsfeed to track progress with ease.

What makes Wrike especially convenient for collaboration is easy data-sharing on project progress with everyone involved. If you wish to connect remote teams, external partners and clients to the project, you can easily do so – the number of external viewers is unlimited.  Bernie confirms: "Wrike's user-friendly web application keeps everyone on the same page."

Commitment to timelines
When you deliver a project on time, customers appreciate it and come back for more. With Wrike's automatic reminders about tasks and updates, you never miss a deadline.

Scheduling tasks is simple and can be done from list, table and timeline views in real time. Bernie Murciano values this ability "to more effectively prioritize tasks by revising due dates." Thus, 123 EDI quickly reacts to the ever-changing business conditions, so that no customer is disappointed by a missed deadline. 

Now that you know Bernie's opinion on what's crucial for improving customer service, we'd love to hear about your experiences! If you wish to share your stories about how Wrike's implementation helped you to tackle project or business management challenges, you are very welcome to do so! Contact us at support@team.wrike.com.

We cannot wait to share the exciting news with you: today, the American Business Awards announced Wrike as a finalist in the category “Computer Software – New Version.” According to the award’s committee, “This is a significant achievement for which you are to be applauded.  This means that independent judges agreed that these nominations are worthy of national recognition.”

The Stevies are one of the most honorable business awards in the United States, recognizing outstanding achievements of organizations of all types and sizes, and the people behind them. In previous years, the list of laureates included such leading companies as Apple, CNN, Ford, Hilton Hotels and more.

“It’s not only the look of the award standing behind the nickname the Business World’s Oscars. It’s also the high level of the applications coming from successful, dynamic, motivated companies,” said Andrew Filev, Wrike’s CEO, who joined the judges’ panel in several other categories for best new products and the most successful product development teams.

Congrats to everyone on Wrike’s team and many thanks to our customers for sending valuable feedback that helped us blend our award-winning social project management mix!

The Stevies committee also seeks to recognize the best products and companies, according to people’s opinions. Of course, it's you, our loyal customers, who we rely on the most in the competition! Please vote for Wrike - just click on this logo and you will automatically be taken to the page where you can submit your vote. The voting is open until June 3.

The world's largest free get-together of product managers and product marketers, Silicon Valley Product Camp 2011, will take place on April 2 in San Jose, Calif. Wrike sponsors this fabulous event to let product folks have a Saturday of discussions, talks, panels and much more. Over 550 people attended the 2010 Product Camp, and this time the event is expected to attract even more visitors.

Unlike traditional conference formats, Product Camp lets the participants decide themselves what issues they find important to discuss. The agenda is defined through online voting for the proposed topics. We invite you to support Andrew Filev’s proposal, named “Be innovative, Yet Familiar: How to Create Business Software That Sticks.” In his speech, Andrew is going to cover the question of how traditional tools like e-mail can be leveraged to create innovative, but still very user-friendly, software.

To get Andrew’s proposal on the event’s agenda, please vote for it at the Product Camp website. Please note that voting is open until March 25, and you can give up to three votes for a proposal.
 

Last week, Wrike’s team took part in the Dallas Vendor Showcase 2011. The event, organized by the Project Management Institute, attracted several hundred representatives from the best project management training, software, consulting and staffing companies. As a leading vendor on the Web-based project management software market, Wrike gained such high interest among the visitors that our stand was quickly left without a single brochure!

About 300 people who visited our booth during the day found out how easy it is to manage projects in Wrike. Nic Bryson, our VP of Customer Relations, answered the visitors’ numerous questions and told them about Wrike’s unique collaborative features. As a great finale for such a day, Nic raffled off a few discounted Wrike subscriptions. Wendy Overturf, PMP, IT project manager at Texas Instruments, became the lucky winner of the free 1-year subscription to Wrike. 



The spring of 2011 is rich with events that are interesting for project management professionals. On March 29, you can meet us at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where Wrike’s CEO will share practical tips on creating innovative, yet familiar, software that “sticks.” On April 2, we invite you to join the world's largest free get-together of product managers and product marketers - Silicon Valley Product Camp in San Jose. This year, we’re one of the event sponsors and can’t wait to meet you there!
 

If you have already connected with us on Facebook, you know that Wrike is competing for the honorable title of “The Best Online Collaboration Tool” in About.com’s Readers' Choice Awards. As of today, Wrike is ahead of four other finalists (such popular tools as Salesforce Chatter, Basecamp, SugarCRM and Google Docs), but the competition is really tough. So Wrike really needs your votes! To support your favorite online collaboration software, please go to http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/mobilecomputingbasics/ss/vote-for-your-favorite-mobile-products-2011_6.htm and click on “Wrike” in the list of finalists. Your vote will be instantly counted.

Your active voting in the first stage of this competition has driven Wrike to the finals. If we keep up the pace, all the readers of About.com will know that Wrike is the tool that helps teams to collaborate easily and efficiently like no other software does! Every vote will take your favorite project collaboration software a step closer to winning this award. The poll is open through March 8, 2011, and the system allows voting once per day in each category. Thank you for your invaluable support!

How to develop a business app that would be innovative, yet familiar, and win over thousands of corporate users all over the globe? This is what Andrew Filev, Wrike’s CEO, will speak about at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco!

Andrew’s proposal has been picked by the tough committee out of hundreds other competing proposals submitted by experienced business, marketing and technical professionals. So the visitors to the biggest conference and trade show that highlights the latest Web 2.0 business models, products and strategies will a get a chance to hear the first-person perspective of Wrike’s success story. In Wrike, the modern Web 2.0 technologies were brought together in a powerful mix with email, the most ubiquitous communication and collaboration tool. As a result, Wrike’s team has created a social project management solution that helps thousands of big and small project teams boost their efficiency. Andrew will share his experience and discuss how mixing brand-new and well familiar technologies allowed us to develop a really helpful app that you and your peers use with true comfort.

Andrew will present his speech at Moscone West, San Francisco, on March, 29. See you at Web 2.0 Expo!
 

This is what Michele Welch, an online entrepreneur and business blogger, told her readers about Wrike. In her post, Michele highlighted her favorite tools that she would recommend for streamlining online businesses and pointed out that Wrike is very helpful for teamwork. We pay big attention to all the opinions about Wrike, both the feedback from our customers and the reviews published by media, and such comments as Michele’s are something that can make our day.  Today, we’ll share some of the recent reviews featuring Wrike, so that you can learn more about other people’s experiences and impressions of our project management and collaboration software.

Neil Robinson at Lanzen Strategy analyzed the most prominent updates of Wrike’s new version, which brought the power of social networks into project management. Neil said that Wrike’s rich features “give the PM and the team the opportunity to understand issues without recourse to a lengthy, time wasting and disruptive meeting.”

Wrike’s big releases also got the attention of influential tech blogs. Simon Mackie at GigaOM reviewed Wrike’s powerful social features and concluded that Wrike is “a very capable online project management tool.” Later, when we unveiled our API in December, Leena Rao wrote about this news in TechCrunch.

Gabriela Warren at About.com named Wrike as one of the best online collaboration tools. Gabriela’s two favorite features of Wrike were the email integration and the Gantt chart: “Once you create a project, you can choose to display the timeline in days, weeks, months, quarters or even years, so reporting for any given period becomes very easy.” By the way, at About.com you can not only read Gabriela’s review, but also vote for Wrike as the best service for project management and collaboration until February 4!

Thanks to everyone for all your comments! A lot of great updates are in the pipeline in the next few months, so we hope to read more reviews soon. 
 

In spite of being busy with holiday preparations, our customers still found a minute to tweet about their favorite project management software. Thank you for recommending Wrike to your friends and colleagues and also spreading the news about our latest releases! Here is a short digest of some recent Twitter posts of Wrike users:

appmerica I'm an intelligent guy but if I trial your #webapp and cant figure it out in <5 mins. I'm done. e.g. Wrike = Good.

crompton Our company has started using Wrike for task/project management -- works Great! http://bit.ly/ftp0YI

megabiteservice‎ RT @MegabiteFL: Project management app, Wrike, includes real-time updates and social networking tools for better collaboration

BradJobling Wrike.com was recommended as a great project management software by a fellow alumnus. http://icio.us/gp1wf3

VIVACreative Looking to get organized? Check out our CEO Lorne Greene's thoughts on @Wrike's project management software http://bit.ly/frpR5x

Lanzen Now this is cool - Wrike Social uses Social Networking to manage projects in the Cloud... http://ow.ly/3b4Su

alirittenhouse @wrike can't wait to try out your product! Just signed up, been through several services & none have been a good fit for my VA practice...

bionicturtle we love wrike, improves workflow & reduces friction RT @GinaAbudi: Thanks for the RTs of the post @bionicturtle and @wrike.

The beginning of 2011 will be no less hot, so stay tuned by following @wrike on Twitter!