Do you see more overdue tasks appear on the dashboard every day, even though you and your team members are working really hard? These days we often have to deal with uncertainty, so it’s not always possible to specify fixed due dates for some tasks. Later, when you don’t meet the set deadlines for these tasks, you need to reschedule them again and again. Maybe there are some items that don’t have an actual deadline. For instance, they can be not actionable items, but valuable ideas to elaborate on sometime in the future. Whether they are tasks or ideas, in order to prevent them from slipping out of your sight, you need to record them in your plan. In a multitasking environment, it’s hard to keep them all in your head when it’s overloaded with information. Occasionally, you may miss something important in the workflow under such pressure.

To free your brain from the pressure of remembering too many things and to avoid stress, you need to get the ideas and tasks with no deadlines in safe storage as soon as they pop up. After you and your team cope with urgent matters, you can then turn to that list to develop your ideas or tackle some action item. Now Wrike allows you to keep these items neatly organized, so that none of them gets lost. If you use the new beta version, you may have noticed that now the tasks can not only be planned for exact dates or set as milestones, but also marked as “Backlogged.” Let us give you a view into this new, important feature of Wrike. 



Generally, a “backlog” is an accumulated list of work that still needs to be done. In terms of Getting Things Done (GTD), a personal productivity methodology that can be rolled out companywide with Wrike, a backlogged task can be defined as an item from the Someday/Maybe list. It means it’s a task that you will possibly pick up and complete sometime in the future. Backlogged tasks have no start date and due date. Backlogged tasks are not tied to the timeline and not visible on it. In the new version of Wrike, backlogged tasks are shown on a separate widget of the dashboard, so that you have a clear overview of them and don’t miss any item in the workflow. However, Wrike doesn’t include backlogged tasks in the daily to-do emails.

To see the tasks marked as backlogged in a certain folder, hit the “Backlog” button. Then you can easily rank your tasks by priority using drag-and-drop. As simple to implement as it sounds, this feature is a powerful tool that will help you to turn a long, messy list of unsorted tasks and ideas into a valid, agile plan. You can change the sorting order whenever your priorities change. 



With the new backlog feature, you take the load of too many things to remember off your brain. Wrike takes care of them and remembers them for you. You and your team members can store and prioritize the items in your workflow, gaining a clearer sense of what to focus on while moving toward your goals. In addition to a personal backlog, Wrike also allows you to accommodate backlogs for your projects, products, departments, etc.  Thus, this feature not only boosts your personal productivity, but turns into a very helpful tool for building your long-term strategies. For instance, you can record all your ideas about the future development of your product in the backlog. Keeping them in a neat, prioritized list that is not tied to inflexible or unfeasible deadlines, you can build a transparent roadmap of your product development and tackle the items one by one when the right time comes.
Try the new backlog feature and gain extra bonus points on your efficiency! 

If you have already started exploring the new version of Wrike, you certainly noticed that your favorite project management software became a lot more social. Avatars are one of the hot additions in the new Wrike. The task bar now shows the avatar of  the person responsible  for the assignment, instead of displaying the full name in a separate column. It will be much easier from now on to see at a glance who is responsible by looking at the picture, rather than reading a name. Plus, avatars take up less space, which is especially notable with our new three-pane interface. We give everyone in your account one of our cool avatars by default, but a user can upload his or her own picture by going to the My Profile tab in the Account Management space.

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!

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!

Do you have a weekly status meeting? Do you have to regularly create sales reports? Or maybe you issue monthly newsletters? In these and thousands of other cases, you will be pleased with the new recurring tasks feature available in Wrike. Now, when you create or edit a task, you can check a box to turn the task from a one-time event to a recurring event.

The recurring tasks feature is great addition to other scheduling options, like customized work days, intraday tasks and task dependencies in Wrike.  Automatic scheduling of recurring tasks will help you reduce time spent on daily planning and result in more realistic plans.

Once the “recurring” box is checked in the task edit form, you will see a pop-up dialog that lets you set up the frequency of your task or event.



For example, if you want to schedule the design of a weekly newsletter due every Monday, you select the “Weekly” button, set it to reoccur every week and check the box called Monday. Then you set the duration of the task recurrence by entering the start day as next Monday, for instance, and the end day as one month later.



After you save the changes to the task, a series of tasks will be added to your Wrike workspace. The tasks will differ by date and title.  A number (starting from 1) will be added to the end of each task title in the series. In our example, we will see  four tasks: “designing weekly newsletter 1,” “designing weekly newsletter 2,” “designing weekly newsletter 3” and “designing weekly newsletter 4” with the corresponding due dates on December 21, December 28, January 4 and January 11. Your recurring tasks are marked up with a special icon in the task list, as well as on the timeline:



When necessary, you can edit the series of tasks by updating the recurrence pattern, or edit an individual task by changing its title, date, description, etc. If you change the due date of an individual task and later update the recurrence pattern, the due date of the individual task will be updated as well. Say you reschedule the task called “designing weekly newsletter4” from January 11 to January 12 and then update the recurrence pattern so that  the task is due each Wednesday, instead of each Monday, the “designing weekly newsletter4” task will be rescheduled for Wednesday, January 13.  

Many of you know that Wrike recently became available in Spanish. Initially, the language of your Wrike interface depended on the domain where you signed up: at www.wrike.com (English) or at www.wrike.es (Spanish). Now we have added the ability to change the language of your Wrike workspace easily.

First, the language option is now available on every page of Wrike’s Web site (see the top right corner of the Web page).



Additionally, you can customize the language of your Wrike workspace and the language of e-mail notifications that you receive from Wrike by using the “My profile” tab (2) that is in the "Account" section (1). Once you switch the language (3) under your personal profile, do not forget to save the changes (4), so that they come into effect!



Each user can individually set the desired language because the settings are personal and do not affect the entire account.

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!

As you know, Wrike has a keyboard-friendly navigation that makes it easy for you to create and update tasks.

Today, we added a new shortcut for creating tasks inline: “C”. You simply click the right pane with the task list (1), hit “C” on your keyboard, and a new task is created (2). Then, you enter the task title (required), due date and the responsible person (optional) and hit “Enter.”
 


Why is this shortcut so special? It works well for Mac users!
 
As before, you can create tasks by hitting “insert” on your PCs.