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. Meanwhile, there are several things that we want to bring to your attention.

1.    When you create a task in Wrike from the Wave, it will not be assigned to anyone, so you’ll need to assign your task directly from Wrike.

2.    For now, the system can sync changes made to your tasks in the Wave; however, it will not translate the updates you made to the task in your Wrike workspace to Google’s platform. So if you create a task from the Wave make changes to the task description in Wrike, and then try to update the main wave content from Google’s platform, the changes that you made in Wrike will be lost.

3.    We recommend that you add your team members to your Wrike account first and only then invite them to the task discussion in the Wave.

We’ll keep you updated on the progress.

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.  

Besides project discussions, another feature often asked for by many of our users--estimation of task duration in hours--is now live.

To help you build a more precise schedule, we’ve added the ability to set task duration to minutes (1).



Examples of valid entries in the duration field: "2h 30 m", "5d", "3h",  "15m". In other words, you can use the following format to set tasks’ duration: "3d 4h 5m". The task duration feature allows you to enter the correct number of days, hours and minutes or to remove unnecessary parameters.

If you enter a fractional number of days, like "0.5d" Wrike will turn it into "4h" to represent half of the working day. If you enter a fractional number of hours or minutes, Wrike will round it to the nearest whole number.

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.

We received a lot of customer feedback about desired changes in everyday to-do e-mails, and today we are glad to present the improvements to you.

To help you focus on the most important tasks for you, now tasks that are overdue by more than 5 days are not shown in your daily to-do emails (1).

If a task was not completed or rescheduled while it was overdue for 1-5 days, it is considered non-important to you right now. However, each to-do email contains a reminder about your tasks that are overdue by more than 5 days (2), and you can reschedule them at any time (3).

As always, the to-do e-mail also contains your tasks that are planned for today (4) and overdue tasks assigned by you to other people.

In the best Wrike traditions, we keep bringing the convenience of using your favorite desktop software to the Web. A couple of weeks ago, we introduced a right-click context menu for the folders tree. Now we are introducing drag-and-drop for folders.

1) To move a folder:

Left-click on the folder, hold the mouse button and pull the folder to the place where you want to see it.



2) To include a subfolder in several folders: hold CTRL.

If you want one subfolder to be included in many folders, hold the “ctrl” key while doing the previous operation. The subfolder will stay where it was before the drag-and-drop, and it also will be included in the new place where you dropped it.



Tip to remember: When you put something in a shared folder, it automatically becomes shared as well. For example, if you move a project folder to a folder shared with your client, your client will see the project folder and underlying tasks.

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.

A tiny, yet useful, feature that helps you request task status updates automatically has been improved. Now the request can be created directly from your workspace. It is not necessary for you to have the default e-mail client, such as Outlook, Gmail etc., set on your computer.


You simply click on “Request status update” and a dialog window appears, so you can add custom text to the default message.



Click “Send,” and the recipient of the message will report to you about the task soon.

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.

First of all, what is RSS? It is an abbreviation that stands for Really Simple Syndication — a format for delivering regularly changing Web content. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate their content’s updates in the form of RSS feeds to help you keep track of newly published information.

How does RSS help you to be more productive?

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple online sources in one place. RSS makes life easier for people who regularly use the Web. You easily stay informed by receiving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You keep your privacy because, with RSS, you don’t have to subscribe to each site's e-mail newsletter. You save a lot of time because you do not need to visit each of your favorite sites individually.

How can you save time following your project’s progress with Wrike’s RSS feature?

You can use Wrike’s RSS feeds with Wrike’s e-mail to-do lists or instead of them, if you find it more convenient.  Wrike’s RSS feature is a perfect complement to on-site update notifications that you see in the upper left-hand corner of your workspace. RSS might be especially helpful when you are out of the office because you will still get relevant and up-to-date information about your team’s progress for you to read in your own time.  This information will be available with your smart phone, BlackBerry, iPhone or other mobile device.

How can I use RSS?

You need to have special software called an "RSS reader." It can be either Web-based or desktop-based. There’s a handy list of RSS readers in Wikipedia. Google Reader or Bloglines are very popular. Besides, you may already have one in your browser, if you use Fire Fox, Internet Explorer 7 or Safari.

To get updates from people you are collaborating with via RSS, you just need to click on the blue RSS icon in the upper right-hand corner of your workspace.



This will allow you to stay in the loop without having to stay logged on to wrike.com all the time. All the messages will be chronologically listed in your RSS reader. When new information is added to a task, you get an update with a link to the renewed task instantly.

With little helpers, like Wrike’s RSS feeds, you become more productive and manage your projects more efficiently.