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.

Two articles by Andrew Filev, the founder and CEO of Wrike, Inc., were published on the reputable project management resource site ProjectSmart.co.uk. The focus of the site is on exploring the recent trends and developments in project management. ProjectSmart.co.uk. features articles, whitepapers, templates, updates on events for project managers and other useful information.

In his articles, Andrew discussed trends like the role of collective intelligence in contemporary project management and the new emerging approach to managing projects, known as Project Management 2.0.

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.

Wrike's founder, Andrew Filev, is an expert in project management with about 8 years of experience in leading global software development teams. At the same time, Andrew is keen on innovating the project management sphere. That's why many authoritative project management institutions and resource centers are willing to find out his opinion on hot project management topics.

This time, Andrew was invited to write for The Project Management Hut. PMHut is a remarkable online collection of articles, covering the whole process of managing a project, from initiation to closure, including all the necessary templates. The posts are written by elite project managers. The site is an excellent resource for any project manager who wants to "get the project done." This week, PMHut featured Andrew's article on the characteristics of an ideal project management tool. Will there be such a tool? And if yes, what would it look like? Find out by reading Andrew Filev's article at PMHut.com

What is a wiki?
A wiki is a collection of Web pages that allow teams to keep, share and update information. As information is updated, everyone on the team gets a notification about the change. People do not have to ask the administrator’s permission to update a wiki’s page, so contributions to it can be made in real time.

The most successful wiki is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an example of how groups of people demonstrate more intelligence than isolated individuals. In contrast to other encyclopedias that were created by closed groups of people, Wikipedia shows a tremendous growth, thanks to the open approach to collaboration. Wikipedia has been created by hundreds of thousands of contributors. Anyone can contribute to any subject in which he or she has expertise. As a result, each of the 10 million articles contains data collected from multiple sources. This makes Wikipedia comprehensive. According to the Nature journal, Wikipedia is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same in accuracy. High-quality articles attract users every day, making Wikipedia one of the most popular and helpful resources on the Web.

How do businesses benefit from wikis?
Thanks to the support of collaboration, wikis have become a popular business tool. Wikis are often used as an alternative to intranets and other classic software platforms for sharing of knowledge. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes a designing structure prior to use, wikis and other enterprise 2.0 software programs allow people to start with one page and then grow it into a comprehensive knowledge base. The growth happens through many simple interactions. One person creates a page, another person corrects it, the third person adds something, and the first person contributes one more piece of information. As a result, you get a shiny wiki page that reflects a common view of the participants on the subject. This process is also known as emergent structures, the pattern of intelligent behaviors that  emerge bottom up from people with no or little central control.

Companies use wikis to get more team members involved in project collaboration, for knowledge management, as a Web portal and as a content creation tool. With a wiki, team members can easily access the up-to-date project information and work together on shared documents. For example, a wiki is a good way to store a series of phone scripts for salespeople or a presentation that many departments are contributing to at once. Since everyone is empowered to contribute in real time, using wikis facilitates information exchange and improves team productivity. Ultimately, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools make companies more agile and, thus, more competitive. 

For more information about how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and technology, such as wikis, to be successful, you can read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.


How you can use Wrike as a wiki
In addition to its inherent project management features, Wrike has the most important wiki features – collaborative editing, revision history, e-mail notifications about changes and links between pages.

Collaborative editing
Wrike’s tasks can be edited by anyone with whom they are shared. Instead of multiple versions of a document kept in different places, you get a single master document (a task) that everybody can access.

Everyone on the team can view, edit and update information easily, at any time. Your team members can discuss requirements, elaborate on product design, create a conference agenda and find solutions to problems. It minimizes the necessity of meetings and calls to update a piece of work. It also saves team members from having to send e-mails with revised documents back and forth, and it releases your team from the nightmare of comparing document versions.

E-mail notifications about changes
The changes are instantly visible to all of the team members online, via e-mail and RSS. This allows you to stay up-do-date and quickly react to the changes.

Revision history
Wiki is generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. That is why most popular wikis have a built-in version control tool. Wrike’s Premium and Enterprise versions provide version control for tasks, so that no original thought is lost. It keeps the information about what changes were made, when they were made and by whom. You can review, compare pairs of revisions and restore tasks to previous versions.



Links between pages.
Information can be easily cross-linked. Each task and folder has a unique hyperlink, so you can refer to it easily.



Wiki features organically fit in to the overall Wrike experience and help  Wrike better meet your needs. You get a true project management 2.0 experience, thanks to collaboration brought into the planning process. Compared to traditional project management tools that place the project manager in the center of the project communications, Wrike allows everyone on the team to immediately see the latest updates and contribute to the project plan in real time. This streamlines communications and increases the productivity of your team. Meanwhile, the ability to restore tasks to the previous version at any time allows project manager to keep control firmly in his or her hands.

The revision history, which allows you to use Wrike as a wiki, is available with Wrike’s Premium version, Enterprise version and the old Professional plans.

Collective intelligence, emergent structures, Enterprise 2.0 … What are these things, and how can they help you manage your projects? Wrike's founder, Andrew Filev, explains the answers in his interview with the reputable blogger and veteran project manager Bas de Baar. The conversation covers the hottest project management topics and will make interesting and useful reading not only for project managers, but also to everybody who is involved in this sphere.

If you ever have tried to use Microsoft Project, you know that it’s not very easy to share a Microsoft Project file with your team. You need to purchase and install Microsoft Project Server and a bunch of other applications, such as Microsoft Office Project Web Access. On average, the ability to share your plans will cost you between $4,998 and $85,892, plus a lot of your time and patience.

The good news is now you can share a Microsoft Project file with your team in minutes, and it will cost you only $ 11.99 per team member (with a year-to-year subscription)! Wrike’s new Enterprise version makes sharing Microsoft Project Gantt charts incredibly easy.

Signing up for a Wrike account takes a just few minutes, but it will save hours of your team’s precious working time. If you already have a Wrike account, it will be even easier to upgrade. With the new enterprise version, you can just upload your existing Microsoft Project file to Wrike. To do so click on the “MS Project” icon in the upper right hand corner of your workspace. 



Your file will be converted into a Dynamic Timeline^TM that any member of your team can access and change. You can work on your Microsoft Project file together with your team online. The timeline will reflect all the tasks’ dates and dependencies. This feature makes the transfer to Wrike’s online project management software painless for you and millions of other Microsoft Project users.