This week, we released an important update to Wrike’s Dynamic Timeline™ – task date constraints. This feature is familiar to those of you who switched to Wrike from Microsoft Project. In this post, we’ll tell you about this new functionality and how you and your peers can benefit from using it.

From time to time, we all have to deal with tasks that are closely connected to each other in the workflow. In such cases, Wrike’s Dynamic Timeline™ becomes an irreplaceable tool that allows you to quickly build a precise plan, considering the connection between tasks and the circumstances that may affect them. Wrike lets you connect tasks with dependencies within one project, as well as set cross-project dependencies. Now, with the release of constraints on the timeline, the dependent tasks can have a time lag between them, so that you can build even more accurate project schedules!

Let’s simplify this real business scenario to an exemplary situation, where only two tasks are involved. Say you plan to interview one of your most loyal customers and publish a success story on your website. First, you need to prepare the list of questions. Only after the questions are ready can you proceed to the interview. However, you find out that your customer is going on a 3-day business trip and can’t have the interview on the day you initially planned. You need to reflect this delay in the schedule. In this case, you can connect these two tasks on the timeline, considering the date constraints. Here’s how: point the cursor over the top right-hand corner of the task bar for “Prepare questions.” A small triangle appears. Click on the triangle and drag the line to the dependent task, called “Interview the customer.” This way, you can create a strict dependency. Then drag the dependent task on the timeline to the proper start date to create a task date constraint, as shown in the screenshot below.



Here’s what your timeline will look like after the change is made:



Task date constraints on Wrike’s timeline will help you build an accurate plan that’s shared with your peers. If we look at it on a wider scale, this will keep your workflow perfectly organized in a multitasking environment and help your team avoid any slips in the schedule.
 

When your small team has to collaborate with numerous external partners, it’s an extra challenge to organize effective collaboration. Is it possible to manage the information flow under the high pressure of multitasking so that no tasks are forgotten, no documents are lost and everyone is kept up-to-date? Hildebrands GmbH, a German company that provides shop fitting solutions, works with 30+ external partners, so they’re very familiar with this situation. They found a solution to handle it. “Wrike minimizes the need to make numerous phone calls and send dozens of emails when working on a project. Wrike automatically takes care of a lot of routine communication tasks. Everyone who is involved gets instantly notified about the updates in the schedule,” says Gunter Hildebrand, managing partner at Hildebrands.

Read the whole interview with Gunter to find out how Wrike helped his company to save 25% of time spent on routine project communication tasks and to organize effective project collaboration with numerous external partners distributed all over Europe.

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.

Today, we offer a new, handy feature on Wrike’s Gantt chart. Now you can create a task on the timeline with one mouse gesture! Advanced Web technologies (AJAX) allowed us to implement this feature and improve your experience with Wrike. Adding tasks to the timeline became as easy as creating dependencies and rescheduling plans.

How it works
Switch to the “Timeline” tab. Choose the day when your task is planned to start, click on any empty line in the timeline, hold the mouse button and pull your mouse to the right. Once the task bar reaches the day when the task is planned to be finished, release the mouse button. A dialog window, where you can quickly enter the task name and assign the task, will appear. Enter the data and click on the “Create task” button.

Then, if you want to add a task description, attachments, priority and other properties, move the mouse pointer over the task bar and click on the “Edit task” link in the pop-up tooltip. You can also find the task in the list mode and edit it there.

See a video of this feature in action:



As you see, it takes just a couple of seconds to add a task to the plan. It takes no effort to notify a person about the new task assignment because Wrike does it for you. It is very convenient to monitor tasks in Wrike with the help of instant e-mail notifications and a daily digest of changes. Viva la productivity!

Wrike’s users benefit from the timeline feature that allows them to plan projects and reschedule tasks with drag-and-drop support. You can drag the task bar on the chart to change the task duration, start date or end date. Once any change is made, your team members are instantly notified about it via e-mail, RSS or iCal feed.

Task dependencies, an important project management feature, have been launched this week. Wrike automatically links tasks so that a rescheduling of a top task cascades down to its dependent tasks, immediately displaying the downstream effects on the entire project. This results in a far more accurate and maintainable project plan.  Watch a demo of task dependencies in action.




How task dependencies work.

• Log into your Wrike workspace.
• Switch to the Timeline tab.
• Expand folders if necessary.
• Point the cursor over the top right corner of the task bar. A small triangle appears.

• Create a dependency using the drag-and-drop support. Click on the triangle and drag the line to the dependent task.

• If you are a Wrike user and you don’t have an enterprise subscription, Wrike gives you an option to upgrade to an enterprise subscription.

Task dependencies are available to you with an enterprise subscription. We welcome you to upgrade your account and instantly benefit from task dependencies.

If you are keeping your plans in Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel, it is very easy to start using Wrike. You can simply import your MS Project files to Wrike, share them with your colleagues and work on the plans together, anytime and anywhere. Sign up for Wrike now and get a 30-day free trial.

Today, we would like to delight you with a very handy feature. Now you can expand and collapse all your timelines with a one-click action. Once you click on the appropriate icon, all subfolders within a selected folder expand to show all its tasks on a timeline. The same applies to the way you can collapse all folders displayed on a timeline. Simply click on the icon with the upward arrow to collapse all folders.

For new users, by selected folder we mean a folder that you select in the left pane of your workspace.

We are delighted to tell you that we have released a new feature –  timeline printing.

To get a printed version of a timeline, you no longer need to take its screenshot and paste it from a clipboard to Word/Paint/etc. to be able to print it afterward.

Thanks to the new Wrike feature, all you have to do is  click on the “Print” icon in the upper right corner of a timeline view. You instantly get a graphic file in the PNG format, ready to print. It evidently saves you time and effort.

Besides, an additional size option allows you to have your timeline printed in the scale you need. You can choose the necessary scale for  the timeline view by selecting weeks, months, quarters or years in zoom.


So, you quickly get a handy printed version of your project plan that can be helpful at meetings and presentations.

The timeline printing feature is our response to our users’ numerous requests that we are always willing to listen to. We are glad to develop the most practical project management tool the way users need it.

Besides working on the tasks that need to be done, many of our users wanted to easily see what tasks are already done. We added this feature, so now you can get a full picture of your project plan. Completed tasks, as well as active ones, can be now displayed on a timeline.

You can choose to view all tasks on a timeline (both active and completed), if you need a visual presentation of your entire project plan. If you want to reschedule only tasks that are planned, you can display only active tasks that aren't completed.

We  also added more distinctive visuals on a timeline view to help you quickly get a clear project picture. Completed tasks are grey now, active tasks are blue, and overdue tasks are red.  

If you have ever dealt with project management software, you know Gantt charts can be helpful. But most likely you are stuck with your e-mail to manage your projects and you want to build charts based on the tasks that your e-mails contain without much hassle. We’ve got something for you. Use a timeline option in Wrike project management solution.

You work with your sales leads, customer service requests or Web site development tasks. Wrike helps you keep track of them. At any time you can switch to the Timeline view and get excellent support for your time management. A timeline visualizes a project schedule perfectly. It helps you quickly understand how your projects are going and what requires your particular attention. You can easily build plans and keep track of progress.

You can update your plans in accordance with your business goals and time frames. Devote time to prepare a presentation and simultaneously quote potential customers who send you RFPs. Then schedule participation in an exhibition and follow-up with the received leads. Sign contracts and take a long breath on vacation finally. If you update shared plans, change dates or delegate tasks, everyone on the team is informed about it on the same basis as when they work with the Task List view.

So add the due date [in square brackets] into the subject of your e-mails and wrike@wrike.com into the CC field and Wrike will build a Gantt chart for you:

We have developed a Timeline, which is mostly known as a Gantt Chart. Now you can:

- have the big picture of parallel projects,
- track the work load of your team members, and
- create elegantly designed outlines of plans.

All these tasks are a huge challenge when using other online project management and collaboration tools, aren’t they?

Here is a short demo for you.



Some technical details.
The red flag marks the due date, and the floating bar chart represents the task duration. So you can easily drag a bar and thus change the start date of a task. To change the task duration, you only need to pull the bar’s borders. The red flag - the due date – keeps you from accidentally overstepping the deadline and doesn’t allow the bar chart to move outside of it.