This year is coming to an end, and now it's high time to review the accomplishments we had.

First of all, we're happy to let you know that this year brought us numerous new users! Some of them agreed to share their Wrike experience with us. As a result, we published quite a few new customer success stories, including interviews with:

• Laura Roeder, a popular online marketing strategist and social media expert
• Cornelius Fichtner, PMP, show host at The Project Management PrepCast
• Luther Cale, chief of marketing, HealthStream
• Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager, UKSA
• Nick Doherty, managing editor of television, SBS Online
• and some others.

We hope that we'll be able to publish a case study with you next year. Ready to share your story already? Contact us at marketing@team.wrike.com, and we'll be happy to put it out. By the way, here's a very inspiring SlideShare case study presentation by one of our customers, SayitRight Marketing Solutions. We hope that this slide deck will push you to share your online collaboration and project management best practices with the world.

In 2009, we continued to lead the web-based project management space with our Intelligent Email Engine^TM (smart email integration), which remains the most advanced among project management software solutions. Despite this fact, we never stop innovating in this and other areas. This year has been remarkable in terms of development achievements and new feature releases. Let us innumerate the most important of them:

• new user management engine: allowed you to create your own cost-effective mix of user licenses in your account;
• email-integrated task discussions: let you add comments to task by simply emailing them to Wrike, and  made Wrike's email integration even more robust and universal;
• Outlook add-in: made it easy for you to synchronize your emails marked for follow-up and tasks in your Outlook and Wrike accounts;
• WinMobile app: made Wrike's tasks accessible from your smart phone;
• intraday tasks: allowed you to build a more precise schedule by creating tasks that start and are estimated to be completed on the same day;
• recurring tasks: simplified scheduling of tasks that occur every day, week, month or year for you.

Wrike also was enhanced with 535 "small things," like handy shortcuts, version tracking for files, improvements in task management and daily to-do emails, as well as many other useful features that make you more productive in your day-to-day jobs.

The last, but definitely not least, we delivered Wrike Simple Projects, a productivity application for the My Yahoo! platform.

So the past year brought us a lot of exciting events that couldn't have happened without you. You, our valued customers, continuously inspired us to improve the service and make it an even better solution for your business productivity.

Now, what should you expect from Wrike in the year 2010? Even more amazing news, of course!

We're thrilled to share some of our development plans with you.  The beginning of the next year will be packed with new feature releases. We're currently working on delivering an iPhone app and Google Docs integration. Want even more? You'll get it! Our development roadmap also includes a new user interface, resource management, budgeting, microblogging, BlackBerry and G1 plug-ins and lots of other productivity and management features that will make your team even more efficient.

In addition, we plan to localize Wrike to more than 10 languages! This year, we released the Spanish version of our project management software. German and French versions are next on our list.

We'd like to underline here that our development plans change over time, as they greatly depend on your feedback and suggestions. Your opinion and requests are always welcome in the comments to this blog and at support@team.wrike.com

We wish you and your family a happy, safe and restful holiday season! Your success is our success, and we hope to continue to build our partnership throughout 2010 and the future.

Worried that marketing through social media is taking up too much of your time? It’s a reasonable concern. Living in the world of social media means you spend hours on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and others. It’s very easy to lose sense of time while browsing blogs and newsfeeds.

Well then, how do social media gurus manage to be productive and get things done right on time? They have their own productivity tools and techniques that help them stay efficient in this vibrant environment. The good news is that social media professionals don’t mind sharing their tips. For example, one of them, a popular social media marketing expert and coach, Laura Roeder, told us what helps her stay on top of multiple projects and effectively collaborate with her team members.

“Getting things done fast is perhaps the most important skill you can have to make your business move forward,” says Laura. “Wrike's flexibility allows us to be super-productive, and it helps our own business grow rapidly.” Read the full story and find out how Laura’s social media marketing team benefits from Wrike’s unique features.

We’re excited to announce that Wrike was chosen by the Project Management Institute, New Jersey chapter (PMI NJ) team to organize their Seminar at Sea.

PMI is the most influential and popular project management organization in the world. It helps thousands of project managers globally to gain valuable knowledge, network and exchange their experience. That’s why we’re so proud that PMI NJ’s team chose Wrike to be the primary system for managing the Seminar at Sea project.

“We are happy that Wrike helped a distributed team of the seminar’s organizers collaborate more efficiently than before and complete this big project on time,” said Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike.com. “Our focus has always been on reducing the project manager’s routine jobs and maximizing the productivity of the whole team. It’s great that PMI NJ professionals recognized Wrike’s benefits for collaboration and project management.”

The seminar is be a unique opportunity to enjoy the comfort, enjoyment and excitement of cruise travel with a special educational and networking project management experience.  The event is held from Aug. 29 to Sept. 3, 2009. We’ll be happy to see you among the participants! 

Technology never stops evolving and opening new opportunities for business development. But some people need a serious paradigm shift to realize this. That’s why it’s so important to support 21st century technology learning.

Julia Bergman, a Web 2.0 evangelist and information literacy coach, thoroughly shares this idea. As a part of her course, she educates business people on how they can improve their project management practices and processes with innovative technologies. Her course is based on the principles of collaborative learning. Attendees learn how to use Web 2.0 tools though constant interactions via these tools. However, even such projects need tight supervision and guidance.

Learn how Julia manages to supervise multiple learning projects at a time and organize smooth collaboration across several student groups.

Cloud computing gets a lot of buzz these days, as it helps organizations to cut costs and foster team productivity. Users don’t need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. Companies pay as they go, and they only pay for features that they actually use.

These benefits made the UK-based nonprofit UKSA develop its own cloud computing strategy that included tools like Salesforce for CRM, Google Apps for e-mail and documents, and Wrike for marketing project management. To find out why this organization chose to make Wrike an essential part of its cloud computing practices, read the interview with Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UKSA.

Consulting and e-learning is a multi-project business. One of the major challenges of this business is that you need to keep track of dozens of projects simultaneously. What would it be like if all those projects with numerous tasks could be managed in one place? How much more productive would the whole team and business become?

The team of an e-learning company, ReachFuther, is proud to have become 50% more productive and efficient. ReachFurther is one of the many firms that are struggling to organize multi-participant, multi-project collaboration with e-mails, phone calls and Skype calls. This often was very complicated, as staff members were always very busy, in different places, at client meetings, training or attending conferences. ReachFurther’s team found it difficult to schedule regular, face-to-face meetings. Junior staff members were not always clear about their tasks.

Wrike helped the team to overcome this problem. Today, ReachFurther’s distributed team manages its plentiful projects in a shared Wrike workspace. Read the full story.

Micromanagement can be a serious problem for a person who is in charge of a project or a whole business. It can hamper the development of a company and prevent managers from taking advantage of the creative initiatives of their teams.



Engagement of collaborative planning can help with this problem and allow you to discover the full potential of the team. At the same time, it’s important for the manager to keep control of the team’s actions and to guide them. Only with the combination of bottom-up collaboration and top-down leadership can the business be truly successful. LearnItFirst.com, a fast developing online IT training company, found a way to create and maintain such a combination. Read the story, told by Scott Whigham, the founder of  LearnItFirst.com, and find out what helped him to make the business more productive.

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.

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.