New tasks appear every day. Some of them have urgent deadlines. So every day, you have to adjust the priorities for each project and communicate them to the team. Tons of operations, don't you think? With Wrike, it takes you just a couple of mouse moves to set, adjust and communicate project priorities.

1. Set and adjust priorities. It's easier than you can imagine. Simply sort the tasks by priority and drag the most important tasks up the list with your mouse. Select "Show descendant" if you want to prioritize tasks in subfolders as well. Whenever you need to prioritize tasks across all your projects, go to "My Folders," select "Show descendant" and drag-and-drop tasks.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   If you have dozens of tasks, you might want to prioritize them for each person separately (filter the task list by responsible person first).
    

2. Share and communicate priorities. The best thing about Wrike's priority system is that, if a project folder is shared with the team, the team already knows the up-to-date priorities. How? A person opens a project folder, chooses sorting by priority and voila. He or she sees tasks of the highest priority at the top of the list, just like you do. Every team member instantly sees the automatically updated project priorities with no extra effort from your side. This helps everyone clearly see what they should be focusing on first and promptly react to the changes in the volatile business environment.

Keeping your plan up-to-date and communicating priorities to the entire team is a challenge, but with Wrike, it is a piece of cake. We'd love to know what you think. Have you already used Wrike's prioritization function? Did you learn anything new from this post?

Wrike works in any popular web browser, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari. However, according to multiple tests, Internet Explorer is the slowest browser when it comes to working with dynamic Web apps, such as Wrike.com. With IE, you may think that an app doesn’t perform well, while it’s actually the browser that reduces your productivity. That’s why we recommend using Google Chrome, since it’s currently the fastest browser on the market.

A lot of our users who switched from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome share their fantastic experience. “I knew from prior communications with the Customer Care team that Wrike performed well in Google Chrome, but I simply had no idea how much faster it is. I never thought to try a different browser. Now I know it makes a huge difference. Wrike is really fast in Chrome.  It’s simply amazing!” says Tom Day from CBIA, a long-term Wrike customer.

In case you cannot change your browser for some reason, you still can have all the advantages of Chrome with its easy-to-install plug-in for Internet Explorer. The plug-in enables you to continue using IE for your everyday tasks and at the same time benefit from the speed of Chrome with sites that support the plug-in, such as Wrike. 

We finished 2010 with unveiling a couple of very helpful new features: the add-in for Outlook 2010 and the ability to export filtered task lists to Excel. In this post, we’ll introduce the first updates of 2011 that many of you were suggesting to Wrike’s support team.

Whenever you get a valuable idea that doesn’t have to be realized in a fixed timeframe, you can instantly add it to your project backlog in Wrike without even leaving your inbox. To create a backlogged task via email, add the tag [backlog] in the subject of the message that you send to wrike@wrike.com.



If you want to create backlogged tasks often, Wrike offers you another handy solution. You can simply adjust your account settings so that any email you send to Wrike without specifying a date turns into a backlogged task. To do so, click on the “Account” link in your workspace and go to the Personal profile tab. On that page, you can choose how you want Wrike to process emails with no date tags – either create one-day tasks for today, or add these tasks to the backlog. If you choose to create backlogged tasks by default, you can still add one-day tasks for today by adding the date to the email subject in the following format: MM/DD-MM/DD (or DD/MM-DD/MM if you have this date format set as the default in your account).



Another significant addition to Wrike’s scheduling functionality is that backlogged tasks are now reflected in the table view, as well as the list view. The new column in the table view – duration – lets you get a more accurate picture of your plans. By the way, you can easily move the columns by dragging and dropping them to adjust the table view to your preferences.

We hope these features will help you build agile plans and manage your tasks productively in 2011!
 

The new Wrike provides you with unparalleled flexibility for conveniently organizing your project data and prioritizing your workflow in seconds. This is possible thanks to the cool new feature: drag and drop support for customizing the view of your task list. Now, if you choose to sort tasks in a folder by priority, you can easily re-arrange them by dragging the most important ones up the list. The changes in the task order are instantly seen by all your colleagues with whom the folder is shared if they set sorting by priority. This results in a great collaboration efficiency boost, as the new feature helps you to communicate the significance of tasks to your team members immediately. 

Continuing the series of posts on the new features in Wrike, today we’ll explore the updates in the comments area. Now, instead of simple discussions, each task and folder has its own activity stream. It strongly enhances your control over the workflow because now you’re able to monitor the progress of each task in detail. The edits you and your team members make to a task or a folder get listed as comments below the description. You have the full changes history before your eyes – who changed the description, rescheduled a task, set a new status, renamed a folder or attached files to it, and when the changes took place. The instant updates make a neat log that also supports more efficient real-time collaboration.  Your team members get a better understanding of what their colleagues are working on.



If you want to discuss a task or a folder with your colleagues, type the comment in the appropriate field. As in the previous version of Wrike, you also can add comments to tasks by email. Once you send an email to wrike@wrike.com with RE or FW and the task name in the subject, Wrike identifies your comment and automatically adds it to the specified task. This saves you a lot of time, since you don’t need to log in to your workspace and re-type the comments manually.

What do you think of this new functionality? Don’t hesitate to share your impressions in the comments to this post!

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! 

The G1 phone is one of the most anticipated devices since the iPhone official release. One of the reasons for this is that it is the first phone empowered by Android, a complete, open mobile phone software stack. Android is the creation of Google, along with the Open Handset Alliance. Numerous experts have cited Android as a huge step forward toward openness in software, as this is the first stack open to third-party applications.

However, one of the major user challenges connected with the new G1 phone was the lack of integration with some mainstream business applications, including Microsoft Exchange.

The good news is our team decided to use Android's openness as an opportunity to make the new phone owners' lives easier. We have extensive knowledge and experience in incorporating e-mail into project management, and we understand the importance of maximizing the collaborative capabilities across as many devices as possible.
 
We joined our efforts with Intermedia, the leading provider of collaboration and productivity SaaS solutions, and introduced a new application allowing users to easily download all of their Exchange contacts to their G1 phone. Our aim was and will remain to save you time and increase your productivity. ContactsSync is another step in this direction. The application is absolutely free, so you are welcome to download and enjoy it right now!

You can also read more about ContactsSync.