Wrike Product Blog

Key to Adopting New Project Management Software from Day 1

Daria — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:00:00 GMT

How do you get your team to fully adopt new project management software from Day 1? This can be a tricky question, as implementing a new system always involves training of your staff, which can take up to several months, right?

Yet Adrian McDonagh, Managing Director at the U.K.’s leading Internet recruitment service, EasyWebRecruitment.com, was able to find a solution that was thoroughly adopted by his team of 15 people from the first day of use. Does he know some kind of secret?

Well, this secret is simple: successful adoption is not about the tool. It’s about your team being able to use it. Adrian knows that when you look for a new software solution, it’s important to pick an application, which ties in with the technologies your employees already use and love. This lets you sneak the new system into your team members' hands while providing a familiar interface. So if you don’t want to put additional training pressure on your staff, find a system that fits the existing workflows and integrates with apps that your team members already know. This was exactly what Adrian did when he offered Wrike to his team to use for project and task management.

“Our major challenge with all the project management systems was adoption. The team was already working very hard, and we did not want to add something to their day that would take a lot of time and training to get to grips with, or add to their administrative burden. It was completely different with Wrike. I was pleased to see that, once I showed the team how simple Wrike was, even the more skeptical members of the team were quickly convinced, ” says Adrian. What became the key to 100% Wrike adoption by the EasyWebRecruitment team? Read the whole interview with the company’s managing director to find out.

In Case You Missed It

Daria — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Wrike’s Google Wave integration buzz, our new users’ first impressions and Wrike evangelists' opinions – brought to you fresh, hot and crispy from Twitter.

Strategy First impressions on Wrike - really like the structure. Far easier to use than Basecamp or 5pm.

stoner43 @dawnbierschwal awesome, thank you! that wrike.com looks pretty cool

hymseo http://bit.ly/aIm1aA - Wrike.com's Project Management meets Google Wave

rubycut @wrike This is what I was looking for.

WalterNaeslund Here comes usefulness! RT @ydring: Wrike integrates Google Wave
into their PM-tool. Seems like a good idea: http://bit.ly/dAkFHk

TheGoogleNinja Wrike.com’s Project Management meets Google Wave http://bit.ly/d2s3es #google

laurenkuhlman I considered giving basecamp a try but I am back to wrike.

TechSauce New Project Management in Google Wave from Wrike.com http://bit.ly/9tQWUJ #wave #google

GoogleAppsNews Google Wave Gets Project Management Via Wrike.com http://bit.ly/cnZyRZ

JohnFontana #Wrike releases project management that integrates with Google Wave platform. Projects, tasks, due dates, scheduling, comments.

lkr @DuaneStorey We use wrike, like it better

kolcoo Tools: Wrike (Project Management Software) converts your e-mails into shared plans on the Web http://bit.ly/REdL

And one more from our French-speaking followers : isa2886 Wrike application de gestion de projet en ligne. Planning, temps passés,... http://bit.ly/9KILKX

By the way, we’re happy to notice that Wrike has been listed 25 times! Is Wrike a part of your faves list yet? List it right now!

Energize Your Project Management in Wrike with Google Wave

Daria — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

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.

Need Help with Managing Multiple Projects and a Team of 50?

Daria — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Even if you work in a team of two, keeping track of multiple projects can be challenging. What if you need to collaborate in a team of 50 people? Just imagine how hard it can be to keep everyone in the loop and make sure that all the tasks are completed on time, or simply that they are not forgotten by your colleagues.

“As the projects and tasks build up, tracking them all becomes increasingly difficult with no project management software to help you,” says Joe Dean, CEO at Electronic Sports, a company developing interactive fitness games for commercial exercise equipment. Joe is an experienced project manager, and he knows how it is to be in charge of 50 people and numerous projects running simultaneously. He told us about the challenges of his position, as well as the solution he found to overcome them. Curious to find out what the solution it is? Read the interview with Joe Dean.

Good News from Twitter

Daria — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

We have a confession to make. We absolutely love reading tweets about Wrike! Especially those that praise our project management software, of course. It’s amazingly pleasant to see something like: “Wrike is the best PM web-service out there,” (originally posted by binmugahid). Here are a few more Twitter updates from our users, fans and media that we wanted to share with you:

KendraBuchanan @kotof It's nice to see the PMS we use, Wrike, is rated #1. Thanks for the info. Now, we need bug tracker. Any sug would be great! TKS!

Kolcoo Tools: Wrike (Project Management Software) converts your e-mails into shared plans on the Web http://bit.ly/REdL

KendraBuchanan @JustQuinn we've been using Wrike for over a year now. I like it; easy to use. Especially like the email function.

JustQuinn looking into Wrike PM solution for Union Marketing... anyone have experience?

coachnat @mmangen Wrike is paid but has a 30-day free trial. After that it's still really affordable.

dotAgencyWeb The dotAgency web team's Things We've Loved This Year, part 1: #Agile @Zendesk @Wrike @dotMailer

coachnat @mmangen re: Wrike I like its simplicity and flexibility. Haven't tried it with groups but lots of rave reviews re: group use

andrewcrawshaw Shuffling schedules in MS Project with an eye on migrating them over to Wrike...it really is the most wonderful time of the year

diegonei Looking for goodquality Project Management software? #FollowFriday @wrike
mike_zman Trying out Wrike for size. So far, so good.

saasdir Wrike Offers Free Upgrade with Recurring Tasks Feature for All User Accounts - Earthtimes (press release) http://bit.ly/8sMVN6

crawfishmedia Wrike looks interesting, worth a 30 day investigation. http://www.wrike.com

ITSinsider And the lists continue... good one (blogs) here by Wrike's @andrewsthoughts http://is.gd/5rgpV #e20 #PM #Innovation

MargaretMeloni Vote for your favorite project management blog or at least see this great list of blogs: http://www.wrike.com/projectmanagement/ #in #fb

freshyseth @treske71 There is paid one called Wrike which is best if you're a PC user.

wrike Our Customers Rock in Collaboration 2.0 http://bit.ly/67GPr7

shull @wrike interesting take on 'long tail.' I left a comment on the blog.

columdonnelly Miscellaneous. What’s the Buzz about Wrike? http://bit.ly/8GOIpC

bionicturtle @rickwhittington don't know daylite. We use wrike.com: some excellent

advantages (esp. intelligent email to manage projects)

joipod I am such a project management nerd. Just found wrike.com and think I might be falling in love.

KMWeiland Wrike: Project management app with an email interface (useful for adding documents and assigning tasks) - http://www.wrike.com/

millca @joeworkman Have you ever looked at @Wrike? It's more for project management, but has quite a few nice features. http://www.wrike.com

Thank you for all your endorsements and good words about Wrike in 2009! We only hope to read more this year! Don't forget to follow @wrike.

Wrike Plans for 2010: What Will the New Year Bring?

Daria — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

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.

Our Customers Rock in Collaboration 2.0

Daria — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to share a presentation that was created by one of our loyal customers – Joseph Andrade, owner of SayitRight Marketing Solutions. Joe is speaking about his best practices for implementing Collaboration 2.0 in his marketing agency. It’s a great pleasure for us to let you know that our project management software became the core element of SayitRight’s online collaboration strategy.

Have a look at this interesting case study and learn a real-life war story of online collaboration done right.

View more presentations from Joseph Andrade.

Ready to share your own story with us? Contact us at marketing@team.wrike.com

Wrike Adds Recurring Tasks Feature to All Accounts For Free

Valerie — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

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.

What’s the Buzz about Wrike?

Daria — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

If you have a Twitter account, you know that Twitter is the best place to get hot news about your favorite products and services, as well as exchange opinions and tips with other users of these products. Here’s a short digest of what people were saying about our project management software on Twitter recently:

binmugahid @DrBaher wrike is the best PM webservice out there and for a few dollars more.

train_boy http://tinyurl.com/5n8jh6

lkr @CarlRNelson I use wrike for overall task/project management

JCLEGUIZAMO wrike http://screenr.com/kyB

MSWReview added, Project Management 2.0 And Wrike - http://bit.ly/CwuQX

lkr Watching @erinblaskie's seminar where she's demoing basecamp and it's reminding me how much more I like wrike!

PatrickRedknap @jamiefishback Wrike is "web based project management software" dude. @lkr #Wrike

lkr @jamiefishback Wrike is totally flexible, just tasks and folders. I think basecamp has too much weird structure that it forces on you

pm411 New pm411.org post: Podcast episode 050: wrike and pm 2.0 http://ow.ly/163hQm

garmahis Project Management Software, Project Planning Software, Time Tracking Software: Wrike http://bit.ly/89dCFi #projectmanagement

projectshrink Andrew Filev talking about Project Management 2.0 and Wrike http://is.gd/4NOrn #pmot

tuanvea Project Management Center: YouTube – Wrike Project Management Software http://bit.ly/2J4fv4

mattyza @wrike Thanks for the info. Looking forward to your iPhone app. :)

Jessica_Baer Wrike.com I forgot how much I loved this! It works the way I work.

smorini taking a peek at http://www.wrike.com/

soulhuntre @wrike + google wave woudl be a great replacement for other PM tools

pmtwits Project Management Software as a Service (SaaS), Wrike.com, Is Now in Spanish http://bit.ly/uZsxk

dorias In fact I find Wrike helpful. I'm trying it !

pmtwits Project Management Professional Saves 30 Hours a Month with Wrike, the Most ... http://bit.ly/4kudqV

dszp @bnpositive I've heard of @wrike some people like that.

Do you have thoughts about Wrike you want to share with the world? Don’t forget to put @wrike in your message when you tweet!

Vote for Project Management 2.0!

Daria — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

We’re thrilled to let you know that the Project Management 2.0 blog written by Wrike’s CEO and founder, Andrew Filev, made it to the project management short list of the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards! The Project Management 2.0 blog is a marketing-free space, where its author shares his views on how the present project management space is transformed by the influence of Web 2.0 technologies, like blogs, wikis, social networks and collaboration apps, as well as practices like collective intelligence. It’s great to see that ideas expressed in the blog were acknowledged by such an influential entity as ComputerWeekly.com.

The event organizers wanted the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards to help professionals from IT and other industries find the best authors, sharing their real-life experiences and useful tips. That’s why they involved the blogs’ readers in choosing the best blogs. We’re honored that the Project Management 2.0 blog was chosen to be among the most valuable blogs in the project management field. Now you can help it get to the top of the list! Go to the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards and vote for Project Management 2.0 now!