Wrike Social Release. Everything you want to know.
Watch this video to get an insight into the updates in Wrike's new version that give any team collaborating online a simple way to organize and manage its everyday projects.
What is Wrike Social?
Wrike Social is the new version of Wrike, the award-winning project collaboration and management software. Why do we call it "Social"? The updated Wrike brings the ease of use, productivity and real-time updates of social networks to its advanced project management functionality. This moves online project collaboration to a new level where all the team members, not just managers, can benefit from online project discussions in a centralized place. Project collaboration becomes just as easy as using everybody's favorite social networks. This perfectly meets the needs of millions of SMB project teams that currently suffer from disconnected project information and software adoption problems. Wrike Social offers them a simple, yet intuitive, tool that aggregates all of the project-related data in one workspace. This makes simultaneously running many projects incredibly easy and the adoption process smoother than ever before.
People all over the globe enjoy the productivity and accessibility of information in social networks. When these two components are elegantly weaved into project management, team members are naturally encouraged to quickly adopt the software for enhancing their online project collaboration. This upgrade differentiates Wrike Social from other project management tools and puts it a step ahead of them. Wrike Social minimizes the load of administrative tasks that are traditionally put onto the project manager's shoulders, such as communicating project updates to the team, collecting status updates, notifying and reminding people of upcoming deadlines, etc. Real-time collaboration in Wrike Social's business-friendly environment helps teams to solve their tasks in an easier and much more effective way.
Wrike is the first software on the market to bring the simplicity and collaborative benefits of social networks to a full-featured project management solution. Wrike Social merges Facebook-like news feeds, microblogging, 2-way email integration, Gantt charts, time tracking, file sharing and the new three-pane interface design in one application. Teams get all the important information in one workspace, or even on one screen. This boosts the productivity of SMB teams all over the globe like never before.
Benefits that Wrike Social's features bring
Productivity of social networks
The main purpose of Wrike Social is to make project collaboration as easy and attractive to ordinary business users as social networks. To make it real, the renewed Wrike carries over its smart project management features to an easy-to-use, three-pane interface and adds powerful social network-like functionality, such as news feeds, status updates, microblogging, a follow feature and more.
Unlike other project management systems (such as Microsoft Project, Basecamp or SharePoint, where data is scattered across several workspaces), Wrike elegantly aggregates the data across all projects in one spot. It allows teams to collaboratively organize this data and easily navigate through it. The innovative, three-pane project information layout introduced in Wrike Social improves user experience even more. Thanks to this layout, teams can see everything that's important on one screen: project hierarchy in the left-hand pane, task lists in the middle pane and detailed task information in the right-hand pane. With this approach, no matter how many projects the team is running, using Wrike is still fast and easy. Every action, like sharing a file, creating a task or commenting on projects, takes only a click or two. When all project data is neatly accomodated on the screen, employees don't lose time and focus while switching between pages, tabs and windows, as they are forced to do in other project management applications.
In addition, Wrike Social improves the visual experience of teams' online interactions through avatars. Avatars bring the friendliness of social networks to the project workspace and make project collaboration a step closer to face-to-face communication. Avatars give a quick visual grasp on the project assignments since people don't need to pause and carefully read through names to see who's assigned to what part of the project.
Interactive dashboard
In Wrike Social, the dashboard with interactive functionality is a powerful, yet simple, tool that boosts the productivity of every team member. The dashboard automatically aggregates the most important data from the project management system to keep everyone on the same page.
Interactive widgets on the dashboard help people focus on urgent and important items, like overdue tasks, tasks planned for today, and recent updates in the project schedule and the team's discussions. Each team member can quickly adjust the view of his or her dashboard in the most convenient way by dragging and dropping the widgets.
A clear and well-organized summary of all tasks saves time on finding relevant information and makes task management easier than ever. It also gives managers extra visibility into the project's progress and helps the team to save time and get more things done.
Activity Streams and microblogging
Wrike Social's new Activity Stream feature brings together Twitter-like microblogging and project updates. This powerful mix of social network features lets team members stay up-to-date and quickly share bits of information right in the workspace.
In Wrike Social, teammates are able to exchange short messages about project activities, just like in Twitter. Colleagues can share what they're busy with right now, ask for an advice and post useful links. The Activity Stream allows you to instantly share information, making Wrike even friendlier and saving time on meetings.
In Wrike's Activity Stream, people also get automatic updates on the team's recent actions in their workspace. Whenever someone creates, assigns, reschedules or makes any other changes to tasks and projects, every team member is up-to-date with the most recent project progress. This is important for preventing any miscommunication or risk of duplicate efforts.
The visibility into project updates and the ability to discuss issues as soon as they arise make project teams more agile by helping them to react to changes faster.
Twitter-like "Follow" feature
The improved task-follow feature in Wrike Social equips every team member with the ability to keep an eye on the most important tasks or an entire project. Wrike automatically reports updates to people via email and online in the Activity Sream.
With this feature, people don't have to spend time pulling updates on each task from disconnected emails, phone calls and conversations with colleagues. It reduces the risk of missing an important update in the workflow. For managers, this becomes a great tool for gaining control in a multi-project environment and takes a lot of unnecessary administrative work off the manager's shoulders.
Whether there is just one or dozens of projects running in the workspace, team members have great control over the data. Manipulating the follow options, it's possible to set priorities and define how much information to get, so it doesn't come in an avalanche that might bury something important under it.
Backlog
Wrike Social introduces the backlog, the renowned personal productivity method, as an easy-to-use feature. The backlog gives project teams a convenient and flexible way to organize tasks and valuable ideas, which are often lost or forgotten otherwise. Wrike Social elegantly solves the problem of long, messy lists of unsorted items that become overdue because of unfeasible deadlines. The backlog allows you to create tasks without fixed dates. Thanks to the drag-and-drop support, you can easily prioritize the backlogged items in the task list, turning it into an agile plan.
You can use the backlog to organize your personal activities, as well as to organize the work of your whole team. Backlogged tasks, just like other tasks in Wrike, can be assigned, shared between team members and included in specific projects. So this feature not only boosts the personal productivity of team members, but also turns into a very helpful tool that benefits the whole company.
Having tasks neatly prioritized, without tying them to inflexible deadlines, saves you from the stress of keeping too many things in your mind and being late with completing tasks. You can tackle the items from the backlog one by one according to the available resources. As you move forward in your work, you can always review your priorities. At any moment, you can include a backlogged task in your fixed schedule, if the situation requires its completion by a certain date.
To make sure that the backlog is in the team's view, the new dashboard contains a special widget for tasks of this type. This way, Wrike seamlessly weaves the backlog into the everyday workflow.
Enhanced search
Wrike Social introduces enhanced search functionality that gives people quick access to information they need and. leads to better visibility into the team's workload.
There are a lot of ways to manipulate various search criteria, combining them with sorting options. This functionality is very helpful for building detailed reports on the projects, based on task statuses, dates, assignees and many other criteria. Enhanced search allows you to slice the data in many different ways, getting an overview of the projects from various perspectives.
What else differentiates Wrike from other services?
Two-way email integration
Wrike's email integration, the most advanced in the project management space, makes project collaboration a breeze for any team. This feature makes Wrike really easy to adopt. If team members know how to send an email, they already know how to use Wrike. With this feature, there's no need to manually copy the data from emails into Wrike. It happens automatically, no matter what email program you use, saving time for all team members and eliminating the risk of losing something important in overloaded mailboxes.
Wrike seamlessly brings email into the project workflow. Putting wrike at wrike.com in the CC of the message allows you to create and update tasks, share files and add comments via email. Wrike turns an email into a task, assigns it to the appropriate person, shares it with the team and visualizes it on a timeline with no extra effort from the team.
Thanks to the email integration, it is possible for team members to have project discussions by using both the Web interface and email, depending on the situation. For example, you can start a discussion online and continue it through email on your smartphone while you're on the go, or vice versa. Unlike other collaboration tools, Wrike Social brings those discussions together with tasks and projects, allowing people to see all the task details, related discussions and attached files, all on the same page with no need to switch between panes or pages.
Wrike also helps teams become more organized and effective by issuing interactive, daily to-do reminders via email.
Multi-project environment
Wrike neatly brings multiple projects into one united workspace. Wrike takes the best from hierarchies, graphs and tags to support a multi-project environment with unparalleled flexibility that puts it a step ahead of any other product on the market.
Wrike lets teams bring hierarchies into their online workspace, neatly structuring and organizing data across multiple projects. When the work is flowing, Wrike makes it possible to selectively share folders and tasks in a very easy way. So teams can see the whole picture while sharing only a part of it with an outside contractor or a colleague from another department. This way, everybody has a clear view of the necessary part of the project work, as well as immediate access to the project data, maintaining both productivity and privacy.
Now, what if you want to share the same item with two departments? This is very easy in Wrike. Any item in your workspace, be it a task or a folder, can be included in several folders. In this way, Wrike folders resemble tags or Gmail labels, and they can be a very handy feature for organizing your data and facilitating collaboration.
Dynamic Timeline™
Wrike's Dynamic Timeline™ provides a handy view of the project schedule on a Gantt chart. Since Wrike's timeline is cross-project, it is very easy to make sure there aren't any resource conflicts. Since Wrike's timeline is fully interactive, people can easily make changes to the schedule, thanks to the drag-and-drop support. All the changes made to tasks in a workspace, even those that were sent by email, are instantly reflected on the timeline, which ensures that everyone is equipped with up-to-date information in real time.
About Wrike, Inc.
Thousands of teams worldwide choose Wrike for project collaboration:
