- 3 min read
The Wrike team often dreams of a sticker on their screens with a short message: “Vacation”. Nevertheless the inner necessity to develop the best collaboration tool drives us to be consistent with it.
It will soon materialize in a burst of new features. This time we won’t feed you with drops of small innovations. The upcoming changes are somewhat revolutionary – in the context of displaying and managing the tasks and projects you work on together.
Update on Dec. 10, 2011 In addition to the existing locations, we signed a contract with a new SAS 70 certified data center, a modern hosting facility located in San Jose with 40% of the world’s internet traffic passing through the building. This is an impressive figure, which in itself speaks volumes about the level of facility security. We’re smoothly migrating most of our capacity to this new location. As before, your data is now continuously backed up, but now in the best data center available. Season’s greetings and warmest wishes for the success of all your endeavors in the coming year! The past couple of days have been very painful for our team. As some of you may have noticed, there were intermittent network connectivity issues. On behalf of our entire team, we bring sincere apologies for the inconveniences and work interruptions this may have caused. We continuously put our time and our hearts into improving our product, customer service and reliability, so those minutes when the network had problems felt like someone was slowly pulling our nails. We strive to maintain 99.99% uptime, and we strive to make sure that the rest 00.01% comes at the weekend nights with proper announcements. This was a “Black Swan” event for us - the first in five years. Those of you who follow our news stream on Facebook could see real-time updates on the status of the outage, but we thought it's really important to give a detailed report here as well. Our data center internet connectivity had been intermittently unavailable for some clients during short periods of time. During these connectivity problems, our own servers and network were up and running, and our infrastructure was absolutely healthy, but some of the customers couldn't access it. The source of the issues was a massive DDoS attack on another company which happened to be another customer of our datacenter. If you're not familiar with DDoS, you can read about the havoc it carries here. The datacenter's staff was trying their best to cope with the attack, but it wasn't enough. When the datacenter shut down the target, the attacks stopped. The datacenter then tightened their defenses, brought that unlucky client back up, and the story repeated. Thus the datacenter had multiple incidents. Today along with other measures, the datacenter completely shut down that client, so that attacks shouldn't reappear. This should solve the problem. We are migrating off of that data center in any case (see below), so this is just to explain what happened. On top of the measures taken by the datacenter, our own operations team was working on other solutions to the problem 24hrs a day. We can't fix the internet provider, but we can move from one to another. The problem with migration is potential downtime. Imagine physically moving an office. It's very hard to move all of the computers while the employees are working, all without interrupting the work for a minute. We can't simply start a parallel instance of the database either, because then the data on different instances might get out of sync. We obviously did not want to introduce any down-time from our side, so our operations team is working hard 24 hrs a day now on a new sophisticated infrastructure that will allow future migration in an uninterrupted way. We are also doing a feasibility study for a very complicated replication scheme, where there will always be an isolated and at the same time up to date read-only instance of Wrike, located in a secondary data-center. So that if the primary datacenter is inaccessible (which hopefully will never happen again) due to say, an electrical blackout of the whole coast, the secondary data-center will still be accessible. We absolutely understand that such performance disruptions are unacceptable. Such a downtime has happened to Wrike for the first time in five years. Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon have all had to deal with similar problems. We are taking it very seriously and making every possible effort to make sure that the migration to a new datacenter is smooth and unnoticeable to you. Reliability of the service and your trust are key priorities for us. If you experience any difficulties with Wrike, please contact our Support team. If it's a broader issue, we post updates in the real time at our Facebook page. Please, take our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Many thanks for your understanding and continued patience during this situation.
As you might’ve heard, today Google launched an improved experience for the Google Apps Marketplace™. We're excited to announce today that Wrike is taking the lead as one of the first vendors to be a part of this Google Apps Marketplace experience! The updates are aimed at improving the entire user experience. One example of this is that third-party applications (like Wrike) are now available right from the Google App admin console. There are lots of other great improvements, as well. Wrike has been a part of Google Apps Marketplace for a long time. We’ve gathered tons of positive reviews from Google apps users and became one of 10 Top installed apps among hundreds of other tools. Besides popular Wrike features like interactive Gantt charts, Workload views, and task timers, Wrike offers a set of features that Google apps users specially will appreciate, like our Gmail gadget and integrations with Google calendar and Google Drive. So if you or your friends are looking for a Project Management tool integrated with Google Apps – Wrike is definitely the way to go. And don't forget to add your review to the Google Marketplace to help others harness their productivity with Wrike.
2015 has been a Wriketastic year! We've grown by leaps and bounds the last 365 days — we hope you've enjoyed the adventure with us. From new feature releases to help you improve the way you work, to an even bigger and better team, to traveling the globe to speak at conferences, we've had a lot of fun. Review our recap of the year to see how you can use our latest features to set yourself up for success in 2016! We've also included a list of our most popular business advice blog posts, in case you missed them the first time around or you want to read them again. Wrike in the News This year we've been honored and excited to read all the interviews on leadership and startup advice with our CEO and founder, Andrew Filev, as well as the articles discussing our biggest Wrike news. If you want to learn see how Wrike has been shaking up the tech and business world, check out these reads: Wrike Ranked Number 116th Fastest Growing Company in North America on Deloitte’s 2015 Technology Fast 500™ Wrike Named in Best Places to Work 2015: Smallest Companies What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Steve Jobs About Silicon Valley Andrew Filev – Taking Small Steps to Smash Big Boundaries Email won’t be used in 10 years, says Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (video) Top 3 tips for productivity in your home office Digital natives: creating and maintaining a work/life balance at home Wrike Launches New Real-Time Reports, other Enhancements Take Back Mondays: Cut Out Status Meetings with Wrike's Real-Time Reports Wrike mobile apps: on-the-go project management Wrike New Releases & Features We challenge our teams to work faster and smarter quarter after quarter. This year, we've made a lot of great updates to Wrike online and in our mobile apps. See if you missed any of our big news by reviewing our long list of major updates here, or checking out this shortlist of some of our favorite releases: Projects & Reports: Real-time reports give executives the on-demand visibility they need with one button, and save your team tons of time preparing weekly updates. Make 2016 your most efficient year yet. Custom Workflows: Teams can structure work so it moves faster — create workflows for approval processes, bug tracking, development, etc. Make 2016 a year where everyone knows where things stand. Mobile Inbox: Our free mobile apps have changed the way you Wrike, and we'll continue enhancing our apps to help you and your team even more. Make 2016 a year of mobile accessibility. Wrike Project Templates for Salesforce: Wrike project templates in your Salesforce account smoothens collaboration between your sales org and cross-functional teams. Make 2016 a year for better org-wide collaboration. OneDrive Integration: We've had Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box integrations for a while. Now attach your OneDrive files just as easily. Make 2016 a year for sharing more. Starring Favorite Folders: Keep your most-used folders and projects right at the top of your workspace. Make 2016 a year with less hunting and more doing. New Folder Colors: We went from 5 color choices to 52 in one fell swoop. Go big or go home! Now make 2016 a year full of color. New Workspace Party Themes: Spice up your work life with a little color in your Wrike! Start off 2016 with a new look: Legendary Leopard or Retro Safari. Resource Pages: We created 7 resources pages full of eBooks, videos, and articles to help you better your business. Make 2016 YOUR year. Best Business Advice from the Year We write a lot. Every single day we publish a new blog post to give you advice on project management, leadership, productivity, and more. Here's a list of top picks from the Wrike blog over the past year, according to our own unbridled favoritism and also your likes and shares on social media: Project Management 10 Essential Elements for the Perfect Project Plan (Infographic) 10 Steps to a Kickass Project Kickoff: A Checklist for Project Managers 7 Keys to Project Stakeholder Management from the #PMChat Community How to Handle a Project Management Crisis (Infographic) 10 Reasons the Death Star Project Failed (Infographic) Productivity 20 Lessons from David Allen on Succeeding at Work, Life, and GTD (Video) The High Cost of Multitasking: 40% of Productivity Lost by Task Switching 50 Productivity Tips to Boost Your Brainpower (Infographic) Amazing Online Productivity Resources for Procrastinators Leadership & Management Company Culture: Why it Matters and How to Get it Right Ultimate Guide to Team Building Activities That Don’t Suck A Manager’s Guide to Working with Difficult Team Members (Infographic) 7 Techniques for More Effective Brainstorming Startup Advice 30 Startup Founders Share Their Entrepreneurship Advice Startup Launch Checklist: 22 Steps to Success (Infographic) 6 Fatal Mistakes of Startup Founders Marketing Welcome to DroneCo — Wrike’s Weekly Marketing Comic + Advice 10 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid At All Costs 25 Top Tools for Maximizing Marketing Team Productivity Free eBook Downloads 2015 Work Management Report (Free Download) The Beginner's Guide to Online Marketing (Free Download) The Definitive Guide to Building a World-Class Internal Creative Agency (Free Download) Collaboration Software for Marketing Teams: A Buyer’s Guide (Free Download) ...and More How to Prioritize Your To-Dos When Everything’s Important (Video) How to Create Your Perfect Remote Work Environment (Infographic) Why Email is Addictive and How to Break the Habit The Ultimate Guide to the Perfect Meeting See you in 2016! Did we leave one of your favorite Wrike blog posts off our list? Add it in the comments, or let us know which of the above was your #1!
