Lightspeed Feature Focus: Communicate and Connect Easily with Outside Organizations Using External Requester Collaboration

November 14, 2022 - 7 min read

Rachael Kealy

The age of remote work has brought a number of realizations. We now know that with the right work management solution, we can work effectively from anywhere. We understand that great work doesn’t have to be done in the hours between 9 to 5. Above all, we appreciate the value of digital collaboration more than ever.

The challenge of modern collaboration

At one time, busy offices and hectic workplaces might have disguised poor communication and siloed teams, but now the cost of ineffective collaboration is clear. Wrike’s ground-breaking Dark Matter of Work research proved this: Nearly 80% of knowledge workers surveyed said they work at cross-purposes with colleagues because they have been given tasks that contradict one another, understand instructions differently, or don’t have access to the right information. This type of ‘dark matter’ or invisible work costs businesses up to $60M annually.

As Forbes recently pointed out, effective collaboration across teams, offices, and regions is often the difference between success and failure for a business. This will only become more acute in an unpredictable economic environment, with additional pressure, scarce resources, and increasing employee burnout. In fact, the estimated $60M annual cost of invisible work is expected to increase by 53% in the next five years.

The solution is Wrike Lightspeed

As the world’s most powerful work management platform, Wrike has been a pioneer in digital collaboration since 2006. It has constantly iterated to improve users’ interactions with each other, introducing ever-more impressive collaboration features. In October 2022, Wrike launched Wrike Lightspeed, its most exciting innovation yet.

With a universal work management process that covers the A-Z of modern work, Wrike Lightspeed has all the features any team, department, or organization could need. It’s more customizable, scalable, and easy to use than any other solution, offering a fast, easy onboarding experience for new users, as well as complex, configurable features for fast-growing companies. With more than 400 integrations with popular tools like Google, Slack, Salesforce, and Adobe Creative Cloud, Wrike Lightspeed is the all-in-one work management platform you’ve been looking for.

The perfect combination of speed, technical proficiency, and style, Wrike Lightspeed delivers an exceptional new user experience. Our designers have breathed new life into the interface with fresh-looking Table, Board, and Calendar views and a fully revamped Analytics dashboard that makes seeing work progress fun and informative. Our intuitive navigation makes it easy to get to the features you need, including our best-in-class Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and library of ready-to-go templates. It’s packed with collaboration tools for remote teams, as well as those based in offices all around the world.

Every Wrike Lightspeed feature and integration is designed with the customer in mind. It strips away work complexity, surfaces essential tasks, and facilitates unparalleled digital collaboration.

Wrike Lightspeed powers:

50% faster project delivery: By providing a single source of truth, Wrike offers complete visibility into any project journey, including any potential roadblocks, resourcing issues, and workload imbalances. Teams can see project progression at a glance in multiple views. This means fewer delays, fewer budget overruns, and much, much faster delivery.
70% fewer meetings: Is your weekly calendar filled with time-consuming meetings? Well, with Wrike, every meeting, email, and message can be converted into instant communication in one shared space. Update tasks in real time, tag colleagues across functions, and spend your time on the work that really matters.
90% less email: Email is a great tool and a fantastic way to talk to external stakeholders. But as the threads grow, so too does the time spent writing, responding, and searching for details you need. All this ‘dark matter of work’ has a real cost, estimated to amount to $93m a year by 2027. This is where Wrike can help, offering one secure place for all your conversations, which means far fewer emails and much more alignment.

Lightspeed offers the fastest way to productivity by helping teams, departments, and whole companies Work as One™. It’s also the only remote collaboration software that doesn’t require customers to make tradeoffs — you can interact, communicate, and collaborate seamlessly with internal colleagues and external partners alike.

Introducing External Requester Collaboration

Advancing digital collaboration has been Wrike's primary goal for more than 16 years. We’ve always acknowledged the need to collaborate with other teams outside the work environment and keep all work-related data together. We’ve also long understood that this means more than being able to message a colleague or work on a document together, which is why we introduced reviews and approvals for guest users. This proved a game-changer for service teams of all types, who were able to bring every external stakeholder into the Wrike fold. Since then, we’ve continued to develop our collaboration capabilities, helping keep people connected in the most effective way.

With the launch of Wrike Lightspeed comes our most innovative feature yet — the new External Requester Collaboration. Now, Wrike and non-Wrike users can communicate, collaborate, and create — all in one place.

That means toggling between Wrike and third-party email accounts becomes a thing of the past, as the entire request journey can be managed within Wrike. Communication can be displayed as ‘internal comments’ and ‘email to requester’ so the different paths are clear to all users.

All of this will be great news for our customers, especially service providers who interact with external clients as well as internal stakeholders. This new feature empowers those teams to deliver effective service management, allowing them to continue to do their best work in Wrike’s platform while also communicating smoothly outside of it.

For example, many IT service teams field multiple requests from people outside of their company, including many who aren’t in Wrike. Those requesters will often need to provide more information, such as a screenshot, photograph, or attachment. Similarly, the provider will usually respond seeking extra information or providing a status update. All of these daily back-and-forths can now occur and be tracked in Wrike, offering a seamless experience for both parties and a single source of truth for future reference.

This exceptional collaboration feature will also allow advertising agencies and marketing teams to maintain end-to-end digital collaboration on asset creation, proofing, and publication with temporary freelancers, partner agencies, creative contributors, and many more. No need to download assets into client-friendly PDFs or email approvers separately — now you can just invite them into Wrike, where the task, assets, campaigns, and discussions are happening. Permissions can be adjusted to give them visibility where needed while sensitive information is safeguarded.

How External Requester Collaboration works

Available for all Wrike customers on Team and higher Wrike plans, External Requester Collaboration is a native email integration feature that allows Wrike users to communicate with people outside of Wrike. You can do this by receiving and sending emails directly from Wrike tasks to external email addresses. This way, you can collaborate on tasks with external colleagues and partners without adding them to your Wrike account and avoid switching to email to provide updates or request approvals.

It also means that all of your questions, responses, comments, and assets are stored securely within the task, so it’s easy to refer to them in the future when following up on a query or planning a similar project. This promotes a more structured work intake, reducing back-and-forth email communication, fostering much faster response times and preventing you from toggling between tools.

To start using this great collaboration feature, you just have to follow three simple steps:

Set your external request forms to allow email communication
Create a task from this request form
Click ‘internal comment’ or ‘email to requester’

You will now be able to communicate with external request collaborators via email and vice versa.

Making collaboration truly possible

Wrike Lightspeed is revolutionizing collaboration. It’s a big-picture platform that connects teams, departments, and companies — as well as every type of colleague, client, and customer outside of the organization. By opening up digital collaboration to include external stakeholders, Wrike Lightspeed will put you far ahead of the competition. While they’re still waiting on clients to download a PDF, your client could be commenting on the asset directly in the task.

This remarkable configurability, usability, and scalability can be applied across a customer's entire work management process, enabling teams to work together as one. This is what makes Wrike Lightspeed the most powerful solution on the market for every team, every business — and every external user, too.

Ready to send your team on the path to smooth collaboration and unparalleled productivity? Start a free trial of Wrike today.

Rachael Kealy

Rachael Kealy is a Copywriter at Wrike. She has more than a decade of experience writing about every industry, from energy to entrepreneurship. She spent many years as a food writer and still loves nothing more than exploring new culinary experiences. Her passions are wide-ranging, including the themes of remote working, artificial intelligence, and the future of work. Based in Limerick, Ireland, she travels extensively, always on the lookout for a new story to tell.

#Wrike Features

Wrike Tips 3 min read

Checklists Make Your Tasks as Easy as 1-2-3

When tasks have multiple components, it can be challenging to track what has been completed versus what is still in progress, especially when different segments must be completed by different people. To help you make these tasks more structured and easier to track, Wrike added a new, useful feature. Now you can further break down your tasks into to-do lists or step-by-step instructions with the help of checklists in your task description. To take advantage of checklists, find the new checkbox button in the task description's formatting panel. This feature will add another level of depth to keep your tasks organized and clean. When listing the task's components in the description, it's up to you to order your list to suit your preference, whether that be by due date, assignees, importance, or simply as ideas come to mind. Once a component is completed and you check its box, the item turns grey to fade out of focus. With checklists, all collaborators can easily see what has been finished and what needs to be done before the entire task is completed. One of the cool things about the checklists is that they can help you avoid confusing scenarios when a task is assigned to several employees. Before, one employee would mark an entire task as completed when only his or her individual contribution was done. Now, when you create one task and assign that task to five different people, add a checklist to your task description for clearer workload distribution. Use this feature and kindly remind John to go to the checklist within the task to indicate that he has finished only his portion. When everyone has checked off their separate line items, the last contributor or task author knows to mark the entire task as completed. Have you heard of small wins? Psychologists say that completing several smaller tasks one after another has a powerful motivating effect when you're in the middle of a large assignment. See how that works for you and your team with the new feature! And for additional benefit, we hope checklists can serve as your convenient alternative while we continue working hard to bring subtasks to your workspace.

Wrike Tips 7 min read

Task Dependencies vs. Custom Workflows: When to Use Each in Wrike

Wrike is an incredibly flexible tool, offering several ways your team can set up your projects, track your progress, and reach your goals. But have you ever had too many options? Using Wrike can be like walking into an ice cream shop with 20+ flavors and wanting to try all of them. One of the most common choices Wrikers deliberate over is "Should I track project progress using a Custom Workflow, or should I rely on a chain of task dependencies?" We're here with some helpful tips to help you decide. And keep in mind: this isn't solely an either/or case — you can leverage a combination of these methods to effectively manage your work. When to Use a Chain of Task Dependencies in Wrike Creating a chain of separate tasks linked together using dependencies allows you to show which tasks are happening at what times, by whom, and in what exact order. It's of enormous importance and value to any project-based and deliverable-oriented team (and if you think your team doesn't have projects or deliverables, spoiler alert: you're wrong). There are two reasons you should consider setting up your work in this way: 1. Auto-adjusting timelines Dependencies in Wrike tell you the order in which tasks need to happen. For example, you could have 5 tasks that must happen in a specific sequence (Task 1, then Task 2, etc.). Auto-adjusting timelines helps you automatically update due dates on linked tasks when plans move forward or backward. If Task 3 ends up taking a few days longer than planned, you can update its due date accordingly, and the start and end dates for Tasks 4 and 5 will be pushed back in kind. Alternatively, if we realize that Task 2 can be finished more quickly than anticipated, shortening its duration and moving its due date forward will automatically shift Tasks 3-5 earlier as well — no point in sitting around waiting to start your next steps! 2. Up-to-bat emails One of the biggest bottlenecks in a project is not realizing you're supposed to start on your piece of the project puzzle. Because unless you're keeping a close eye on your colleague's progress (which they won't like, promise), or they came to you immediately to tell you that they finished their task (which they won't do, pinky swear), you'll be waiting until your next status update meeting to learn that you could have started your part three days ago. Instead, you could use a chain of linked tasks in Wrike to get notification emails when someone completes the task you've been waiting on. Set up dependencies between the tasks and make sure you're assigned to the task you're responsible for in the workflow; as soon as Jack hits 'Complete' on Task 1, the assignee for Task 2 will get an email saying it's time to start work. Now your team won't have to hawk over everything to make sure work is getting done as quickly as possible. Just remember, setting up a chain of dependent tasks may be overly rigid for your team. If you aren't married to your original timeline, it's not as easy to manipulate your workflow as using the Custom Statuses & Workflow method. Anything non-standard that gets thrown into the mix (an extra step, unforeseen time off, etc.) will impact your timeline and need to be factored into your chain of dependencies, which can require some re-work. We strongly recommended that anyone employing this dependency-driven methodology spend some time taking at least a rudimentary course in formal project management to learn about things like critical path, scope creep, and risk management. Advantages of Task Dependencies: Laser-focused timelines with easily anticipated due dates and delivery milestones Crystal-clear delegation of responsibilities — everyone knows who is working on what, when, and in what order Layered visibility allows PMs to oversee complex initiatives, while individual contributors only have to focus on what they're personally working on that week Baseline Chart will show you how the team delivered on your project compared to the original estimation Great for linking just two or three dependent tasks when you want to get the up-to-bat email notifications Disadvantages of Task Dependencies: Reliant on strong project management practices and team agreement on timelines and responsibilities Requires ongoing monitoring by the project owner to ensure no changes to the plan are needed Does not easily accommodate projects with unforeseen back-and-forth such as approvals, reviews, or multiple rounds of edits When to Use a Custom Workflow in Wrike With Wrike Enterprise, you can leverage Custom Workflows for more flexibility in your workflow. There are two rationales behind moving a single task through a series of unique statuses in a Custom Workflow: 1. Preserving information If you're producing content and the final outcome relies on input from multiple people, you would hate wasting time using a chain of tasks. You'd attach your version of a file to a task, mark it complete, and notify the next person in line; then the next person would be forced to go back to the previous task, download your file, edit it, attach it to their own task, mark their task complete, and notify the next person, ad infinitum. Instead, by only changing the custom status and assignee of a single task, you can use Wrike's file versioning feature to consolidate all files and versions in a single location, thus streamlining your team's workflow. Similarly, any notes taken in the description field that need to pass from person to person will be easier to find, modify, and collaborate on when they're preserved in a single task, instead of being moved around and duplicated between tasks. You don't want people to spend (i.e. waste) time scouring through tasks looking for the most recent version of the information when you can easily consolidate it in a single task. 2. Non-linear processes When getting from A to Z, sometimes you hit A, B, C, and all 26 letters in order just once before finishing your project. More often, that isn't the case at all. You need to square dance around and switch back and forth between steps, people, etc. before reaching the final Z. That can be a perfectly normal and productive workflow, but if you've set up your chain of tasks to follow a prescribed path, it makes work messy. Instead, by relying on a Custom Workflow you can bounce between statuses, moving 'forward' and 'backward' with ease, passing off the "next step baton" to individuals as necessary. A great example is, again, generating content. Often, content generation will begin with an idea, then copy will be drafted, edited, designed, approved, and published. However, each piece of content can go through any number of revisions, edits, and designs, so it's nearly impossible to determine ahead of time how many 'Review' steps you'll need. If you use a Custom Workflow instead of a chain of tasks, your content can easily move from 'In Draft' to 'In Review' and back again as many times as needed, each time changing who is assigned and responsible for the current stage. Advantages of Custom Workflows: Amazing flexibility (as shown above) In-depth reporting, especially with Dashboards, shows exactly where a task is in a certain process, and managers can easily glean what is currently 'In Review' or 'Needs Approval' Color-coding to make task progress easier to ascertain at a glance Fewer tasks cluttering your workspace Clearer progress markers mitigate the need for extra status update meetings Disadvantages of Custom Workflows: Due dates are not tied to status changes, meaning that you need to continuously change the task's due date to reflect when the next step must begin Very minor, but worth noting: Assignees are not tied to specific statuses, meaning that if someone is responsible for writing and someone else is responsible for reviewing, you either need to (1) both be assigned to the task and know who is responsible for each stage, or (2) switch assignees every time you switch a status. Learn More on How to Use Custom Workflows & Task Dependencies That's why we built them! Relying solely on managing a long chain of task dependencies can be complicated without proper project management training. Don't forget that these two methodologies can always be combined for incredibly effective collaboration! Certain steps along a project timeline may need specialized statuses to best manage their progress, and they can sit within a longer chain of tasks connected by dependencies. Ultimately, different projects will have different needs and we are here to support however you work best. If you still can't figure out the best way to use Custom Workflows and Task Dependencies for your team and you'd like to learn more, reach out to our Support team or talk to us in the comments below! We're standing by to answer all your questions.

Wrike Tips 7 min read

Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In

We’ve come a long way in a short time during this blog series. So far we’ve detailed: Leveraging an organized project intake method, rather than managing work in spreadsheets Enhancing team collaboration and speeding up design asset approvals Automating repetitive tasks and moving work forward fast Improving client transparency, sharing, and tracking project progress The final article is about digital advertising reporting, managing team resources, and ensuring all your work stays secure. Compiling digital campaign data is laborious Digital marketers have more data at their fingertips than they can manage, and as advertising spend continues to rise, the need to optimize campaigns grows stronger. The growing digital advertising spend only adds to the mountain of data marketing executives are accumulating elsewhere in automation and analytics platforms. Meanwhile, CMOs and other marketing leaders have identified two blockers to effectively using analytics: Proving the value of analytics to marketing efforts Demonstrating the overall impact that investing in data will have on their organization Curating all the available data is challenging because everyone, including non-technical members, must be able to view, interpret, and act on it in real time without requiring external resources. Of course, numerous BI reporting tools can tap into the digital marketing channels, yet the data often requires an analyst to interpret it for marketing team members. Even when data is extracted by data reporting tools, it’s not standardized in a uniform view. YouTube and LinkedIn, for example, have “subscribers” and “followers,” respectively. Both are the same metric but are traditionally looked at separately. After standardizing the data, presenting it in an actionable way remains a struggle. Digital marketing moves too fast for teams to mess around attempting to interpret the findings so they can iterate in real time. Think about ad auctions where it takes, at most, 300 milliseconds to complete an auction, of which billions occur every hour. Data review and adjusting strategy that takes weeks or months isn’t acceptable. Marketing leaders must have complete visibility and an easy way to automate data collection so they can iterate in real time to optimize results. Balancing team workloads is an ongoing issue If you collaborate with freelancers, an agency, or a professional services team, you know that to maintain profitability, team workload management is crucial. Too much work and you’ll have a long backlog you’ll never get to address. Not enough work and you may struggle to keep everyone working at full capacity. In both scenarios, you need a workload management tool that empowers you to reprioritize and reassign work in an instant. Then, there’s the issue of billable versus non-billable work. Not maximizing billable hours opens the door for more non-billable activities that won’t contribute to the bottom line. When you don’t have full visibility into everyone’s capacity and work coming down the pipeline, how can you expect to balance their workload and maintain profitability? It’s an ongoing headache and one that can be avoided once you have a CWM solution with built-in capabilities for time tracking and resource management. Your data isn’t behind lock and key Company-wide, teams operate with a variety of sensitive information — financial and legal documents, employee records, upcoming product announcements — that requires extra safeguarding. Coupled with the digital transformation era and the global shift to cloud computing and securing data gets even more complicated. From the organization’s perspective, the cloud serves two key benefits: huge savings and the convenience of accessing resources and data without having to manage the servers that store the data. Meanwhile, these same companies also want to enjoy the benefits of collaborative work technology, especially highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. These industries must comply with even more strict rules, so they often forgo using any cloud apps. All want to be reassured that their work will only be accessible to those with permission and won’t fall into the wrong hands. Without that level of enterprise data security, companies run the risk of failing to comply with federal regulations but also losing their customers’ trust. But who controls the data and who has access? If you don’t know or aren’t satisfied with the answer, look for a CWM that offers enterprise data security software with encryption codes and a digital paper trail of who accessed the data and when. How Wrike solves each pain point Wrike Insights Wrike’s advanced reporting and business intelligence enables you to sync with 50+ apps for real-time digital campaign performance data, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, AdRoll, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, TikTok, and more. By unlocking this cross-channel analysis, users get 360-degree visibility into campaign performance and where to iterate for the best results without requiring BI reporting tools or data analysts. Built-in data visualizations and analytics dashboards will help your team be more confident on where to take action to maximize ROI. Wrike Resource Management As workloads increase and your team scales, Wrike Resource Management allows complete team availability at a glance with shared tasks, folders, and projects so that managers can reprioritize or reassign work as necessary and optimize performance. It’s a single, collaborative workload management tool that anyone — even external stakeholders — can access from anywhere. Here you can plan, schedule, and allocate resources to set priorities and distribute work. The built-in time tracker and detailed timesheets let you measure effort and review how long projects take to complete. Meanwhile, the Workload view allows you to boost performance and prevent employee burnout by reassigning and reprioritizing tasks based on bandwidth. With this additional transparency, team leads can manage dependencies using Gantt charts and prevent bottlenecks from happening via Table view. Packaged all together, it’s true end-to-end quote-to-cash visibility where you can balance team workloads and help ensure profitability. Wrike Lock Keeping data secure in the modern age goes beyond username and password login details. Wrike’s enterprise data security provides users with customer-managed encryption keys along with an extra layer of encryption by locking the keys to their data. Think of it this way — it’s akin to having a secret code name to get access to the vault’s password, before you can see what’s behind the vault. Furthermore, Wrike doesn’t store your master encryption key, so only you have access. Wrike customer feedback Derick Dahl, Director of Product at Sonance, speaks about the benefits his marketing team has experienced using Wrike Resource for team workload management: “Wrike Resource helped control the otherwise overwhelming nature of our marketing team’s work by allowing us to identify and correct overtaxed employee workloads, reducing the average number of active projects per employee from 12 down to three.” Torsten Mühlhoff, Marketing Controlling & Corporate Projects at ABUS, speaks to the value of Wrike’s security features: "It’s easy to assume that an on-premise solution would be more secure than the cloud. However, our provider and its partners are much better equipped to guarantee the security we need. We’ve also reduced our admin workload and made life easier for our own IT....Wrike is one of the most secure collaborative work management platforms out there, and we really feel we’re in the right hands." Select the best CWM solution for your team This article series isn’t an exhaustive list of pain points that hyper-growth and enterprise teams experience and how a CWM solution can be the answer. As you evaluate vendors, what is exhausting is comparing features head-to-head and reading reviews. Get your free copy of our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them, which highlights the 16 most important CWM features to answer the most common pain points. Try out Wrike today and see why 20,000+ customers rely on our collaborative work management platform to streamline their workflows, get work done faster, and scale.

For Teams

Use cases

Apps & Integrations

Explore Wrike

Learn and connect

Become Wrike Pro

Lightspeed Feature Focus: Communicate and Connect Easily with Outside Organizations Using External Requester Collaboration

The challenge of modern collaboration

The solution is Wrike Lightspeed

Introducing External Requester Collaboration

How External Requester Collaboration works

Making collaboration truly possible

Rachael Kealy

Related articles

Checklists Make Your Tasks as Easy as 1-2-3

Task Dependencies vs. Custom Workflows: When to Use Each in Wrike

Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In

Lightspeed Feature Focus: Communicate and Connect Easily with Outside Organizations Using External Requester Collaboration

The challenge of modern collaboration

The solution is Wrike Lightspeed

Introducing External Requester Collaboration

How External Requester Collaboration works

Making collaboration truly possible

Rachael Kealy

Related articles

Checklists Make Your Tasks as Easy as 1-2-3

Task Dependencies vs. Custom Workflows: When to Use Each in Wrike

Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In

Get weekly updates in your inbox!

You are now subscribed to Wrike news and updates