6 Top Marketing Trends for 2015 (Infographic)
2015 is upon us! (Can you believe it?) Time moves fast, but the marketing industry moves even faster. Alongside constantly changing customer needs, marketing teams have to cope with new technologies and trends popping up every day, or risk being left behind. In our latest infographic, we’ve compiled six top trends that all marketers should watch out for this year in order to stay on top of their game. Do you have your own ideas for what the top marketing trends will be? Cast your votes and see if others agree! Make sure your friends are in the know. You can share this infographic on your site using this embed code: Wrike Collaboration and Project Management Software Related Reads: Is Agile Viable for Marketing Teams? 4 Ways to Arm Your Team for Content Marketing Success Using Wrike for High Performance Marketing Teams
Vote! What Marketing Trends Do You Expect to Have the Biggest Impact in 2015?
With 2015 just around the corner, more and more companies are releasing their views on top marketing trends that will come to light in the new year. But with all of these separate articles, we're interested in gathering a consensus. Which trends are going to have the biggest impact? What marketing technology innovations may be coming our way? And which trends are wishful thinking, won't be able to move the needle in the next year, or simply never going to happen? We've collected trend ideas from companies and marketing leaders all over the internet and brought them together in one list. Now it's your turn: 1. Vote for the two or three trends you think will have the biggest impact in 20152. Add your own predictions to the list if you don't see them already 3. Embed this list on your site or blog & share it with your friends and readers (click here for embed code) Vote! What Marketing Trend Do You Expect to Have the Biggest Impact in 2015? You can view more lists from the Wrike Team on Listly. Read through all of the 55 potential trends? Make sure you vote for the 2-3 trends you think will have a huge impact next year year, and add your own thoughts if we missed something. We're waiting to hear your feedback in the comments below!
34 Holiday Buys for Productivity Junkies (Gift Guide)
Productivity enthusiasts are a tough bunch to buy for. They loathe the distractions of clutter, so forego useless trinkets and get them something they’re sure to love: the gift of getting more done! Each of these gifts will bring greater efficiency (and a smile) to the face of your favorite prolific pal. GADGETS & APPS Tools that help you get more done. 1. Flic Wireless Smart Buttons Create a shortcut that initiates your favorite actions without pulling out your smartphone. Turn out the lights, hit snooze, take a selfie, start navigation, and more at the touch of a (physical) button. Pre-order it here. 2. Tile Attach these minimally-designed tiles to anything you'd hate to lose: your keys, luggage, bike, etc. The app shows you when you get closer to your lost item, or you can program your tile to make noise. Start your day organized and calm, instead of in a frantic rush of "Where'd it go?!" nerves. Get it here. 3. Alfred App Powerpack For your Mac laptop. Create shortcuts and hotkeys, search the web or your hard drive, create workflows, and more. Use it as a replacement for Spotlight and make your Mac more efficient. Get it here. (Or try the Free version yourself). 4. Spotify Premium subscription Listening to your favorite music (without the ads) puts you in a good mood and triggers higher brain function. And Spotify's "Deep Focus" playlist is great for getting in the zone (and staying there). Get it here. 5. Belkin WeMo Insight switch Turn your home devices on and off via mobile app. Works with IFTTT.com, or you can use “recipes” to complete specific actions. Free your brain from daily distractions like, “Did I leave the kitchen light on?” Get it here. 6. Noise-canceling headphones Minimize distraction with a set of noise-canceling headphones. You'll never have to worry about overhearing those "TMI" personal conversations in the office again. Bose QuietComfort: Get them here. 7. A simple alarm clock Stop using your phone as an alarm. It's more likely to distract you with incoming notifications and keep your mind racing than help you sleep. Instead, opt for a simple alarm clock that displays only the time. Retro Digital Flip Clock: Get it here. 8. Health & wellness tracker A healthy lifestyle is essential to productivity. There are dozens of options to choose from, including the Jawbone UP24, which will "nudge" you when you've been inactive for too long. A perfect reminder to take a productivity break. Find the perfect device for you here. BOOKS & BRAIN-BOOSTERS Get your brain in shape for the New Year. 1. The Happiness Project Gretchen Rubin spent one full year trying science-based tricks and popular strategies to bring more joy to every aspect of her life. Find out what worked and add some happiness to your own life. Get it here. 2. Brain Rules (updated & expanded) John Medina’s bestseller explains the science of how our brains work and outlines 12 strategies for improving your brain's performance. Get it here. 3. The Mindfulness app Rejuvenate your mind and sharpen your focus with daily meditation. This app includes guided sessions from a quick 3 minutes to a half hour, or you can meditate silently until you hear the bells. Get it from the App Store or Google Play Store. 4. Action Method notebook Developed by Bechance founder Scott Belsky, The Action Method breaks every undertaking into three components: Action Steps, References, and Backburner items. This notebook is designed so that every page has clear sections to capture each component. Get it here. 5. Unstuck Productivity Tips Cards This deck of cards helps pinpoint the cause of productivity slumps and gives tips to help move past them. Also available in "Conjure Your Creativity", "Stop Your Procrastination", and "Stop Your Negative Thinking." Get them here. ROAD WARRIOR PRODUCTIVITY A long commute or hectic travel schedule shouldn't slow you down. 1. Portable USB charger No outlet at the airport? No problem. Anker Astro Portable Charger: Get it here. 2. Logitech Keys-to-Go Keyboard Work in comfort with this portable, durable keyboard. Pairs via bluetooth and runs on a rechargeable 3-month battery. Get it here. 3. Smartpen Record and replay on-the-go voice memos or reminders, and transfer handwritten notes scribbled on napkins and receipts into digital text so you can sync your analog & digital worlds. Livescribe Echo Smartpen: Get it here. 4. Powerbag This backpack contains a portable battery for charging your smartphone or tablet. Get it here. 5. Gigs2Go USB Flash Drives This tear-away USB pack is made of extremely durable recycled paper and plastic: it's shockproof, waterproof, and doesn't need a cap. Get it here. PRODUCTIVITY-ENHANCING STOCKING STUFFERS Sometimes big productivity comes in small packages. 1. Lemon-scented candle The pleasant smell of lemons improves focus and reduces errors by 54%. (If you're buying for an office buddy, you might want to stick with something non-flammable like this diffuser.) Williams-Sonoma Meyer Lemon Candle: Get it here. 2. Chocolate Aside from being delicious, chocolate releases dopamine, a hormone that motivates action, along with chemicals that promote calm and stimulate brain function. Godiva 72% Dark Chocolate Bar: Get it here. 3. “Make It Happen” Notebook by Panama For capturing goals big and small — and inspiring commitment. Get it here. 4. Aquanotes Waterproof Notepad For that buddy who claims their best ideas always come to them in the shower. Get it here. 5. Desktop organizer An organized worker is a happy and productive worker. Clear the clutter and save the 76 hours you spend each year looking for lost stuff. iStick Multifunction Desk Organizer: Get it here. 6. Cable clips Another simple organization item to keep your workspace tidy. CableDrop Cable Clips: Get them here. 7. Adorable desk calendar Looking at baby animals improves concentration and focus — and likely puts you in a better mood too. Who can stay grumpy with an adorable fluff ball always in sight? Puppies & Friends 2015: Get it here. 8. Colorful art print Use color psychology to beautify your office and stimulate your brain. Blue helps you concentrate and can make you more productive, while yellow improves your mood and can stimulate creativity. Water lilies by Monet: Get it here. 9. Flowers & Seeds Houseplants increase your focus, motivation, and creativity, while simultaneously eliminating harmful microbes. Potted gardenia: Get it here. OFFICE SHENANIGANS Having fun at the office is the new productivity essential. 1. Mustache paper clips Give your reports and memos some comical style. Get them here. 2. Clip-on desk cup holder Keep your caffeine close at hand, without worrying about accidental spills. Get it here. 3. USB rocket launcher Office warfare is serious business. Maximize your firepower with this nerf rocket launcher. Get it here. 4. Origami Sticky Notes Impress your colleagues by upcycling your used notes into fun origami masterpieces. Get it here. 5. "You Earned It" Bottle Opener Crack open a cold one in celebration of a job well done. Get it here. 6. I Am Very Busy art print Aren't we all? Get it here. 7. "You Can Do It!" mug For just the right amount of encouragement (and caffeine) on those days you'd rather be in bed. Mugs by Emily McDowell: Get it here. Happy Holidays from the Wrike team!
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Where Collaboration is Heading in 2015: Top 4 Trends to Watch
With 2015 just around the corner, it's time to take a look at the growing collaboration trends that will affect the way you work with your team this coming year. While some are merely logical extensions of ongoing trends, a few may surprise you. 1. More Collaboration via Mobile/BYOD With mobile devices out-shipping desktop units four-to-one, one thing is clear: mobile is king. And it isn't just about units sold, it's also about work behavior on these devices. For example: 47% of all email is now being opened on a mobile device rather than on a desktop email client (based on 251 million opens tracked by Litmus). This doesn't mean completely abandoning desktops in favor of tablets, however, as the sheer overwhelming variety of devices brings about its own challenges. Converting files to compatible formats, for example. What is does mean is that team members will choose to work on personal mobile devices even when they're in the office, just for the convenience of accessing familiar tools and apps. As a result, mobile collaboration apps will continue to be a priority for team collaboration. Software companies creating collaboration tools will have to continue investing in mobile applications, especially with the sheer number of customer teams clamoring for a way to work together via their smartphones. Desktop UIs will continue to take a backseat to the growing demand for mobile collaboration tools. And companies will have to adapt. Over the past six years, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend has been steadily reaching critical mass, giving CTOs and IT departments their fair share of security concerns. But with cloud storage now more accessible and the benefits of allowing people to work from the familiarity of their personal devices clear, expect 2015 to be the year when BYOD goes mainstream. 2. Increased Need for Systems (and Products) that Work Together Alongside the dominance of mobile and upward trend of BYOD, there will be an increased focus on interoperability: the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without extra effort. Think about it: various new work devices coupled with the need to leverage new technologies that answer customers changing needs equals...? A big challenge. A team member using an iPad needs to participate in the same video conference as someone attending via webcam on a Linux laptop, for example, and it all has to work seamlessly. Work is already being done to make these integrations customizable by end users. Services like IFTTT (If This Then That) and Zapier have made automation between social collaboration tools and the larger ecosystem of work apps possible. For example, the Wrike and Zapier integration gives users the chance to create tasks from their choice of apps — anything from Evernote to Zendesk to Marketo. 3. Email Superseded by Social Collaboration Tools As early as 2010, Gartner was predicting that 20% of business users would choose social networking solutions over email as the main channel for communication and collaboration by 2014. With modern business growing more social in nature, that transition has come, and many companies are introducing cloud-based or internal social collaboration solutions. Here at Wrike, we've long said that managing projects via email is not ideal; there's a loss of context when information is consumed in fragmentary replies. There's a tendency for duplicated information as multiple people respond to one email thread. There's a lack of visibility into how a project is faring, forcing managers to spend time manually gather status updates from each contributor. Project management and social collaboration software solves the email problem by giving users tools to stay on top of projects and make communication more efficient between team members. That's not to say email is dead. Rather, it will go back to being used as a direct communication tool instead of a platform for project management and collaboration. 4. The Rise of Users Helping Users But possibly the biggest trend to watch out for is the rise of the community-led knowledge base. More companies will encourage super users and customer evangelists to take an active role in helping other users in the community, sharing tips and tricks in a common knowledge base. Alongside this, expect customer help desks to dwindle as crowdsourced support steps up to fill the need. Users still expect service in real time, so there will still be a need for live operators. But for the more reactive customer service desks, fully fleshed-out wikis and forums will be key to providing critical information that's contributed by fellow users. Where do you see collaboration going? Agree with our predictions, or do you have a different idea of how we'll collaborate this coming year? Share the post or our collaboration trends Slideshare and see what your colleagues think. We'd love to hear everyone's thoughts. Read Next: 6 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2015 Image Credit: Crystal Ball by Christian Schnettelker on Flickr. Some rights reserved. Edits made.
Meet Us at Google Enterprise Global Partner Summit 2014
This week, Google hosts its second annual "Enterprise Global Partner Summit" in San Francisco, where its partners from around the globe gather to learn about the latest innovations and upcoming Google releases. Our CEO and champion, Andrew Filev, is excited to be attending once again, representing Wrike as one of the top Google partners in the productivity and project management space. We have a long-term relationship with Google, and we were recently one of the first independent software vendors to transition into their relaunched Apps Marketplace experience. "I look forward to seeing everyone at the Google Partner Summit, catching up with our friends across the world, and hearing Google's announcements," says Andrew. "It's cool to touch base with such a great group of companies that are changing the way the world does business." Wrike keeps you connected with sources such as Google, which we know so many of you rely on daily at work. Our Gmail widget helps you work in Wrike without leaving your inbox. With Google Drive integration, you can attach files to tasks right from your Drive. You also can minimize the chance of projects slipping through the cracks by synchronizing your Wrike and Google calendars. We are always eager to meet more of our friends and customers, so if you're going to the event, get in touch with us. We look forward to seeing you there!
Wrike Featured as 'Cool Startup to Watch' at IBM Connect 2014
Last week myself and a few of my team members were able to attend the annual "IBM Connect" user conference in Orlando. This is our second time attending the event on behalf of Wrike, and it was great to be back in the IBM community. Wrike was selected by IBM as one of the "Cool Startups to Watch," giving us the privilege of showcasing our company and product at a special session featuring other social, dynamic companies. Our fearless founder and CEO, Andrew Filev, presented Wrike's social project management software to an audience of IBM customers, alongside four other startups: Hype, TemboSocial, Hootsuite, and Temasys. This year's theme "Energizing Life's Work" brought together companies committed to reinventing businesses of all sizes with better collaboration, just like IBM and Wrike. On the expo floor, we had a great time connecting with IBM customers, partners, and other tech companies that, like Wrike, integrate with IBM's tools for enhancing day-to-day work. It was also an invaluable opportunity to meet face-to-face with fellow Wrikers like Mizuno and Hootsuite! Being in a room with so many innovative leaders who value collaboration is always refreshing. We're excited about the relationships we've built, and look forward to working with some of our new friends throughout the year! Of course, for a company known for it's geeky innovation, IBM sure knows how to throw a party. Special thanks for their accommodations at Hollywood Studios in Disney World. We all had a blast!
Goodbye, Successful 2013! </br> Hello, Ambitious 2014!
As 2013 approaches its end and the holiday season begins in earnest, it’s a great time to look back and evaluate all the important events that this year brought us. Buckle up for an exciting ride in Wrike’s time machine! As 2013 approaches its end and the holiday season begins in earnest, it’s a great time to look back and evaluate all the important events that this year brought us. Buckle up for an exciting ride in Wrike’s time machine!Growing with Customers, Growing the Team In 2013, we worked hard and moved fast. The number of customers like you that enjoyed the premium version grew by more than 60%, and today we’re happy to serve over 4,500 organizations of different sizes, including brands like PayPal, Ecco, and Google. In fact, thousands of new companies try Wrike every month, and we hope that our family will keep growing. Just a couple of weeks ago, you helped us reach another remarkable milestone – the number of tasks managed in Wrike exceeded 20 million! Alongside growing the number of customers, we've been growing our capability to better serve you by adding team members in charge of customer success, sales, marketing, operations, and product engineering. Releasing Features that Rock This year alone, there were 30+ big and small feature releases, as well as hundreds of important improvements that aren’t immediately visible on the front end. In August, we launched Wrike Graphite, and it's not just hype to say that this release contributed to shaking up the online collaboration space with features such as project infographics, timers with live status broadcast, task dependencies, and lots of other powerful, but easy-to-use tools. Driven by your needs and the suggestions of other customers with large deployments, we introduced the Wrike Enterprise plan just last week as our year-end finale. With the help of big data technologies, we've made it easier to manage large distributed teams and complex projects. Get a high-level overview in this short video.Wrike and Bain Capital Ventures: More Than Just Funding On the strategic business side, one of our key milestones this year was receiving $10 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, which gives us the resources to grow even faster in 2014 than we did this year. Spreading the Word Our feature-filled releases didn’t go unnoticed by the press. Over the past several months, Wrike was featured in business and tech media giants such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, AllThingsD, TechCrunch, and Venturebeat, to name just a few. Overall, Wrike received almost twice as much coverage this year, compared to last year ... and we're still counting. So to all of you customers and friends, a big thank you for supporting and believing in Wrike. Your patronage and feedback are extremely helpful and always very much appreciated. Happy holidays to you and your families. And see you in 2014 with a couple of big releases just around the corner.
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Language Settings in Wrike: Switch from English to Spanish and Vice Versa Easily!
Many of you know that Wrike project management software recently became available in Spanish. Now, we have added the ability to change the language of your Wrike workspace easily. First, the language option is now available on every page of Wrike’s website (see the top right corner of the webpage). Additionally, you can customize the language of your Wrike workspace and the language of email notifications you receive from Wrike by using the “My profile” tab in the "Account" section. Once you switch the language under your personal profile, do not forget to save the changes so that they come into effect! Each user can individually set the desired language because the settings are personal and do not affect the entire account.
Wrike’s Interface in Spanish Is Released. Other Languages Are Coming Soon!
If you were waiting for the release of Wrike’s interface in Spanish, you will be pleased with the latest updates. Today, it becomes more convenient for you, as well as your Spanish-speaking team members, clients, and partners, to collaborate on projects with the help of Wrike. To make your experience as pleasant as possible, we did our best to carefully translate Wrike’s workspace, notifications, alerts, and help pages. We believe that the possibility of working in the Spanish interface will make your work with Wrike even more enjoyable. Also, it will let you invite more Spanish-speaking peers to collaborate with you on Wrike. “It is very exciting to launch the first localized version of Wrike,” said Nic Bryson, VP of Customer Relations. “With plans for more languages in the future, such as German, French, Portuguese, and Italian, we started with Spanish, the one most called-for by our users. We value our Spanish-speaking customers who have been using Wrike in English to date. We believe that they, as well as new Spanish-speaking users, will be pleased with the convenience of using Wrike in their native language.” How can I see Wrike in Spanish? Have Spanish as a high-priority language in your web browser. If you are as happy with the release as we are, a tweet or a short blog post about it would be a great “thank you” for our efforts to deliver the Spanish version to you:) Thank you for your continuous support and for using Wrike’s English version! Want to see Wrike in your language? Let us know in the comments of this post. Your vote counts!
Wrike is Ready to Learn New Languages
We know that many customers of Wrike from different corners of the world wanted to see their workspace in their native language. Today, we have some great news for you! First of all, you may have already noticed several new language options in your personal profile. Thanks to our users’ contributions, Wrike is now also available in Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese. New arrivals on the language list First of all, you may have already noticed several new language options in your personal profile. Thanks to our users’ contributions, Wrike project management software is now also available in Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese (besides the interfaces in English and Spanish that we’ve had for a long time)! If you want to see one of them in your workspace, choose it in one click right now. We appreciate the efforts our users made to help translate Wrike’s interface to these languages and hope that it will make Wrike a more convenient tool, not only for their teams but for thousands of other users, as well. Many thanks to Marcos Stenner, Jana Kroftová, Mikhail Prokhorov, and Eugene Smirnov for their invaluable help! Your contributions are welcome as well! But this is not all that we wanted to share with you. We also have launched an easy-to-use online translating tool that can help you make Wrike project management software an even better place for your team. Whether you want to translate one string or the whole interface, you are very welcome to do so! Translating Wrike is simple and quick. If you want to make just a couple of suggestions or correct a mistake, you can do it right away without registration. However, the registered users will see their translation in the interface faster than anonymous users. We’ve prepared a quick guide through the tool interface and some translation tips on our special page for you. Enjoying the fruits of your work won’t take long! We deploy the approved translations once per week or so. As soon as more than half of a new language is translated, it becomes available in the workspace. To speed up the deployment, you also may drop us a note once you’ve finished the translation. We hope that using Wrike in your native language will make your team’s collaboration smoother and easier! A number of other popular languages, such as French, German, Norwegian, and Croatian, are now in the process of translation, too, and thanks to your help, they may appear in the interface very soon. Come up with a string translation for one of them, or start translating into a new language if you’d like to!
Wrike's 2012: A Look in the Rearview Mirror
Over 30 new features, 4 new languages, doubling the customer base, talented new team members – this is just a brief snapshot of the great things that happened at Wrike in 2012. As we’re gaining momentum on the next big part of our roadmap, I’d like to glance back at the events and achievements we had in the past year and share some highlights with you. Our team of 50 worked hard to make the online work of thousands of organizations as easy, comfortable and efficient as possible with Wrike’s help. To make that happen, we enhanced Wrike with more than 30 big and small project collaboration features, including the shiny new mobile apps, the redesigned three-pane Activity Stream, the Live collaborative editor and much more. These releases not only received a warm welcome from our customers, but also gained positive reviews from top tech and business media, including TechCrunch, InformationWeek, Mashable and Business Insider. As the word about Wrike was spreading wider and quicker, we saw more than 40,000 companies trying our software in 2012. This is about double what we had in 2011. To make it even easier for international users to leverage Wrike’s power, one of our top priorities was localizing Wrike to new languages. Last year, we introduced our UI in German, French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, so that the native speakers of these languages literally feel at home in Wrike. There’s more to come in 2013: The work on several other languages is humming on our translation portal. We were happy to welcome many new ambitious start-ups on board, as well as teams from globally known corporations, such as Fujifilm, Ticketmaster, Cisco and many more. Our overall customer base expanded more than twofold, which was one of our most prominent results of that year! We’re happy that you rely on Wrike in managing your projects. When we hear from our customers that Wrike “operates how they think”, makes them more organized and efficient, and helps them “take their business to the next level,” we feel like our hard work is rewarded! Thank you all for your business and your support! 2012 was a fruitful year, but if you ask us about our pace and plans for 2013, we are going to go only faster than before. We have many ideas about how to make you, us and the whole world more productive, and we just can’t rest until we build those ideas into the product and see that happy smile of yours. Some of those innovations are nearly out of the door. You’ve already seen the recent update to our messaging interface with quotes built in. So stay tuned for more exciting releases, and as always, don’t hesitate to drop us a note if you want to influence our direction. Wishing you all a great and productive year! P.S. I’d like to kindly ask you about two things: As a good car craves being driven, Wrike was built to be used by you and your team on a daily basis. If you make it a habit, sure enough, it will pay back in productivity in many expected and unexpected ways. We’d appreciate it if you help us spread the word about Wrike. Tell your colleagues, blog about it, tweet about it, anything. Just like with email or Skype, it’s much easier to collaborate, when everyone’s on board.
In Anticipation of PMI Global Congress North America 2012
With the ongoing expansion of the distributed workforce, this topic seems to be gaining even more importance among fellow project managers. The first part of the speech will cover the most interesting findings of a survey recently conducted by Wrike with 1,000 respondents (how many people work remotely, how this compares to their work style 2-3 years ago, what they value the most about telecommuting, where they see this trend going, etc.) For instance, the vast majority of surveyed people believe that a fully virtual office will be a reality in the future. Later, the presentation will focus on efficiency tips for managers of virtual teams, based on my own experience of working with globally dispersed employees. If you haven’t planned a trip to Vancouver yet, it is worth consideration! I’m just as eager to hear the other presentations as I am to give my own. Speaking of the event agenda: this is one of the things that we recently discussed with Paula Jayne White, PMI’s Director, Professional Development. Read our full conversation to find out about the focus of the upcoming event and discover some lessons that such a huge project like PMI Congress can teach. Paula Jayne, I’m pleased to welcome you in my blog! Could you please tell me a bit about your PMI history and your role in organizing the Congress in Vancouver? Hello, Andrew. Thank you for having me. I joined PMI almost a year ago exactly, as the PMI Global Congress 2011—North America was getting underway in Dallas. It was a great initiation, since my role with PMI is to build on the Global Congress’s great history and help the event evolve in a way that reflects and meets the evolving needs of today’s project managers. The PMI Global Congress is the place where project management meets, and I’m fortunate to work with a talented team of individuals that share my passion and vision for everything from content to professional networking – everything that defines the participant experience and makes the PMI Global Congress such a valued professional development event. One of the most exciting things about PMI Congresses is that they observe a really wide diversity of topics. Can you outline a few of the hottest ones on the upcoming agenda? What are the keynotes? Some of the hottest topics this year are change management; requirements management; leadership and soft skills for project managers; agile; complexity in large projects; risk management; and the PMO, among others. Our keynote speaker is Marcus Buckingham. We’re very excited to have him as part of our line-up; his insight into workplace strengths, how to maximize them and the crucial differences between leadership and management are unmatched. His presentation will give attendees a new perspective on how to fulfill the quest for long-lasting achievement, not just in the workplace but in all walks of life. Other speakers include Annie McKee, best-selling author and founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute; behavioral scientist and consultant James Kane; Lem Lasher, President, Global Business Solutions, Chief Innovation Officer and Chairman of the Leading Edge Forum for technology solutions firm CSC; and Mary Beth Romig, one of the key architects of the reconstruction of New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. We’re excited to offer some new panels and topics for 2012 as well. Our first-ever Women in Project Management panel is poised for an exceptional turnout as it corrects the misconception that project management is a profession led only by men. Some of the most successful women in project management will share their experiences as project managers; discuss how project management as a profession is growing in general, and how opportunities for women specifically are increasing; and show how women are cracking the top echelons of previously male-dominated roles. Other new offerings include Hot Topics panels, which will enable attendees to learn about a given topic from multiple speakers and perspectives in a single session, and improved business networking events where attendees can make new contacts and explore new professional opportunities. Compared to the 2011 Congress, how has the focus in topics shifted? Do you see some specific trends in the project management space that affected this? The PMI Global Congress 2011—North America focused on the delivery of general project management knowledge. Many of the topics above were addressed in some form, but this year, they will be examined more thoroughly, and in sessions designed for intermediate and advanced project professionals. This is based on direct attendee feedback, as well as on PMI’s Pulse of the Profession report and studies by the Anderson Economic Group, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the McKinsey Global Institute. Instead of doing an open call for papers, as we did in past years, PMI invested in extensive market research to determine the topics that are of most interest and need to our attendees, and this year’s offerings are the direct outcome of that feedback. We issued a targeted call for papers on the most requested topics to ensure that attendees would get the most value from their experience. Is there any talk that you’re eager to hear personally? With that line-up, how can I choose just one? Well, I’m very excited about the women in project management panel. The demographic of PM is definitely changing; women are project management leaders, and have been for quite some time, but they can be isolated in their professions because there are still fewer of them. It will be exciting to learn how the profession and organizations are evolving in this area. And you can’t miss Marcus Buckingham. He’s such a dynamic speaker, with such profound cultural insights. The whole room will be hanging on his every word and I’ll be first in line to do that. I’m also very excited about closing speaker James Kane, and I hope that everyone can attend. He’s talking very specifically about collaboration, which has become a key concept for project professionals: how do we collaborate in virtual team environments? James Kane is both insightful and entertaining, and we’ll walk away with solid concepts that we can execute immediately. The Congress is a big project, so could you share some lessons learned along the way that readers could apply to their events, or maybe projects in general? It’s essential to have strong project management for an event of this magnitude. We’ve learned that a strong program manager is critical, as are skilled project managers for each work stream. Communication and accountability are key as well, along with strong leadership and technical skills. And never, ever forget an excellent sense of humor! It’s the only way to manage all of the moving parts so that the event comes together flawlessly. Were there any interesting and fun anecdotes that you’d like to share? One of the things we like to do each year is feature something fun, cool, and a little outside the box for technical project managers. Last year, attendees played Jeopardy against Watson. This year, we’ll get an up-close and personal look at the rebuilding of New Orleans through the experience of those who were actually there. These real-world scenarios, along with the social and networking events, are the backbone of the PMI Global Congress experience. There are more, of course, but to find out what it’s really about, you’ll have to attend. This sounds like one of the prominent reasons to attend the Congress. Thank you for your time, Paula Jayne. It was a pleasure to talk to you in anticipation of the Congress. See you in Vancouver!
2012 is Around the Corner: Time for the New Year’s Eve Report
Wait a moment, is it December already? It has been such a fantastic year, the time flew by so quickly. First of all, we would like to thank all of you for choosing Wrike project management software and relying on it in managing your day-to-day project work. It is a pleasure to serve both “Wrike experts” with a rich experience of using our app and our new friends that have just recently joined Wrike’s customer community. We really appreciate your contribution through your feedback, awesome suggestions, and experience shared with other users in your case studies. Wrike has become even smarter… We’ve added 20+ new project management features to help you become way more productive. In 2011 we added the abilities to attach files with drag-and-drop, edit documents without downloading, view your tasks from your favorite mobile or tablet device and much more. Many of these updates were inspired by your suggestions, so if you haven’t voiced your favorite feature yet, it’s the right time to do it! …even faster… As the pace of information flow increases, project management needs to be much more flexible and agile. Thanks to a slick facelift, Wrike got a friendlier look and feel, as well as an unparalleled speed boost that allows you to load and manage tons of data in just seconds whether you are running dozens, hundreds or even thousands of tasks and projects. “Thanks to Wrike, our team now completes 30% more tasks with open deadlines per month,” says William Fetter, director of marketing and communications at Hexagon Metrology. …and you’ve wowed it! “I love the fact that Wrike hit everything in my dream list! With Wrike's help, we get vastly better results, we get more things done and done faster,” says Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution. Thank you Tim for such nice words! We hope many of you would “+1” Timothy’s opinion ;). Your positive feedback resulted in new fantastic customer stories and podcasts discussing best practices to using Wrike and new project management methods inspired by our app. Our achievements were also appreciated by the business community: Wrike received a Stevies award and got extensive media coverage in GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, eWeek, AllBusinessBlog, InformationWeek, PM4Girls and more! So what’s the bottom line? Terri Griffith from GigaOm has perfectly summarized the results:
Wrike's New Triumph: Finalist in the 2011 American Business Awards
The Stevies are one of the most honorable business awards in the United States, recognizing outstanding achievements of organizations of all types and sizes, and the people behind them. In previous years, the list of laureates included such leading companies as Apple, CNN, Ford, Hilton Hotels and more. “It’s not only the look of the award standing behind the nickname the Business World’s Oscars. It’s also the high level of the applications coming from successful, dynamic, motivated companies,” said Andrew Filev, Wrike’s CEO, who joined the judges’ panel in several other categories for best new products and the most successful product development teams. Congrats to everyone on Wrike’s team and many thanks to our customers for sending valuable feedback that helped us blend our award-winning social project management mix! The Stevies committee also seeks to recognize the best products and companies, according to people’s opinions. Of course, it's you, our loyal customers, who we rely on the most in the competition! Please vote for Wrike project management software - just click on this logo and you will automatically be taken to the page where you can submit your vote. The voting is open until June 3.
Outlook 2010 64Bit Sync: Connect Your Tasks into One Big Picture
December 22, 2011 update:We have released a new Outlook Add-in! Information in this post may not be correct. Please read our post about the new, improved Wrike Outlook Add-in to get the most up-to-date details.Contact Support if you have any questions. Wrike’s frictionless integration with other ubiquitous tools you use in your work is one of the core things that make it so friendly and easy to use. According to the feedback that we receive from you, Outlook sync is a popular feature that many of you enjoy using. This week, we’ve enhanced it with a very important project management update – we’ve released a new version of the add-in for those of you who use the 64bit version of Outlook 2010. To download this add-in, simply click on the “Sync” link in your Wrike workspace and download the Outlook add-in from that page. After you’ve gone through the download and installation process, you’ll need to fill in your login information and adjust the sync settings between Outlook and Wrike: frequency, direction, etc. If you have any doubts, these help pages will guide you through the process step by step. Getting your tasks automatically synced between Outlook and Wrike will connect your work into one big picture. Thus, you’ll have a clear overview of your most important tasks in both apps at any time, which will make you more efficient in getting things done. Do you have any questions or suggestions about Wrike’s Outlook sync? Don’t hesitate to drop us a note in the comments or contact Support.
Vote for Wrike CEO's session at Silicon Valley Product Camp 2011!
Unlike traditional conference formats, Product Camp lets the participants decide themselves what issues they find important to discuss. The agenda is defined through online voting for the proposed topics. We invite you to support Andrew Filev’s proposal, named “Be innovative, Yet Familiar: How to Create Business Software That Sticks.” In his speech, Andrew is going to cover the question of how traditional tools like e-mail can be leveraged to create innovative, but still very user-friendly, software. To get Andrew’s proposal on the event’s agenda, please vote for it at the Product Camp website. Please note that voting is open until March 25, and you can give up to three votes for a proposal.
Wrike Rocks Dallas Vendor Showcase 2011
Last week, Wrike’s team took part in the Dallas Vendor Showcase 2011. The event, organized by the Project Management Institute, attracted several hundred representatives from the best project management software, training, consulting and staffing companies. As a leading vendor on the Web-based project management software market, Wrike gained such high interest among the visitors that our stand was quickly left without a single brochure! About 300 people who visited our booth during the day found out how easy it is to manage projects in Wrike. Nic Bryson, our VP of Customer Relations, answered the visitors’ numerous questions and told them about Wrike’s unique collaborative features. As a great finale for such a day, Nic raffled off a few discounted Wrike subscriptions. Wendy Overturf, PMP, IT project manager at Texas Instruments, became the lucky winner of the free 1-year subscription to Wrike. The spring of 2011 is rich with events that are interesting for project management professionals. On March 29, you can meet us at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where Wrike’s CEO will share practical tips on creating innovative, yet familiar, software that “sticks.” On April 2, we invite you to join the world's largest free get-together of product managers and product marketers - Silicon Valley Product Camp in San Jose. This year, we’re one of the event sponsors and can’t wait to meet you there!
Wrike's 2010: an Overview of the Achievements
The biggest milestone we reached in 2010 is the launch of Wrike’s new, social version. The months of hard work and lots of effort that we put into this release have resulted in making Wrike project management software as friendly and easy to use as a social network. A brilliant new interface, activity streams and built-in microblogging, interactive dashboard, handy backlog and many other powerful features have been introduced in the new version to give an extra productivity boost to you and your team. On the heels of the social version release we enhanced Wrike with table view for fast task editing, a new image viewer for convenient work with visual graphics and more helpful updates. In 2010, we’ve greatly extended Wrike Apps & Integrations. Collaborative document management has become quick and easy, thanks to Wrike’s integration with Google Docs. Also, Wrike has become the first project management solution to integrate with Google Wave. Finally, a few weeks ago, we unveiled Wrike’s development platform, which gives your development team an opportunity to integrate Wrike with other software you use. We’ve been happy to hear the positive feedback on the updates from our customers. Enthusiastic reviews, such as “Wrike has been the most productive tool we’ve added to our arsenal,” “Wrike has become an irreplaceable tool we rely on,” and many others are worth the sleepless nights we dedicated to making Wrike as helpful and efficient as it is today. You can learn more about other users’ experiences with Wrike in the success stories. This year, we published quite a few new interviews! Our accomplishments also have received positive reviews from influential media. Wrike has been covered in TechCrunch, Computerworld, eWeek, Venturebeat, GigaOM and many other blogs. Also, Wrike was honored as the tool of the month by the Clever Tester network, one of the largest independent software testing resources on the Web, which testified that Wrike is a great match for the needs of software development and quality assurance teams. We’d like to thank you all for your business and your loyalty to Wrike. We highly appreciate your opinion and try to address your needs with every release. If you ever have comments, ideas or feature suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact our Support team. In 2011, we’ll keep working on making Wrike the best project management and collaboration software that exceeds your expectations! Wrike’s team wishes you and your family Happy Holidays! See you in 2011!
Wrike & Outlook 2010: Get All Tasks Completed!
December 22, 2011 update:We have released a new Outlook Add-in! Information in this post may not be correct. Please read our post about the new, improved Wrike Outlook Add-in to get the most up-to-date details.Contact our Support team if you have any questions. .
Vote for My Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010 Proposal!
” Recently, the conference organizers announced the opening of the Community Vote, which will play major part in the selection of the sessions that will be presented at the conference in Boston. I’m excited about the start of the voting, and I ask for your support. If you liked my “Email Is Dead… Long Live Email!” presentation, I encourage you to vote for my proposal entitled “Popular to Ubiquitous: How to Skyrocket Adoption.” Note: voting there requires a quick registration to avoid duplicate votes. Please bear with it; it’s simple.
Wrike Plans for 2010: What Will the New Year Bring?
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 [email protected], 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 EngineTM (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. 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.