Why DAM Is The Next Best Addition to Your Wrike Workflow
Today’s consumers are demanding more than ever. Personalization, interactive content, and complex media types (think video and VR) are all top of mind from those who expect top-notch experiences from the companies they do business with. But what does this mean for your marketing and creative teams? There is now immense pressure to pump out high-quality, visual content at significantly faster rates. When environmental factors and looming KPIs require your team to build strong campaigns at a faster rate, it becomes critical to lean into processes and technology that facilitate strong workflows. Even more critical: ensuring the digital assets (photos, animations, videos, etc.) that your teams need to create are always readily available within those workflows. So, how can your teams collaborate more effectively? By integrating your Wrike account with MediaValet’s cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) solution. What is MediaValet? MediaValet is a digital asset management solution (DAM) that helps companies manage, organize, share, and distribute their digital assets from within one central library. It improves the productivity of marketing teams and increases the ROI of content and creative programs.From within the library, users can perform a variety of functions, including re-sizing & re-formatting their media, tracking usage history, and sharing large files easily with external parties. It provides organizations with increased media security, such as user permissions, compliance regulations, recovery, and geo-replication. Key features of a DAM include: Storing and managing brand and marketing material (photos, videos, etc.) Quickly finding and retrieving digital assets, using advanced searches Enriching assets with custom metadata, such as keywords Version control and history tracking for all media assets Manipulating assets into other forms, such as file type or size Access permissions for internal and external users How does the MediaValet and Wrike integration work? With the MediaValet and Wrike integration, teams can deliver campaigns faster, eliminating time-consuming admin tasks while protecting their brand’s identity. The two-way integration between the platforms allows users to seamlessly push and pull assets between Wrike and MediaValet and ensure everyone is using the most up-to-date assets with automatic version updates. The top three benefits of integrating Wrike and MediaValet include: Finding what you need, faster, Always working with the most up-to-date content, and Maintaining content security Let’s explore each benefit of using Wrike and MediaValet in more detail below. 1. Find the assets you need, faster The integration allows users to automatically push and pull Wrike project attachments directly into the DAM library without ever leaving the Wrike interface. Users can browse folder categories or use MediaValet’s additional search capabilities to instantly find the assets they need. In addition to finding content by filename, users can search for files by added keywords and AI-generated auto-tags (identifying people, objects, text, spoken work and subjects). When uploading final files back to MediaValet, users can add keywords, categories, and other searchable fields to enhance asset discoverability. Plus, all images and PDFs are automatically tagged using artificial intelligence (AI), eliminating manual entry. This minimizes redundant admin creative requests, giving time back to the creative team to work on their most important tasks and projects. 2. Always work with up-to-date content Integrating Wrike with MediaValet means never again accidentally using an old draft or outdated asset. Ensure brand consistency across campaigns and channels with automatic bi-directional versioning. This means users can publish new materials from either platform with the confidence that their team is only using the most up-to-date asset. Bi-directional version control ensures that Wrike and all Wrike users are always using and accessing the latest approved version of each asset. When the new version of an asset is published in a Wrike task, it will replace the existing version of the asset in MediaValet; and vice versa, when a new version of an asset is uploaded into MediaValet, it's automatically pushed to all associated tasks in Wrike. This allows for seamless and collaborative workflow across all users and Wrike tasks. 3. Keep your content secure at all times By integrating your Wrike instance with your MediaValet library, you gain enhanced permission structures, which means you can control exactly what each person can use within the DAM. This ensures team members only have access to what is relevant to their workflows, and your asset library remains secure. Enhanced user permissions also help to improve collaboration with geo-distributed teams. This keeps project details centralized and accessible by attaching assets to specific Wrike tasks. Users can upload final assets to MediaValet for use across projects and campaigns—from anywhere. Additionally, direct uploads from within Wrike allow users to publish final creative assets directly to MediaValet from Wrike, without needing to first download them to their own desktop and then upload them to MediaValet. Final approvers can rename assets and even update the assets’ metadata from within Wrike. Seamlessly streamline your workflow and maximize project execution with MediaValet’s Wrike integration. Get in touch to learn more and book a demo with your Customer Success Manager today!
Lightspeed Feature Focus: Communicate and Connect Easily with Outside Organizations Using External Requester Collaboration
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.
Lightspeed Feature Focus: Work Your Way With Custom Item Types
It’s no secret that the pace of work has increased exponentially in recent years. In less than half a century, we’ve moved from typewriters, to word processors, all the way to laptops packed with software to help us deliver ever more work in the fastest way possible. In fact, knowledge workers now use up to 14 applications in their roles, toggling through more than a dozen work management tools every day. This heavy workload, coupled with resource scarcity, unexpected pivots, and employee burnout is contributing to a major loss of productivity — in the second quarter of this year, U.S. worker productivity plunged again, leading to the largest year-on-year decline on record. Businesses need to address these issues fast in an increasingly pressured and unpredictable market. They urgently need work management software that focuses on maximizing output, minimizing expenses and allocating resources efficiently. What they need is Wrike Lightspeed. Introducing Wrike Lightspeed Launched in October 2022, Wrike Lightspeed is the latest innovation of the world’s most powerful work management platform. Combining speed, style, and substance, it’s got everything an organization could need to manage diverse types of work. It’s more intuitive, easy-to-use, customizable, and scalable than any other solution, growing in tandem with your team as you soar to new heights of success. It strips away work complexity, surfacing essential work, and illuminating a path towards productivity. With more than 400 integrations with popular collaborative tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce, Wrike Lightspeed is the all-in-one solution that can replace those towering tech stacks, break down silos, and help you take back your team’s time. It’s also a lot of fun to use, with an attractive and modern UX design that will make working with Wrike every day a joy. Our designers created new Table and Calendar views, and a fresh look for our Analytics dashboard, so users can watch as they hit goal after goal. It’s easy for new and advanced customers alike to navigate through the wide range of dynamic work management software features like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and customizable calendars. Every tool, feature, and integration is built to help companies maximize team performance, accelerate growth, and deliver real impact, including: 50% faster project delivery 70% fewer meetings 90% less email 100% real-time visibility Savings of up to $60m* *The estimated annual cost annually of wasted time, canceled projects, duplicated efforts, and employee churn. This can rise as high as $1.65B for organizations with over 100,000 employees. Revolutionary in its approach and unrivaled in its capabilities, Lightspeed offers the fastest route to productivity — by helping teams, departments, and whole organizations to Work As One™. It still features the exceptional versatility Wrike’s work management platform is renowned for, with extra layers of customization so users can tailor individual work that matches team needs. It’s the only platform that doesn’t require customers to make tradeoffs,it has it all, wall to wall, intuitive interface, customizability you need in today’s dynamic work environment and the ability to scale indefinitely as you need it. That means that you don’t have to adjust to work in Wrike. It adjusts to work for you. Managing multiple ways of working More than 2.4m people around the world use Wrike every day. They’re based in hundreds of countries, speaking multiple languages, and operating in a wide variety of industries, professions, and fields. That means that they need a powerful work management platform that reflects their unique requirements. Most out-of-the-box work management software solutions force teams to work within a rigid workflow template. That means squeezing their round work pegs into the provider’s square holes, using whatever templates, layouts, and business processes are included. Take a simple work request form, for example. That might look like a technical support ticket for an IT provider, a creative brief for a marketing department, or a repair order for a facilities team. Each request will need different fields, ranging from software error details, to creative asset requirements, all the way to photographs of a broken window that needs to be fixed. The organization could include dependencies to funnel the request to the right team, and use acronyms or shorthand to denote different types of queries. Modern work is complex enough: busy teams need to receive, organize, and expedite their tasks in a way that works for them as fast and as easily as possible. Without it, they risk losing valuable hours, jeopardizing on-time delivery, and compromising the uniformity, quality, and efficiency of their work. Here at Wrike, we’re aware of this problem — we’ve seen it happen, time and time again in our 16 years of pioneering modern work management software. So we built the solution, with unrivaled versatility and next-level customization capabilities — empowering you to work your way in Wrike. Unveiling Custom Item Types With the launch of Wrike Lightspeed comes Custom Item Types — the ultimate in configurability. Teams can now adapt their workspaces for their own specific use cases, business processes, terminologies, and behaviors. They can add their own item types in addition to native task and project types. They can even configure the layout of each item's processes to work with their own business logic, designing a specific set of fields to reflect their unique needs and requirements. It’s like having custom project management software, without the expense of bespoke software engineering. How would that look in a modern workplace? Well, marketing teams can now work with campaigns, assets, and creative briefs; Agile teams can create user stories, epics, and releases; and IT departments can raise tickets, issue first fixes, and phase rollouts. You can rename all the item types to fit neatly with your organization’s culture, linguistic style, and shorthand — like how HR and talent acquisition teams deal with job descriptions, candidate profiles, C.V.s, interviews, feedback, and postings in multiple locations. Wrike speaks your team’s language. Wrike’s work management platform is the most cutting-edge solution available, deploying advanced AI to make all our users’ lives easier. With the release of Wrike Lightspeed and Custom Item Types, we’ve taken Automations — one of our most valuable productivity-boosting features — to the next level. Nobody knows your business like you, so that’s why we made it easy for you to design your own workflow. Power users and admins can now automate some of their most routine work, utilizing easy-to-use, no-code workflows that streamline every item type into a natural business logic that’s designed by your team to meet your needs. Custom Item Types support team-specific processes and automations that are unique and relevant for your use case. Item types also speed up team operations and cross-functional collaboration with the flexibility and customizability needed to automate best practices directly into a daily-use system. By creating Custom Item Types in response to requirements, you can build your very own library of no-code automated work items, define workflows and item relations that adjust fast when needed. Custom Item Types now work seamlessly with request forms and co-exist alongside Blueprints, helping teams of all sizes to get the answers they need fast and expediting their work. They also connect with Wrike’s powerful analytics, so that key results can be viewed in formats that best reflect the requirements of your team or organization. Share this valuable data in seconds, by generating pre-built or customized reports, complete with helpful infographics and visual insights. Custom Item Type features Available for all Wrike Customers on Wrike’s Business and higher plans, Custom Item Types are packed with powerful features that will drive productivity in your organization. With Wrike Lightspeed’s groundbreaking work management software, you can now: Create your own library of easy-access item types that can be defined and adapted to mirror business processes of your team, department, or company Access out-of-the-box types that come with ready-made use-case templates Facilitate work filtering in dashboards, reports, and other tools using item icon and type identification in item views, as well as visible titles in Table, Gantt, and Board views Enable power users and admins alike to tailor Wrike for team members’ needs using a Custom Type Editor — without advanced skills or coding knowledge Make it unique with team-specific item types that help define and highlight each team member’s role You can also use Custom Item Types to: Support consistent company processes with account-wide item types Enable or disable item types in an instant when your requirements and team needs change. That means no confusion between old and new across your organization Configure item views so that different sections and fields can be hidden from users, added in-flight, or adjusted during different phases Customize context creation menus incorporating multiple views and adaptable hierarchies Enable item-specific workflows and automations rules that execute for your specific type of work Define parent-child relations between item types to build logical hierarchies of work — for example, you may wish to create an event that consists of deck, copy and venue subitems and not the other way around Putting you in control of your work — and your future Wrike Lightspeed helps to put you back in the driver’s seat and take your team to new heights of productivity through one powerful work management platform. It offers the best of both worlds: teams can customize almost everything in their own space, while the platform unifies and centralizes the work and reporting. That extraordinary configurability, scalability, and ease of use is game-changing in our unpredictable economic environment. Wrike’s Custom Item Types in particular help to pare back the complexity of modern work, enabling every team to build their ideal work environment, navigating through familiar terms, and accessing the right work in seconds. This means less time searching, adapting, or using third-party tools — and more time delivering great work. Ready to transform your team with Custom Item Types? Start a free trial of Wrike today.
How Wrike Lightspeed Will Cut Out Wasted Time and Save Your Organization’s Bottom Line
Do you ever feel like work is flying at your team at the speed of light? The rate at which teams are expected to complete projects and tasks is higher than ever — and employees as well as employers are feeling that pressure. That’s why we designed Wrike Lightspeed. In this day and age, you need a platform that enables your team to thrive and excel at lightspeed. Wrike Lightspeed is also designed to bring tasks into the light, increasing visibility so every team member has the information they need to complete their best work — and so managers, executives, and stakeholders can quickly understand project progress in a blink. We recently published a study that really shocked us — and as a result, pushed us to design Wrike Lightspeed, the most powerful work management platform on the market. Our study on the Dark Matter of Work underlined just how much employees and organizations are suffering from inefficient processes, the daily juggle of too many windows, apps, and passwords, and a disconnect between individual work and what it means for the organization. What the Dark Matter of Work really means to your organization The Dark Matter of Work is what gets lost in the gaps between systems and solutions that aren't integrated. It’s the time that’s wasted when you have to duplicate work in one app that you’ve already done in another. It’s the resources that could be better used elsewhere, but are instead poured into updating your stakeholders about project progress or sending email after email to a coworker asking for information. The Dark Matter of Work doesn’t just bog down your employees’ productivity; it can crush the soul of your company. Picture this: You’re an employee who has to switch between an average of 14 apps throughout your day. In several platforms, you have to update the same tasks to reflect work you’ve done between fielding email requests for more tasks. When you finally get a chance to get into deep work, you realize the information you need is buried in email threads and Slack messages. You leave work late, exhausted from struggling with systems that just don’t work. And you question what all those disjointed tasks are really doing to move your company forward. At 2 a.m., you wake up with a start, realizing you forgot to update your manager ahead of an important meeting you have first thing tomorrow. The Dark Matter of Work wastes your employees’ time and leaves employees feeling discouraged — even when they’re putting in maximum effort. The cost of letting the Dark Matter of Work continue We also know that the Dark Matter of Work doesn’t just impact your employees’ daily work, their productivity, their sense of purpose, and their career fulfillment — it affects a company’s bottom line. The wasted time from the Dark Matter of Work costs a single employee at a knowledge organization up to $16K per year. Multiply that by the number of employees in your organization, and you’ve got a serious problem — and a major opportunity to make up lost revenue. The Dark Matter of Work leads to delayed and canceled projects, missed deadlines, low productivity, and even employee churn. That costs companies in the knowledge industry millions every year. And that’s where Wrike Lightspeed comes in. How Wrike Lightspeed will help you eliminate the Dark Matter of Work We designed Wrike Lightspeed to help companies eliminate the Dark Matter of Work and recover those lost profits that are slipping through the cracks. Wrike Lightspeed is the platform where your employees can plan, manage, track, and complete all of their daily work. It’s fully configurable to your team’s processes — no more trying to shoehorn your ways of working into a pre-built cookie cutter platform. Instead, we give you the features you need and help you customize them so they fit your team. Wrike Lightspeed helps companies cut out those daily struggles like switching platforms and duplicating work, and enables employees to achieve new levels of productivity. It enables an unprecedented velocity of work — and it brings the work your team does to light with 360-degree visibility. That means managers can see how employees are progressing with tasks — and catch bottlenecks before they delay projects. Teams can emerge from their silos without leaving their desks — Wrike Lightspeed offers cross-tagging, which increases visibility and decreases duplication. Do the work once, tag teams who need to stay in the know, and move on to work that matters. What’s more? Wrike Lightspeed is powerful for a team of five — or for a team of 500. It can scale as you grow without losing any of the collaborative benefits, automation capabilities, integrations with your most-used apps, intuitive work intelligence, or security features. That’s major savings for your company with every team that’s added to Wrike. Are you ready to see for yourself just how Wrike Lightspeed can transform the way you work? Start a trial and begin eliminating the Dark Matter of Work from your workflows today.
How Workflow Automation Software Frees Up More of Your Time
In part one of our “selecting the best CWM solution” series, we discussed that having a centralized project intake method and managing all your team’s work using a system of record are essential to working efficiently. Without these in place, you’re likely struggling to keep track of work, managing projects in multiple programs, and chasing down stakeholders to get project details. Part two highlighted the pain of slow asset approvals and siloed teams trying to collaborate. Today, we’ll focus on the advantages of workflow automation and working intelligently. Pain: You can’t automate repetitive tasks Most projects and tasks go through predictable stages before completion and always with some repetitive work. Assigning tasks to the correct teammate, advancing work to the next stage, and completing and archiving work. Administrative work translates to lost time on productive activities like interviewing customers for case studies or writing a new product announcement blog article. Why not use workflow automation software to auto-assign and notify the correct person when work is ready for their sign-off? There’s a finite time in the work day, and teams shouldn’t waste a second doing admin work that can be left to automation. Pain: The rate you scale is too slow Business growth can often be a blessing and a curse. Blessing because revenues increase and teams grow but a curse because as organizations scale, projects and workloads increase, which could introduce resource availability constraints. As work demands escalate, teams don’t have time to dig through piles of data for decision-making insights. As a result, collaboration gets tougher and boundaries between work and personal time become blurred. With increased workloads, it becomes challenging for project owners and managers to manually track and analyze the progress of high-level initiatives and granular tasks. Assessing risk becomes equally challenging and determining risk levels based on intuition and experience is less effective and nearly impossible at scale. Project owners and managers need an efficient way to identify at-risk initiatives at a glance and prioritize them without manually checking in with team members and digging through multiple project levels. Once a potential risk is identified, they need insight to accurately diagnose the cause and determine next steps, whether it’s notifying stakeholders, alleviating bottlenecks, adjusting resources, or updating timelines. Machine learning and AI continue to seep into our everyday activities and routines. Smart devices act as personal assistants to help manage calendars and set reminders. Help center bots are more prevalent to provide great customer service. Our most used applications provide auto-generated responses, such as Gmail, LinkedIn, and many phone messaging apps. All this technology is available at our fingertips to be more efficient, collaborate, and do more. Why should work be any different? Workflow automation tools free up teams to do their best work. As workload and collaboration ramp up, team members may sometimes get buried with notifications in need of timely responses. This is noteworthy because most work-related communications and responses are short and require simple decisions, but it takes too much time and manual effort. Plus, there’s pressure to respond quickly while juggling more responsibilities. Yet with notifications piling up, it can be overwhelming to respond without a quick way to answer. You need a workflow automation software solution that empowers you to act quickly and move work forward without much manual effort. Even in the digital transformation age, not all work is digital. Ever get a printed document or handwritten note from a colleague that the rest of your team should see? Even if you could digitize the file and upload it, the editing process would be painful. Physical document sharing, editing, and collaboration is unrealistic across distributed organizations and teams because members don’t have access to traditional office technology to digitize print assets. Common problems meet Wrike solutions Wrike Integrate, our workflow/process automation software add-on for all complex and multi-app workflows, has teamed up with our new Automation Engine to automate repeatable processes within Wrike. The Automation Engine can automate your most-used workflows to reduce operational busywork. Based on if/then logic, account administrators can build automation rules using triggers and actions to create custom reminders and notifications, move and organize work, update work status and assignments, initiate approval workflows, and take action based on project risk levels. No coding experience is necessary to create the automation rules. There are many advantages of workflow automation. By removing repetitive tasks from a team’s workload, you can reduce errors, streamline processes, and save each team member hundreds of hours per year — another way of improving productivity. Project Risk Prediction Wrike’s built-in Work Intelligence™ features Project Risk Prediction, where we use machine-learning technology to predict potential project delays and alert project and team leaders of the possible causes. This allows them to take action fast to reduce or avoid delays. Our workflow automation software uses signals like start and end dates, tasks extending beyond project deadlines, and prior outcomes from similar projects to assess medium and high risks, and sends email digests to alert users. The predictions can be used as inputs to the Automation Engine to trigger actions that automate the activation of different scenarios based on project risk. Smart Replies To address the need for quick, short responses, Wrike’s Smart Replies allow users to take quick actions to move work forward by responding to notifications and activity with automated replies generated with machine learning. Each reply is based on the context of the conversation and allows users to select from up to three responses for each @mention received in their Wrike Inbox. Document Processing Teammates don’t have to fumble with physical documents anymore when they want to share with the group. Wrike’s new Document Processing functionality, an optical character recognition (OCR) technology, digitizes and converts printed documents and handwritten notes into editable text files. Just use your mobile device camera as a scanner, save the file as a task attachment, and upload to Wrike. House of Design automates their workflow Ryan Okelberry, COO/Principal at House of Design details how Wrike’s automation speeds up his team’s workflow to deliver results: “... [Wrike] has been simple enough to allow us to write recipes fairly quickly and easily without having a lot of programming experience. It is often the little things that we can write recipes and automation for that really enhance the Wrike platform.” Work smarter with automation Automate your workflows, identify at-risk work, respond quicker, and collaborate on physical documents. It’s all possible with Wrike’s Automation Engine and cutting-edge Work Intelligence™. Let Wrike show you how by starting a free trial today. While you’re at it, download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the four key areas to consider when evaluating a CWM solution, including the top 16 features for hypergrowth and enterprise teams.
11 Resources to Help You Build a Marketing Team That Can Weather Any Storm
As we head into the next business cycle, uncertainty about what’s over the horizon is pushing businesses to tighten their belts. While marketing is vital to any company or client’s success, it is often viewed as one of the most flexible. When budgets need to be trimmed, companies often start with marketing. While this may not necessarily happen in your organization in the coming months, CMOs and marketing leaders around the world are wise to take proactive steps to ensure their operations are running as tightly as possible. They’re building up business resilience frameworks that will help them weather market turbulence as it arises. Building business resilience involves eliminating wasted time and resources costing businesses in the knowledge industry over $60M each year due to productivity challenges, canceled projects, and employee churn. As marketing teams are juggling employees spread across time zones with a host of competing tools, they’re particularly vulnerable in turbulent economies. To build business resilience for a marketing team, marketers should be doing a few critical things. They should eliminate existing inefficiencies, allocate resources effectively, and maximize their team’s productivity. When CMOs can strengthen those areas, they will be able to better prove their team’s contribution to the organization’s key goals. We recently published a groundbreaking study on the Dark Matter of Work, which is the work that takes place in synchronous apps and the gaps between systems and solutions that aren't integrated. The study outlined how workplace complexity is eating into companies' profits and harming employee engagement. In marketing departments, that might look like teams struggling with bottlenecks for reviews and approvals, total communication overload, and siloed marketing tools that make collaborating across teams and time zones impossible. Our research shows that those everyday frustrations waste time, money, and your team’s energy — a single worker’s wasted time might cost a company as much as $16K every year. Eliminating even a fraction of the Dark Matter of Work your team faces will help you recoup that wasted profit by driving marketing ROI, optimizing resources, and improving productivity. As experts in working effectively, we know that robust work management software helps marketing teams recapture the energy and resources currently being lost. Work management software pulls entire organizations into a single platform, strips out wasted time spent switching apps, and provides visibility into projects so that tasks don’t slip between the cracks. To help you build better business resilience, we’ve rounded up 11 Wrike features, templates, and integrations that will help you power through uncertainty. Key features for building business resilience in marketing Automated approvals: Approvals can steal precious time from marketers. Wrike’s streamlined and automated workflows mean reviews and approvals occur seamlessly and result in clear, actionable decisions — so your team can improve productivity and focus on more impactful work. Critical insights: To fully understand your team’s productivity, you’ll need data. Wrike Insights is a first-of-its-kind performance aggregator that delivers insights on 50 tools, delivering real-time data across advertising, marketing, and social media via one simple interface. Workflow versatility: Wrike’s industry-leading Custom Item Types enable users to mirror their team’s business practices and daily task scenarios in their Wrike workspace. That means you can use your team’s preferred terminologies and behaviors, reducing wasted time further. Built-in integrations for creative teams Creative connections: Wrike integrates seamlessly with Adobe Creative Cloud. Teams can manage their assets from programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe Premiere Pro. Digital asset management: Wrike’s MediaValet integration enables users to share and manage digital assets across both platforms. Teams can attach MediaValet files to tasks, search for assets, and upload assets from Wrike back into MediaValet. Resource management features for marketing agencies and departments Accelerate resource planning: Quickly estimate project resource needs and request job role resources. With Wrike’s resource planning capabilities, you’ll be able to ensure the highest priority projects have ample coverage with visibility into resource allocation across your whole portfolio. Optimize workloads: Assigning and managing workloads has never been easier. Get an understanding of team members’ availability, capacity, and strengths at a glance, and drag and drop tasks to balance workloads more efficiently. Clear budgeting: Weathering upcoming uncertainty is going to put pressure on budgets, so Wrike’s budgeting tools will be critical in helping you accurately determine project budgets and margins. As team members track time spent on projects, you can monitor budget spend in real time to keep projects profitable. Pre-built templates At Wrike, we know that one of the biggest barriers to launching projects is getting processes in place. That’s why we’ve set up a wide range of templates to help jump-start your processes, streamline your workflows, and get your team working faster. You can try any of these templates with a free Wrike trial. Agile marketing template: If your team struggles with managing a constant stream of requests, using the Agile methodology for your marketing operation will create an effective structure to tackle that overload. Our Agile marketing template will help you get started, providing an effective way to maximize sprints and get more accomplished. Marketing operations management template: Having a handle on your entire marketing operation can be difficult. Wrike’s marketing operations management template sets you up for success, helping you manage every detail of your marketing operations with custom request forms, dashboards, and reports. Marketing calendar template: Keeping campaign tasks from falling through the cracks is critical to maximizing your marketing resources. Wrike’s marketing calendar template will ensure your entire team is on the same page so that deadlines are met and clients are satisfied. Helpful tools on Wrike’s ROI As you work to bolster resources and do more with less, learn more about the real ROI of Wrike. Try our Wrike savings calculator How Wrike customers save time, money, and increase productivity Learn four ways to measure the ROI of work management tools With this cache of resources, you’ll be ready to jump-start your business resilience framework and protect your organization from market uncertainty. Start your Wrike free trial or request a free demo to see how Wrike can help you streamline, strengthen, and thrive.
New Wrike Template and Capabilities Enable Service Management Teams to Work As One
Every organization deals with enterprise service management uniquely, but the problems encountered are usually quite similar. On a day-to-day basis, service teams – from HR to IT to finance – are often: Manually juggling repetitive tasks Unable to streamline and organize multiple requests Struggling to manage ongoing change and optimization Sound familiar? Fortunately, you're not alone or without help — Wrike’s latest Service Management template is designed to enable companies to quickly and cost-effectively establish any service team on a secure, robust, and scalable platform. And by allowing service teams to work as one with other departments in a single source of truth, companies see huge productivity gains through simplified workflows and increased visibility without the need to spend on specialized technologies that are complex, expensive, and difficult to ramp up. This is especially important for SMBs, which face challenges with security, budget, and cross-functional work. As their business scales, they will need a solution that can grow with them rather than taking on the time-consuming task of seeking out multiple other solutions to meet new demands. We’re bringing all work onto one platform. Great service management starts here Wrike’s latest template introduces consolidated request management processes that reduce manual and mundane work via automation, streamlined requests, and knowledge base management. It's the simplest and most effective way to establish the single source of truth your service management teams need to achieve great productivity and exceptional work management. Powerful, versatile, no-code tools like those provided by our IT service management template put everyday workers and citizen developers in control of their workflows so that they can spend less time on busywork and more on the projects that matter. Consolidate request and service management Streamline work and consolidate request and service management processes with request forms that are easily customizable and configurable to fit your organization’s unique workflow and needs. Unlock advanced project visibility Comprehensive, accessible dashboards provide a bird's-eye view of all the work your service management teams are involved in. Effortlessly monitor task progress, status updates, incidents, new service requests, and more. Also, view and categorize service tickets based on custom item types — such as description, location, or a specific team. Empower teams to succeed Don't leave your organization in the dark — this service management plan template provides service teams with the tools to enable self-service and build a cross-departmental knowledge base. Workers can easily access information through organized knowledge articles, reducing the overall number of help tickets and queries. Articles can also easily be built and tracked through defined workflows and tools within the template. Service management excellence Service teams represent the backbone of workplace operations — it’s essential that they have everything they need to effectively deliver their services and break down silos and barriers between teams. Wrike continues to meet growing service needs and empowers both technical and non-technical teams alike to do better work. Another recent example is Wrike's new email communication functionality with non-Wrike users. This feature moves communications with non-Wrike users, like external email exchanges, directly into Wrike. It reduces overall SaaS sprawl and removes barriers to visibility and better workflow, adding even more power and utility to the Service Management Template. Check out for yourself today how much easier it is to streamline, consolidate, and optimize your IT service management workflows. Wrike users on the Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle plans can get started with the Service Management Template here.
Collaborative Work Management Stands for Productivity
When it comes to managing work, there are a lot of different solutions out there. You may have heard acronyms like Collaborative Work Management (CWM), Adaptive Project Management and Reporting (APMR), and Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) thrown around, but what do they all really mean? And how do you choose the right one that fits the needs of your team in a digital work environment? You need a solution that is intuitive, powerful, and can easily flex to meet the varying needs of your organization, and we’ll explain why a CWM solution can do just that. First up, what is CWM? Collaborative Work Management is a market term that represents a category of work platforms where teams, departments, and even entire businesses can manage their work in one place. If you’ve ever felt frustrated or disappointed after managing a complex project (or multiple projects) using a mix of spreadsheets, email, Slack, and other apps, you’re not alone. 70% of knowledge workers feel stressed having to juggle multiple apps and systems every day, according to our Dark Matter of Work research. Most common tools are only designed for very limited use, or simple data analysis and basic work plans, and don’t meet the needs of today’s workers. Much of our daily work is complex, involving processes, people, technology, timelines, and budgets that require alignment to strategic initiatives, reporting to executives, and constant cross-functional collaboration. When you consider the complexity of all of this — a reality that is costing organizations 60M dollars each year — choosing a CWM platform to manage all of your work is a no-brainer. CWM solutions have been used by companies of all sizes since the 2000s, but they really took off in the 2010s. They are affordable (even for very large deployments), can evolve and update quickly to meet customer needs, and they represent significant cost savings for organizations that want to maximize productivity and run more efficiently. The best CWM tools can connect work in a myriad of ways across people and initiatives; they have smart features like AI to automate workflow processes, as well as robust mobile apps designed to keep work moving when you’re away from your desk. Understanding the categories: CWM vs. PPM CWM sits in the sweet spot of workplace productivity between ad-hoc collaboration tools and more niche offerings like PPM. It can be thought of as the connective tissue that streamlines work happening in disparate tools like your Microsoft Office or Google suite and email and messaging apps, and it provides a single source of truth for internal and external teams to create, plan, manage, collaborate, and report on work and processes. Portfolio and Project Management, on the other hand, represents a category of work platforms that are function-specific, and intended for planners to align programs and projects into portfolios. PPMs are designed primarily for project management offices (PMOs) with dedicated portfolio, program, or project managers, and they are much more cost-prohibitive. If you’re familiar with PPM, it means you're serious about organizing and reporting on your work, but it also means that you recognize one major deficiency of these technologies: very few people actually use them, and even fewer can use them for their actual work. This is due to limitations such as: Outdated UI (versus work platforms designed to balance planning and delivery) Complex feature sets that most of us will never use Rigid structures and hierarchies that don’t represent the workflows we use daily The need for both technical integrations (some PPMs even require integrations from their product into their own product) and long deployments with ongoing oversight CWM has actually subsumed a significant portion of PPM capabilities over the years in order to provide a universal solution to host all work at a lower cost. Understanding the categories: CWM vs APMR In another niche corner, you will find Adaptive Project Management & Reporting (APMR) — a market term for a category of technology that represents how project managers, citizen developers, and individual contributors can execute detailed project plans more seamlessly than by using point technology, like a spreadsheet, or traditional portfolio and project management technology. APMR is a subcategory of CWM technology and represents the evolution away from planning-centric technologies. If you’re a project manager or lead an outcomes-focused PMO, you’ll recognize that you sit in the middle of an imperfect Venn diagram between planning and execution. On one hand, you need the work to get done (ideally on time or even ahead of schedule) and on the other hand, you need to report progress to your executives to show how that work is helping the company achieve its goals and objectives. Companies often try to manage project timelines and progress reporting with APMR, but when you take a closer look at what makes a good work management technology, you probably need to consider collaborative work management tools instead. CWM software works for every team and every business because it’s quick to get started, speaks the language of different departments, is easy to use, scales work – no matter how complex – and brings teams together across entire organizations, all in one place. Bottom line: it’s the only work management solution your team will ever need. Why is a CWM, and Wrike specifically, the most powerful choice? Regardless of the new names and claims out there, we have been in the game for more than 15 years and understand that more technology isn't always better. Today's modern workers need a single platform — not disparate applications — that allows them to manage a multitude of workflows to streamline all work, while also having visibility into what‘s happening across the organization. This need to “work as one” is further magnified as companies are forced to take a closer look at the bottom line in this uncertain economic climate. We can confidently say that Wrike has the tools to get the job done. Wrike’s platform includes some of the most commonly-requested capabilities from our customers, and the tradeoffs customers have made with other solutions – in our category and in others – prior to selecting Wrike as the best CWM platform for their business. With Wrike, there are no tradeoffs. Top features the Global 500 demand today Custom Item Types to go beyond standard tasks and projects and enable users to create their own work item types tailored to their team’s specific culture and style; Wrike is able to define different types of work to support any team’s workflows and keep cross-functional work connected within a single source of truth Detailed project and work demand intake using dynamic request forms Basic demand prioritization and selection using either financial terms or strategic inputs Resource capacity planning and modeling across different project teams Detailed project and work planning and management Resource assignment and allocation to ensure work is assigned appropriately Task management with multiple view types like table, Kanban, calendar, and lists, that includes time-tracking and status reporting Project and work risk management Project and work change management Features, including commenting, live editors, and built-in approvals, that allow for real-time collaboration Analytics that support decision-making and help form business strategy across multiple dimensions, not just at the highest portfolio level Rich analytics, either natively within the platform or exported directly into your business intelligence and analytics stack to help guide progress on goals and objectives Artificial intelligence (AI) that supports work creation, allocation, and risk Mobile access and support across all major mobile platforms Advanced integration strategy including integrations to popular applications like Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and Slack; workflow specific integrations like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Quickbooks; data syncs between technologies like Wrike and Jira, an integration platform that connects and automates technologies across an enterprise or even an advanced API for teams that really need that configurability What to do next? We understand how important it is to have the right tools to mitigate both the financial and human costs of work complexities. If any of the above features resonate with you, it’s time to consider implementing collaborative work management. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to take a tour of Wrike or hear it straight from our customers at Wrike Collaborate, our free work management conference. If you want to get started right away, begin a free trial now! Authored by John Notman, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Wrike
The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Campaign Management
Campaign management requires diligent planning, timely execution, and a ton of knowledge and insight into the audience you're reaching out to. Let's dive into the world of campaign management and learn what it takes to bring your marketing campaigns to the next level.
Don’t Wait: Integrate Wrike Into Your Google Calendar
So, you do everything out of Wrike. It’s your work hub, your task management system of choice, and a robust tool for reporting to team leads and managers. Why not optimize the tools you have by integrating Wrike into your Google suite of services. You can start with one of the most important tools for organizing your day: Google Calendar. By integrating Wrike into your Google Calendar, you’ll increase work output by limiting the need to constantly switch between tools you use every day. Here’s why this should matter to you — and how you can do it. Context switching is a productivity killer Context switching is what happens when you quickly go from one task — or tool — to another. You may not realize how often it’s done or the impact it can have on your productivity. However, it means you’re taking longer to do routine tasks, let alone any kind of deep work. Some people forget to check Wrike No matter what industry you’re in, there’s at least one person you’re collaborating with regularly who spends a lot more time in Google Calendar and other apps than they do in Wrike. It’s important to be aware of your organization’s biggest milestones, project task due dates, and incoming tasks. Because most people are checking their Google Calendar at least once a day, you can easily turn your most important work into events in your calendar so that everyone in the company can follow along. Manage events like tasks Do you religiously manage your tasks in Wrike every day? When you integrate Google Calendar into Wrike, you can optimize the ability to stay on top of your projects. You can do all your planning for the day without leaving Wrike by turning your meetings into Wrike tasks. Additional functionality includes asking questions about meetings, requesting changes, and more, all from Wrike. By connecting Wrike into Google Calendar using Project Syncs, you can accomplish more in Wrike, collaborate more efficiently with people across the organization, and never have to switch tools again. Integrating Google Calendar with Wrike using Project Syncs is quick and easy The Project Syncs add-on for Wrike is a no-code workflow management solution that lets you connect with Google Calendar. It empowers the user to sync Wrike tasks seamlessly with your calendar. If you’re using a Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, or Enterprise Pinnacle plan, you can get access to this add-on! As long as you’re an account owner, enabling Project Syncs is as simple as going to the Subscription panel of your Wrike settings and enabling the Project Syncs trial. From there, you just need to click Create flow to start linking your Wrike projects with Google Calendar and get more out of both tools. Here’s more information on doing that. If you have any questions, or having issues connecting with your calendar, feel free to reach out to us.
Raising the Bar Again: 3 Wrike Security Enhancements to Protect Your Work
With hybrid work environments now the norm, it makes sense to manage and collaborate on all your team’s projects in a centralized hub, like a work management platform. But as teams begin to store more of their work in the cloud, at some point, they begin to ask, “who has access, and is our data secure?” It’s a fair question, and teams deserve to know that their sensitive work is safe and secure from those without permission. Wrike is committed to keeping your data safe. Today, we’re announcing the availability of three enhancements to Wrike security features that reset the standard for work management platforms: Space Level Delegation Locked Spaces Customizable User Types As a bonus, we’ve passed another series of security and privacy audits, including recertifications of SOC2 and SOC3. We first teased the security updates in our Collaborate 2021 announcement wrap-up article, and these features are aimed at giving more control to the right people while protecting your organization’s confidential data. The big three Wrike security features For context, here’s why security continues to be a driving force in our platform, according to Senior Vice President and Wrike General Manager, Citrix, Andrew Filev: “Enterprise-grade security and manageability have always played a central role in how we innovate and advance the Wrike platform. Overall increase in security risks, in addition to remote and hybrid work environments, has made data privacy a top priority for organizations. We want to ensure customers have a feeling of total security when they use Wrike, no matter where they sit in an organization. That’s why we continue to make Wrike Spaces, which are hubs for teams to house information and focus on purposeful work, and are robust yet still user-friendly. Our commitment to doing both of these things is where we are unrivaled.” Space-Level Delegation Space-Level Delegation enables teams to better democratize and organize their work by putting full rights into the hands of admins at the Space level. Now, Space admins can quickly and easily provide the right control to the right people on a task, project, or Space. This new capability not only lets teams accelerate work by building out their own workspace based on their needs and timeline, but it also lets Space admins take full ownership by choosing who has access to what, such as reports, dashboards, or calendars, in real time. They can also access and manage Custom Fields, define member lists and permissions, and create and manage Space-level request forms. Space-Level Delegation is available to Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle customers. Locked Spaces Next is Locked Spaces, which are restricted, secure Spaces used to collaborate on isolated work and get things done with complete data privacy and control. Wrike is the only collaborative work management platform to offer the capability of Locked Spaces, which allows users to take extra precautions aimed at protecting their business and eliminating risks. Unlike Public, Private, and Personal Spaces, only members of a Locked Space will be able to locate or access Space-level items or tools in Wrike and interact with other members in that Space. Whether your executive leadership team is collaborating on a sensitive project, finalizing contract details with legal, or you’re an agency working with a client, Locked Spaces ensures only approved stakeholders have access to the work items and information isn’t leaked accidentally. Locked Spaces is available to Pinnacle customers. Customizable User Types One of Wrike’s cornerstone abilities is its customizability — request forms, workflows, dashboards, etc. Now, add user types to the list. With Customizable User Types, actions like disabling status changes from collaborators or allowing external users to share tasks and folders are as simple as one click. Customizable User Types extends current Access Roles and Controlled Admin Permissions security settings and builds on Wrike’s robust user and admin controls with a new way of managing granular permissions. It provides Account owners and admins with the correct permission to set up what users can do in Wrike based on their license and role type. Customizable User Types are available to Enterprise and Pinnacle customers. This collection of security updates is best summed up by Filev: “Over the past few years, concerns around data security and confidentiality have grown exponentially as companies look for new ways to allow employees to work flexibly and collaboratively without compromising information integrity. We quell those fears with a work management platform that is not only the most powerful but the most secure, as well. With this latest round of security enhancements, we give teams and organizations the peace of mind they’re looking for.” Very few work management platforms offer as much configurability and security control as Wrike. We’re confident that these enhancements will safeguard customers’ sensitive work and reset the bar for data security. New compliance certifications To round out our security announcements, Wrike also passed another cycle of Security and Privacy audits and recertifications. These include five international security standards with the British Standards Institution and the extension of its SOC2 compliance and SOC3 reports, following an audit by Schellman & Company. For more information, visit our press release here. Trust your sensitive work data to Wrike Not all work requires the same permission levels. When your team requires more than the average, don’t settle for the status quo. Uplevel and upgrade your team’s work with Wrike security features. Start a free trial today and experience unparalleled data security from the most intuitive and robust collaborative work management solution.
How the San Francisco 49ers use Wrike
All great teams require an aligned game plan and flawless execution. Unfortunately, the complexity of today’s work environment makes both a challenge. But with the help of its innovation partner Citrix, the San Francisco 49ers are removing the complexity and noise from work, and empowering their team off the field to be as successful as their team on the field. When the 49ers first partnered with Citrix more than six years ago, the team was looking to streamline its operations and fuel collaboration. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they enabled remote work for their employees quickly to support a dispersed workforce and keep its operations running, using digital workspace solutions to stay connected and collaborate. The addition of Wrike to the Citrix portfolio was great news for the 49ers — the team was already a customer. For the past three years, the 49ers have used Wrike’s project management solution to support production of video and media assets. They turned to Wrike because they were looking for a more efficient and effective way to serve internal partners who needed these assets. “We are a fully functioning creative agency housed within the 49ers marketing department,” says Nate Steele, Manager of Production and Media Assets. Steele’s team produces everything from sponsorship videos to images for the team’s social media channels. With games almost every weekend, from September to January, plus preseason and postseason, and requests for assets to support sponsors, community engagement, and more, having a tool that could enable effective communication and the quick turnarounds required was critical to managing the flow of work. And Wrike delivers. Improved communication and visibility Before Wrike, requests and follow-ups were getting buried in inboxes, leading to miscommunication and wasted time and effort. Now, requesters complete a customized form when they need help with production of video or other media assets. The information comes to Steele’s team, and the work can move forward without multiple follow-ups, speeding the process. “We were looking for a more useful way to get information amongst 49ers internal teams. This platform allows dialogue between our team and the project requestor. It provides a robust tool for tracking effort on project request and allows collaboration on edit requests and approvals” Steele says. For example, he can provide feedback to his video producers directly in the asset, which helps to streamline the review cycle. He can also track the time spent on projects, getting valuable insights into the amount of resources used to complete a request. Blueprints Wrike’s Blueprints feature has been one of the biggest advantages for Steele’s team. Blueprints enable users to manage projects, folders, task templates, and more, and the feature is especially useful for recurring work. They were able to cut the majority of phone calls and emails around projects, while still supporting mutual decision making, from which changes need to be made to whether a project should even go forward. Blueprints helps the team to get the information they need on the front end and eliminate barriers so they can do the work. “What we were doing here was buying back time for our team of content creators,” Steele says. Ready for remote Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the team worked together in a single location, and providing feedback on projects could be as simple as a face-to-face conversation. Having Wrike in place, Steele says, was a win for his team because they were already set up to support remote collaboration. They didn’t have to scramble at the onset of the pandemic to figure out how to engage remotely (and effectively) with content requestors and keep their content creators on track as they approached the 2020 season. Learn more Learn how Citrix helped to keep the 49ers connected and collaborative as they prepared for the 2020 season. Check out the video below to learn more about Citrix and Wrike and get your free trial of Wrike today.
Folder Permissions: Greater Control Over Data Editing Rights
For many of you, Wrike has become the central hub for collaborating with team members, contractors, freelancers, clients, and partners. But as companies grow and projects begin to involve more and more people, many of you began asking us for the ability to provide more granular control over data management in Wrike, allowing you to keep company structure under control, while still giving departments a space to work without bureaucratic restrictions. In this case, the brand new Wrike Enterprise feature, folder permissions, comes in very handy because it allows you to choose what different users or user groups can do within the shared folders.For many of you, Wrike has become the central hub for collaborating with team members, contractors, freelancers, clients, and partners. But as companies grow and projects begin to involve more and more people, many of you began asking us for the ability to provide more granular control over data management in Wrike, allowing you to keep company structure under control, while still giving departments a space to work without bureaucratic restrictions. In this case, the brand new Wrike Enterprise feature, folder permissions, comes in very handy because it allows you to choose what different users or user groups can do within the shared folders. Two Access Levels: Full and Limited Imagine you've just launched a big project. You've carefully thought out its main phases, defined possible task statuses, set up milestones, and reflected all this neatly organized project structure in Wrike. Now you face a challenge. You need to keep this structure unchanged while sharing project data with people you need to collaborate with: employees, clients, and third-party vendors. On the one hand, you need to limit their access to data by restricting their rights to move and delete folders, but on the other hand, you need to give departments the full freedom to manage tasks within their areas of responsibility. This challenge can be easily handled with Wrike's folder permissions. You can easily customize user rights for each folder. Let’s take a closer look at this much-awaited feature. Wrike Enterprise now gives an individual user one of two levels of access to a folder: full or limited. A user with FULL access has exclusive rights to share the folder with others and change the access levels of other users. Your current experience when sharing folders is quite similar to full access, but without the ability to set other users' access levels. LIMITED access restricts users' editing and sharing rights for a certain folder (including all its subfolders and tasks), so that they become limited to Collaborator’s rights. It means that users can still view tasks, add comments, attach files, and mark the task completed in a certain folder, while they won’t be able to edit or manage the tasks and subfolders in it. So why add the “Limited access” option for users if we already have the “Collaborator” license in Wrike? Because these two license options have several significant differences: Collaborator User with “Limited access” rights Right to create and edit tasks and folders Can’t create or edit any tasks or folders in Wrike Adjustable on the folder level (The admin may allow the user to edit some folders, while providing limited access to others) Premium feature access (e.g., the Gantt chart, dashboard, advanced filters, etc.) No Yes Price and amount Free and unlimited According to the subscription plan This way, in terms of price and functionality, a Collaborator license may be a great option for working with freelancers. At the same time, a User license with the limited access is a better alternative for collaborating with clients because it allows the client to create and maintain a backlog of tasks, and even track the project progress on the Gantt chart, building customized reports with the help of advanced filters. Extra tip: Consider providing your newcomers with limited access to main folders. It helps you avoid issues with erroneous renaming of tasks/folders and accidental reorganization of folder structures. The same principle is valid for a cross-functional team. If one department just needs to reference the work of the other department (e.g. your marketing and analytical departments), then consider providing them with limited access to other departments' folders. Making it Work for You Here are some insights that should make access rights distribution more efficient: Use case Action required Examples Private folders that shouldn’t be viewed by anyone Don’t share folder with anyone * Personal to-do lists * Top secret business data Folders with tasks that need review, discussion, and tracking without editing task content and folder structure Set limited access to users * Cross-functional projects * Collaboration with third-party vendors * Newcomers Work in progress tasks and folders that should be managed and edited Provide users with full access to folders * Team members * Outsourced workforce (consider external user licenses) Setting the Access Level Who exactly is responsible for giving users access rights? All the users with full access rights who share a certain folder can adjust the access rights of other users for this folder and all its subfolders. What about setting an access level for user groups? In Wrike Enterprise, access can be set at both the individual user level and the user group level. Just remember that rights are always upgraded, never downgraded. So if a group has full access rights to a folder, then you can’t downgrade a single group member to limited access to that same folder. On the other hand, if the entire group has limited access, a user with full access can upgrade the level of a particular user. < To safeguard against folders becoming black holes where no one can make any revisions, there will always be one person with full access to a folder. The last user with full access won’t be able to downgrade his or her access rights (or unfollow the folder) until he or she has given full access to at least one other user. Important Facts to Remember A users’ access rights are inherited by all subfolders of a particular folder. If a user has a full access rights in a particular folder, all subfolders inherit the same access rights. The same logic works for limited access levels. Remember that you can change users’ access levels to a subfolder from limited to full, but never vice versa. If the access rights of different user groups in a particular folder vary, a user who is a part of these user groups will always inherit the higher access level. For instance, if a folder is shared with two user groups with different access levels, and you are part of both groups, you will always have full access rights. The case with different folders is very similar. If the folder is included in two others that are both shared with you (but you have different access rights for each), you will always inherit full access to this folder. Hopefully this gives you an idea how Wrike Enterprise can give you more control over data editing rights. Remember that a granular approach to the data-sharing in your company makes collaboration much smoother. To best understand folder permissions, you should take it for a test drive right now. Drop us a note at https://www.wrike.com/contact-sales/!
Export Your Filtered Task Lists to Excel
We love getting ideas from our users on how we can improve Wrike project management software. This helps us adjust our development roadmap to your needs and deliver the most popular requested project management features first. Recently, our customers who manage big projects have asked about the ability to apply various filters when exporting their tasks from Wrike to Excel. We’ve made that happen, and starting today, you can export task lists, narrowed down by specific criteria, from anywhere within your workspace. For instance, if you have some typical tasks that sometimes repeat, you might want to create a template for them. You can find these tasks by using the appropriate search criteria (1). Then, after you click on the Export button and choose Excel (2), Wrike will ask you whether you want to export all tasks or only the filtered list. Choose the second option (3), and that’s it – you get an .xls spreadsheet with the tasks you need to use as a template in the future. Obviously, this is just one example of the feature’s implementation, and we hope it will be helpful for you and your team, too!