When Numbers Are Not Enough: Add Comments to Your Time Entries
When you click on the "hours spent" link in the task details, you will see the text box right below the field for entering hours. You can use this text box to specify what exactly you have done so far. In the time report, you will see not only a list of time entries for each task, but also have a clue about what the time was spent on. This way, you can always provide your clients with a thorough report of what you are billing them for and ask the same from your contractors. More new handy features are on their way to come before Christmas! In the meantime, if you have ideas of what can make you more productive, please let us know at our voting forum.
Guess Who? Now You Can See Who Is Editing Files in Tasks
Looks like it’s document management month in Wrike! Before you could say wow, we’ve added one more file management feature on the heels of our recently launched Dropbox integration. Now, when someone is working on an MS Office document right from Wrike without downloading it, you can instantly see who exactly is doing this. Your colleague’s name appears next to the file title in the task’s attachment list. Let’s see when it can be helpful for you. Looks like it’s document management month in Wrike! Before you could say wow, we’ve added one more file management feature on the heels of our recently launched Dropbox integration. Now, when someone is working on an MS Office document right from Wrike without downloading it, you can instantly see who exactly is doing this. Your colleague’s name appears next to the file title in the task’s attachment list. Let’s see when it can be helpful for you. Imagine you finalized a report on the latest banner campaign and asked your colleague, Jack, to review it before you share it with your boss. For some reason, your boss suddenly wants to see it ASAP, and he also asked for a diagram that you haven’t prepared yet! In Wrike, now you see that Jack has this document open on his computer. It looks like he started reviewing it before he went away for an urgent meeting with a contractor, but you have no idea when he’ll be back … No worries, you can stop Jack’s session with the file by hovering over his name and pressing the “Unlock” button. The document is all yours now. Add and edit whatever you wish! When your colleague gets back to his PC, he won’t miss the update, as it’ll be reflected in the task’s activity stream. If you face a similar situation, remember that there’s this small, yet useful feature to help you through!
Android App Updated with Dashboards, Time Tracker, and New Widgets
In the effort to make project collaboration on the go even more efficient, we recently empowered the Wrike app for Android™ with three important features that many of you requested: the familiar multiple Dashboards and time tracker, as well as three all-new Android widgets. 1. Multiple Dashboards: Just as in Wrike's desktop version, you can now create multiple Dashboards in the Wrike app for Android. Instantly scroll through to see project statuses, meeting updates, and your most important tasks. 2. Time Tracker: We've adapted another powerful desktop feature to bring it to you on your Android device. Track the time you spend working on tasks while you're on the go. Keep accurate time logs no matter where you are by clicking the familiar time tracking button. 3. Android Widgets: This is an exciting, all-new feature specifically for our friends using Android devices — you can now add three different Wrike widgets right to your home screen: + Add new task. This simple widget has a plus button that allows you to create a new task in a pre-defined Wrike folder. Perfect for those times when you need to capture an idea and don't want to log all the way into the app. + Stream. You can display Activity Stream updates for the whole account or for a particular folder, and apply your chosen filters. Staying on top of all your updates is now as easy as glancing at your home screen. + Task list. Like the stream widget, you can also choose to display a list of tasks from within a specific folder. You can keep track of: tasks for a particular project, your own to-do list, or tasks you've assigned to someone else. If you haven't downloaded the app yet, get it on Google Play and send us your favorite screenshot of the Wrike app in action. We'd love to see how you Wrike on the go!
Dropbox Chooser and Wrike: Fantastic File-sharing Experience
Just a couple of days ago, Dropbox announced the release of a cool new feature called “Chooser”. The idea behind this update is to facilitate sharing Dropbox files through other apps. Integrating with this popular sharing tool has been on our roadmap for quite some time, so we were overjoyed by the announcement! Right after the feature was announced, we jumped at the opportunity, and today you can already enjoy the convenience of attaching Dropbox files directly to tasks and folders in Wrike with a few mouse clicks. Right after the feature was announced, we jumped at the opportunity, and today you can already enjoy the convenience of attaching Dropbox files directly to tasks and folders in Wrike with a few mouse clicks. The Dropbox integration lines up perfectly with the Wrike’s approach to file collaboration: You can access the most up-to-date file version without a time consuming re-uploading routine. Combine that with online file editing and Google Docs integration, and you have 3 powerful ways to relieve yourself from file version confusion. How does it work? In the task, right under the task description, click on the “Attach from Dropbox” link and choose the desired file. A built-in photo gallery and search function is particularly handy in finding the right file. Even if you update the file in your Dropbox every couple of minutes, your teammates will access the most up-to-date version in Wrike. We hope this update will make your file collaboration in Wrike even more convenient!
Security of your data in Wrike
You care about the security of your data. So do we. Security is an intrinsic part of our system. Our main concern for the initial design of Wrike was the security and privacy of users’ data. Our uptime is over 99%. If at some time we cannot keep our promise of 99% uptime, we will give you a week of service for free. Safe. Your data is backed up nearly every second. Wrike is hosted on our safe and reliable servers. We are running a real-time database replication. Translated into lay language, it means that your data will be backed up nearly every second. We also have recycle bin and revision history to help you recover from accidental losses and give you full, 360-degree protection. Secure. Your personal Wrike account is protected with the password. Secure access over https (SSL) is provided with the all paid accounts. Rights to your data belong to you, so if you delete your account, we delete it. We have no rights to resell your data or misuse it. We are bound by the terms of the privacy policy and covered by the laws of California. Our users are our main value. That's why we care so much about our users' value - their data security.
Popular App Do.com Shuts Down Soon: How to Safely Migrate Tasks into Wrike
Customers and friends, you may have heard the recent announcement that the task management app Do.com is going to close soon. This software has been quite popular, so this news surprised us just like everyone else. To make things easier for everyone who relied on Do.com in their work, we took care to provide a transition option that will be both smooth and quick. Wrike developers have just built an importer specifically for Do.com tasks that simplifies the whole process to just a few clicks.Customers and friends, you may have heard the recent announcement that the task management app Do.com is going to close soon. This software has been quite popular, so this news surprised us just like everyone else. To make things easier for everyone who relied on Do.com in their work, we took care to provide a transition option that will be both smooth and quick. Wrike developers have just built an importer specifically for Do.com tasks that simplifies the whole process to just a few clicks. If there are active Do.com users amongst your colleagues and friends, please let them know that Wrike would be happy to accommodate their tasks and direct them to this post with the instructions below. Here are the easy steps for migrating tasks into Wrike. For new users who don't have a Wrike account yet Please, go directly to our Do.com import page: https://www.wrike.com/docom-import.htm. There, you can create a new Wrike account and launch the import in one click. For users who already signed up for Wrike If you already have an account in Wrike, you can import your Do.com tasks via a backup file. Please, follow these steps: In Do.com, use the new Export function to generate a file with your data (the file will have a .json extension). Please note, that the export feature is only available to admins and owners of Do.com accounts. When you login to Wrike, click on your Team's name in the left pane of the workspace (1). On the next screen, click on the Menu button marked with "…" in the middle pane (2). Choose Import -> Do.com from the dropdown menu (3). In the pop-up window, select the file you generated on Step 1. The import is now in progress. Just have a bit of patience – it can take a few minutes – and that's it! Then you can go straight to getting your tasks done. In addition to the task info, your attached files, workspace and projects structure, tags and contacts will be safely imported, too. We've also taken care of your team. Other members of your Do.com account will get automatic invitations to Wrike. As a warm welcome, we'd be glad to provide these newcomers with a special onboarding bonus. If you're one of them, just drop a note to our customer care team here and they'll set it up.
Highlight Important Points In Tasks With the New Color Marker
Working on task descriptions in Wrike with your peers is easy and fun thanks to our lightning-fast Live Editor. In fact, the descriptions serve like online documents! They are saved in real time, can be edited by several people simultaneously, and have the essential formatting tools. And today, we enhanced the text formatting toolkit with a color marker to help you be sure everyone notices important points. Another great way to use colors is creating your team’s secret color coding scheme ;-) For example, when you’re sharing ideas with each other in Wrike, you can mark your favorite in green, and give less appealing suggestions a red mark of disapproval. The great news is that the marker is transparently integrated with other tools, like MS Word and email. If you paste text with color highlights from another source, it remains highlighted in the task. Since color palettes vary in different editing tools, the shade gets adjusted to its closest equivalent in Wrike. For example, pink becomes red, and brown is converted into black. How about coloring up some of your Wrike tasks? :)
New Image Viewer in Wrike to Help Marketing and Creative Teams
Creative teams, as well as other marketing department roles who frequently add images to tasks in Wrike via email, will be pleased with Wrike’s great new task management feature: the image viewer. This tool gives you a quick and nice-looking view of your images, screenshots and photographs in the task description. When you send an email to Wrike, Wrike elegantly converts it into a task. Thanks to the new image viewer, you can see neat thumbnails of all images that were inserted in that email (1) while browsing your tasks in Wrike (2). You also can get full-size views of these images in a single click! To see the image in detail, you simply click on its preview to zoom in. The new viewer is really handy for working with several images that were added to a task description via email. In the image viewer, you can quickly switch between the images by simply hitting the arrows on your keyboard, play a slideshow (3) and drag images around the screen (4). Many marketing and creative teams work with images on a daily basis in Wrike. With the new image viewer, there is no need for you to download tons of design mocks, screenshots and photographs to examine each of them. The full-size images are only one click away! Such a quick and convenient way to view images will help you save time and make your task management experience with Wrike even more enjoyable. You are welcome to try the feature today and share your thoughts and feelings with us!
Customer’s Tip of the Day: How to Make the Management of Your Freelance Staff More Efficient
Working with freelancers may seem challenging from time to time, as keeping them synced with your team isn’t always an easy thing to do. Since freelancers have a floating schedule, often work remotely and deal with separate tasks, rather than the whole project, they can easily fall out of the loop. However, one of our customers efficiently manages the work of 8 freelancers at the same time. Interested to know how? Take a sneak peek with us into their way of successfully organizing the team work. Customer’s background FreestyleXtreme is a Bristol-based web shop that specializes in accessories, apparel and sports equipment for almost all forms of extreme sports. Recently, the team has been focused on getting into new territories and, therefore, had to work with a number of freelance translators to localize their website in different European languages. Customer’s tip: “Wages are the biggest expense in our company, so it’s critical for us to find the most optimal way to manage the team’s workload, especially when it comes to the part-time workers,” shares Ben Robert Richardson, the founder of FreestyleXtreme. He understands that if there are too many tasks assigned to freelancers, they may run out of time and miss critical deadlines. At the same time, if freelancers don’t get enough of work, the company’s efficiency will suffer. To take most of their time, FreestyleXtreme’s team has come up with several guidelines that make it easier to synchronize their workload. Here’s what helps them make freelancers the same part of the team as full-time workers. Dedicate a fair amount of time to the onboarding process According to FreestyleXtreme team, the best way to familiarize people with a new system is to let them take their time with it. On the first workday, the team lets the new person spend the time he or she needs to get familiar with the new tool. The team members explain the benefits of Wrike and the way it works. Then the newcomers usually get some time to figure out how the system works on their own. Share your company’s vision with freelancers Another important part of the onboarding process is to make part-time translators enthusiastic about what they do. Team members explain to the freelance translators that they are now the company’s voice in the new countries and that their work is valuable for the company. As a result, motivated workers take more responsibility for their assignments. Let the freelancers know about your goals in advance Scrum methodology helps a lot in planning for the FreestyleXtreme’s team. They run regular monthly meetings and set major deadlines several weeks in advance. This ensures that part-timers will have enough time to complete important tasks marked on their work schedule. Then each week, the head of each department checks up on the progress to make sure there are no stumbling blocks on the way. Assign a team member to be a point of contact for your part-timers There is one full-time member on FreestyleXtreme’s team who manages the workload of the freelance workers and acts as the central point of contact for the project updates. This helps to avoid conflicts and make sure important details don’t slip away. Have regular progress check-ups All freelancers in FreestyleXtreme have a five-minute morning meeting with the supervisor to go through their tasks for the day on Wrike. Manager looks through the project’s progress, clarifies the details, and adjusts Wrike schedules accordingly. Since freelancers normally work just 2 or 3 days per week, such approach makes sure everyone’s on the same page, even when part-time workers are out of the office. Selective sharing helps vary the level of involvement The easiest way to manage freelancers’ work is to put all tasks assigned to them in a separate folder in Wrike. With the selective sharing, you easily choose how much of the project data you want your freelancers to see. You can share only related tasks with each person, and at the same time, monitor the progress of all freelancers in the folder’s Activity Stream. If you feel like you want to involve part-time workers more in the project, you also can share other particular tasks or subfolders with any of them. For instance, you might share a subfolder with the project schedule. Keep everything logged in Last but not the least comes a simple rule of FreestyleXtreme’s team - no matter how small the task is, it should be always logged into Wrike project management tool! This way, nothing gets lost, even if it was backlogged months ago. To learn more about FreestyleXtreme team’s workflow and managing the extreme sports equipment business, watch our podcast with Ben Robert Richardson! Do you also apply any of these principles in your team’s work? Or do you organize your work with freelancers differently? “Wrike has enabled us to effectively manage our team’s time and be more productive! All tasks are now transparent, so at any time I can see the progress along with any problems, and also learn how different members of our staff are handling their workload. We have now developed an ethos that, no matter how small a task is, it is put into Wrike, so nothing is overlooked or forgotten!” Ben Robert Richardson, founder of FreestyleXtreme
Save Time with Duplicate Tasks & Subtasks
Ever wanted to duplicate a single task and its accompanying subtasks instead of the entire folder? If you create recurring tasks for clients, work on series of similar tasks, or need to develop a project template from a single task, the new Duplicate task feature will save you hours on manual routine.
Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In
We’ve come a long way in a short time during this blog series. So far we’ve detailed: Leveraging an organized project intake method, rather than managing work in spreadsheets Enhancing team collaboration and speeding up design asset approvals Automating repetitive tasks and moving work forward fast Improving client transparency, sharing, and tracking project progress The final article is about digital advertising reporting, managing team resources, and ensuring all your work stays secure. Compiling digital campaign data is laborious Digital marketers have more data at their fingertips than they can manage, and as advertising spend continues to rise, the need to optimize campaigns grows stronger. The growing digital advertising spend only adds to the mountain of data marketing executives are accumulating elsewhere in automation and analytics platforms. Meanwhile, CMOs and other marketing leaders have identified two blockers to effectively using analytics: Proving the value of analytics to marketing efforts Demonstrating the overall impact that investing in data will have on their organization Curating all the available data is challenging because everyone, including non-technical members, must be able to view, interpret, and act on it in real time without requiring external resources. Of course, numerous BI reporting tools can tap into the digital marketing channels, yet the data often requires an analyst to interpret it for marketing team members. Even when data is extracted by data reporting tools, it’s not standardized in a uniform view. YouTube and LinkedIn, for example, have “subscribers” and “followers,” respectively. Both are the same metric but are traditionally looked at separately. After standardizing the data, presenting it in an actionable way remains a struggle. Digital marketing moves too fast for teams to mess around attempting to interpret the findings so they can iterate in real time. Think about ad auctions where it takes, at most, 300 milliseconds to complete an auction, of which billions occur every hour. Data review and adjusting strategy that takes weeks or months isn’t acceptable. Marketing leaders must have complete visibility and an easy way to automate data collection so they can iterate in real time to optimize results. Balancing team workloads is an ongoing issue If you collaborate with freelancers, an agency, or a professional services team, you know that to maintain profitability, team workload management is crucial. Too much work and you’ll have a long backlog you’ll never get to address. Not enough work and you may struggle to keep everyone working at full capacity. In both scenarios, you need a workload management tool that empowers you to reprioritize and reassign work in an instant. Then, there’s the issue of billable versus non-billable work. Not maximizing billable hours opens the door for more non-billable activities that won’t contribute to the bottom line. When you don’t have full visibility into everyone’s capacity and work coming down the pipeline, how can you expect to balance their workload and maintain profitability? It’s an ongoing headache and one that can be avoided once you have a CWM solution with built-in capabilities for time tracking and resource management. Your data isn’t behind lock and key Company-wide, teams operate with a variety of sensitive information — financial and legal documents, employee records, upcoming product announcements — that requires extra safeguarding. Coupled with the digital transformation era and the global shift to cloud computing and securing data gets even more complicated. From the organization’s perspective, the cloud serves two key benefits: huge savings and the convenience of accessing resources and data without having to manage the servers that store the data. Meanwhile, these same companies also want to enjoy the benefits of collaborative work technology, especially highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. These industries must comply with even more strict rules, so they often forgo using any cloud apps. All want to be reassured that their work will only be accessible to those with permission and won’t fall into the wrong hands. Without that level of enterprise data security, companies run the risk of failing to comply with federal regulations but also losing their customers’ trust. But who controls the data and who has access? If you don’t know or aren’t satisfied with the answer, look for a CWM that offers enterprise data security software with encryption codes and a digital paper trail of who accessed the data and when. How Wrike solves each pain point Wrike Insights Wrike’s advanced reporting and business intelligence enables you to sync with 50+ apps for real-time digital campaign performance data, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, AdRoll, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, TikTok, and more. By unlocking this cross-channel analysis, users get 360-degree visibility into campaign performance and where to iterate for the best results without requiring BI reporting tools or data analysts. Built-in data visualizations and analytics dashboards will help your team be more confident on where to take action to maximize ROI. Wrike Resource Management As workloads increase and your team scales, Wrike Resource Management allows complete team availability at a glance with shared tasks, folders, and projects so that managers can reprioritize or reassign work as necessary and optimize performance. It’s a single, collaborative workload management tool that anyone — even external stakeholders — can access from anywhere. Here you can plan, schedule, and allocate resources to set priorities and distribute work. The built-in time tracker and detailed timesheets let you measure effort and review how long projects take to complete. Meanwhile, the Workload view allows you to boost performance and prevent employee burnout by reassigning and reprioritizing tasks based on bandwidth. With this additional transparency, team leads can manage dependencies using Gantt charts and prevent bottlenecks from happening via Table view. Packaged all together, it’s true end-to-end quote-to-cash visibility where you can balance team workloads and help ensure profitability. Wrike Lock Keeping data secure in the modern age goes beyond username and password login details. Wrike’s enterprise data security provides users with customer-managed encryption keys along with an extra layer of encryption by locking the keys to their data. Think of it this way — it’s akin to having a secret code name to get access to the vault’s password, before you can see what’s behind the vault. Furthermore, Wrike doesn’t store your master encryption key, so only you have access. Wrike customer feedback Derick Dahl, Director of Product at Sonance, speaks about the benefits his marketing team has experienced using Wrike Resource for team workload management: “Wrike Resource helped control the otherwise overwhelming nature of our marketing team’s work by allowing us to identify and correct overtaxed employee workloads, reducing the average number of active projects per employee from 12 down to three.” Torsten Mühlhoff, Marketing Controlling & Corporate Projects at ABUS, speaks to the value of Wrike’s security features: "It’s easy to assume that an on-premise solution would be more secure than the cloud. However, our provider and its partners are much better equipped to guarantee the security we need. We’ve also reduced our admin workload and made life easier for our own IT....Wrike is one of the most secure collaborative work management platforms out there, and we really feel we’re in the right hands." Select the best CWM solution for your team This article series isn’t an exhaustive list of pain points that hyper-growth and enterprise teams experience and how a CWM solution can be the answer. As you evaluate vendors, what is exhausting is comparing features head-to-head and reading reviews. Get your free copy of our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them, which highlights the 16 most important CWM features to answer the most common pain points. Try out Wrike today and see why 20,000+ customers rely on our collaborative work management platform to streamline their workflows, get work done faster, and scale.
New in Wrike: Two-Way Sync with GitHub
With your projects and tasks in Wrike, it can be challenging to work with technical teams that use other systems like JIRA and GitHub. Limited visibility into what they’re doing makes it harder to manage the projects they’re involved in and you’re stuck communicating outside of Wrike, separate from where you and your team collaborate. Because we strive to keep you insanely productive, we recently released an integration with JIRA, and now we’re excited to announce our new integration with GitHub, also powered by Unito. Just as with JIRA, our integration with GitHub is a two-way sync, giving you unmatched access to the work that development teams are doing and enabling you to collaborate with them just as if they are right there in Wrike with you. The Power of Full Two-Way Sync Integrating different systems is essential, to ensure information isn’t stuck in one place. An integration can be as simple as exporting and importing data, or involve synchronization, which ensures information is always the same across systems. But, all synchronizations aren’t the same: one-way syncs only copy information in one direction, manual syncs need to be started by you, and some syncs transfer only limited information. Our new GitHub sync is best-of-breed: it’s two-way, so changes are copied in both directions between Wrike and GitHub, happens automatically (and nearly immediately), and enables you to sync all your important information, including custom fields. Sync with GitHub and Everyone Wins You stay in Wrike and they stay in GitHub. You and developers both benefit because you both stay in your system of choice and don’t have to learn something new, while still enjoying seamless collaboration. Project Managers coordinate across teams and systems in one place. Plan projects that have a mix of tasks that come from GitHub and tasks that exist only in Wrike, and maintain Wrike as your single source of truth. Executives get multi-project visibility and reporting, all in Wrike. Run reports in Wrike on work being done in GitHub and eliminate the effort and delays of getting updates from different teams. What You Can Do With Our GitHub Sync Here's some of what you can do with the new GitHub two-way sync: Create new issues in GitHub from within Wrike Leave comments in Wrike and they will appear in GitHub, and vice-versa Automatically see status updates and other changes to issues Sync GitHub milestones to due dates or custom fields in Wrike There's much more. Check out our Help Center for more details. And It’s Free for a Limited Time Both our new GitHub sync and our existing JIRA sync are free to try, but for a limited time only (you have until February 1st, 2017). They’re available to any user of a paid Wrike account, and are also included as part of a Wrike trial. Try them out today and tell us what you think below!
Filter: Track time and activities with Wrike
Recently we activated a filter in Wrike as one of the tools that make time and activities tracking easy. The filter doesn’t only select the tasks or folders you need, it helps you manage your information and track projects. Filter activities you work on together Let me demonstrate how it works. You want to have a picture of all tasks that John is in charge of and shares with Mary and that are already completed. So, you want to know how productive they are or simply remind yourself of what activities they worked on together. Filter all of the activities by status – choose “Completed”, then “Assigned to” – John and “Shared with” – Mary. Or vice versa: first by responsible, then by status. No matter. Now you have a list of the selected tasks. The benefit of this approach is that you not only can track separate projects, but also cross-folders. You may know what your peers or sub ordinatas are in charge of and what kind of tasks they perform.
Focus on What's Most Important: Try the New Full-Screen View Of Tasks
According to different productivity methodologies and techniques, staying focused on one action item at a time is key to efficient task management. With this in mind, we added the ability to open a task in full screen mode, so it’s much easier for you to concentrate on a particular task.According to different productivity methodologies and techniques, staying focused on one action item at a time is key to efficient work. With this in mind, we added the ability to open a task in full screen mode, so it’s much easier for you to concentrate on a particular task. Open a task in the full screen mode Now, whether you are working on a huge report or simply putting up the corporate party schedule in real time, you can allocate the entire screen to it. Just click on the Menu icon and choose “Enter full screen”. Alternatively, use our special shortcuts if you want to save extra seconds/mouse moves: Alt+Shift+F on Windows (Ctrl+Shift+F on Mac). To get back to the task list in the folder, press ESC or click on the “Exit full screen” menu option. Open a task in a separate tab Even though most productivity gurus say multitasking can’t be productive, sometimes we need to switch between several interconnected tasks. For example, during the brainstorm session you can jump between relevant tasks right as you discuss them and instantly add info, instead of struggling to remember and log everything after the meeting. To open a task in a separate tab, use the corresponding option under the Menu icon or the Alt+Shift+O (Ctrl+Shift+O on Mac) shortcut.
Projects: A New Way to Organize!
We built Wrike to be extremely flexible so it fits the way you organize, manage, and report on work without forcing you to change the way you work. For years, the basic building blocks of Wrike have been Folders, Tasks, and Subtasks. Now we’ve added Projects, making it easier to track larger initiatives in Wrike. Manage Your Largest Goals Use Projects to manage a group of tasks that are part of a larger goal. With Projects, you can track the status and due dates of the project separately from individual tasks and can store files and notes that need to be accessible to the project team. Simplify your workspace by separating Projects from Folders Store project files and notes in a central place instead of inside tasks Easily report on status across all your projects in one view (Enterprise plan) Working With Projects is Easy Projects and Folders both appear in the left-hand panel and projects are identified by a clipboard icon. If you have existing folders that are already being used for projects you can convert them by right clicking the folder and selecting "Turn into Project." Create new projects from the + button next to the Projects (formerly labeled Folders). Projects Makes Reporting Easier When reporting to executives, sometimes tasks provide too much detail. With Wrike’s Enterprise edition, you can build custom client status reports just for Projects, so it’s easy to provide a birds-eye view of the project status with a push of the button. Best Practices for Using Projects, Folders, Tasks, & Subtasks Use Folders to categorize work. For example, folders can be used to group projects and tasks by team, by client, by stage of work, or however fits your team best. Folders can contain subfolders, projects, and tasks. Use Projects to manage a group of tasks that are part of a larger goal. With Projects, you can track the status and due dates of the project separately from its individual tasks, and can store files and notes that need to be accessible to the project team. Tasks are the activities you need to complete. They can be standalone activities or part of a larger project. Finally, Subtasks are the steps you need to take to complete a task. Subtasks are particularly useful if different people are responsible for each step. Need more info? Check out the Projects page in our Help Center or leave a comment on this post.
Brand-new iPhone and Android Apps: Be Mobile and Productive!
Warm up your fingers to tap and swipe as we have great news for you: Wrike’s fantastic mobile apps are ready-to-use! Now, whether you have just a couple of spare minutes or half an hour, you can invest the time into your work productivity: Check task updates, take part in the discussions, adjust schedules, instantly spot important tasks and much more! Sounds great? Then it’s high time to download your mobile app from the Apple Store or Google Play. In August 2014, we relaunched our iOS app! Check it out on the App Store! Warm up your fingers to tap and swipe as we have great news for you: Wrike’s fantastic mobile apps are ready-to-use! Now, whether you have just a couple of spare minutes or half an hour, you can invest the time into your work productivity: Check task updates, take part in the discussions, adjust schedules, instantly spot important tasks and much more! Sounds great? Then it’s high time to download your mobile app: The new apps are incredibly intuitive, so let us quickly run over the main points just to give you the look and feel of mobile Wrike.The core of the app is the “magic button” that allows you to quickly switch between different views. All in all, there are five of them to address your main productivity needs: Stay on top of your tasks. The “To-do” gives you a perfect overview of your responsibilities, deadlines and important tasks across all projects. You can either focus on your own tasks or check the plan of a particular team member. Tip: Right swipe a task to mark it complete. Keep up with the project’s progress. Yeah, that’s our favorite – the Activity Stream, a digest of the latest news, task updates and discussions. Now you can keep your finger on the pulse of your team’s work whenever and wherever you want. Tip: To add a comment to any entry, tap on the corresponding update and then type your message. Take good care of your ideas. In the “Someday” view, you’ll find all the tasks without the start and due dates. It’s a perfect place to neatly organize all your ideas and “someday/maybe” plans. After you’re done with urgent tasks, open the “Someday” section and spend time on your backlogged tasks. Tip: When you need to add the due date, tap the task to open the task details, tap the “no date” icon in the upper right corner and choose the required due date. Make use of every second. The benefits of time-tracking are familiar to all information workers, but we’ve prepared a special bonus for our mobile app users: a “Timer” that counts the time you’re spending on a task. And don’t forget to leave a comment on your time entry so that you can easily recall the essence of your task later. Tip: To put the timer on, tap on the “+” at the bottom of your Time Tracker screen and choose to start tracking. Keep an eye on the “inactive” work. Don’t let “inactive” tasks disappear forever in the whirls of day-to-day work. The “Archived” view gives you quick and easy access to all completed, cancelled and deferred tasks. Tip: Left swipe a task to put it on today’s to-do list or move it to the recycle bin.Update: Get the bird’s-eye view of project plans on the go with the Gantt chart view right on your iPhone or Android (beta) Find more useful tips and tricks in our help section for Android app or iPhone app. To make a long story short, our main idea behind developing these apps was to assist you in improving your productivity habits. In the following video, Andrew Filev, the CEO of Wrike and a faithful evangelist of Wrike’s “mobilization,” explains our vision of “mobile productivity.” More hacks for convenient use With these 5 views, you can slice and dice your team’s work to get the perfect insight into the progress. Though they are so different in nature, there are three “hot spots” that are common for all of them and remain on the screen at all times: 1) The huge “plus” button at the bottom of the screen that provides you with an easy way to create new tasks; 2) The “search” icon at the right-hand bottom corner that lets you find people, tasks and folders from any part of your mobile Wrike; 3) Filter options at the top of the screen that allow you to drill down to tasks placed in a certain folder or assigned to a certain team member. We are just scratching the surface of what iPhone and Android apps can do for you. You can also read this post in Serbo-Croatian.
Team Collaboration Tools: Why Wrike’s Features Are Essential for Team Success
Just because more teams are dispersed now than pre-pandemic doesn’t mean work is slowing down. If anything, the pace of work for many teams remains the same or even sped up. More work can translate to more available resources and it’s not always in-house. Freelancers and agencies remain valued team members and can’t be forgotten since they’re relied upon to get work done. Keeping everyone inside and outside your organization up to speed on work proves to be more challenging as workloads increase and more team members get integrated into your workflow. That leads us to the next pain points in our series. Pain: Work visibility is too limited Teams need to have an overview of all their projects and be able to share work views with external stakeholders securely. When all stakeholders can’t see project progress at a glance, they risk missing updates and deadlines. As timelines change, all dependencies should dynamically change as well. You don’t want to spend time updating related work just because one item changed. There’s technology to assist with that — team collaboration tools are essential to helping your team clarify their work. Having a high-level calendar view of all your team’s work is necessary to see every project in progress. However, that’s not sufficient since individual tasks and projects need to be monitored at the micro-level, too, especially when multiple departments are tracking the projects in the context of their own unique workflows and reporting. Therefore, having a system to label work for multiple teams without duplicating efforts would make everyone happy. Pain: Reporting isn’t simplified and requires experts In a few clicks, can your team collaboration tools determine how many of your projects are new, in progress, under review, completed, overdue, and canceled? Can you identify any bottlenecks and resolve issues so that more of your team’s work avoids being delayed? If you answered “no” to either question, it’s time to reevaluate your reporting process. You need deep visibility and insight to ensure your team’s best results. But not all reports have the power to give you adequate insight, but the bigger problem is, not everyone has access to separate BI tools. Or maybe you rely on a business analyst to pull and analyze the results. Either way, collecting and interpreting the data on a weekly or monthly basis is a drag. Not only does your reporting process need to provide the necessary insight, but the reports should be visual with options like pivot tables, calendar heatmaps, pie charts, and bar charts so that you can understand the results. Furthermore, reporting dashboards should be interactive that get updated dynamically, and be customizable to how you work so that you can focus more of your time on producing results. Solving each pain with Wrike Wrike’s shared team calendars allow everyone to visualize priorities. When work is automatically synced to a shared calendar, it’s easier to see deadlines and future work coming soon. Calendars in Wrike’s online collaboration tool are customizable to match team needs, like the beginning of your fiscal year, or viewable by day, week, quarter, and year for a detailed snapshot of your team’s progress. Expand or collapse selected layers to get an overview of department, team, and individual workloads while spotting any potential bottlenecks and adjusting deadlines as needed. At the micro-level, Wrike’s cross-tagging capabilities increase transparency among all teams and open up the visibility of your work so that everyone involved can track progress. It’s not limited to tasks, either. Subtasks, folders, milestones, phases, and entire projects can be cross-categorized into multiple work streams. For example, to cross-tag a folder, navigate to the Space that has the folder you want to tag, and then follow these steps: In List view, use the folder icon in the top right to open the info panel. The folder's tags are listed under the title. Click + to add a tag and search for your desired folder in the dropdown list. To remove a tag, click the “x” next to the tag you’d like to remove. Cross-tagging benefits a wide variety of teams and individuals. Whether you’re part of a marketing team looking to open up visibility to others, doing daily standups to report on work in progress, or a Project Manager in a PMO ensuring that all work gets done on time, tagging your work makes it more accessible to those who need it. This functionality has proven to be a game-changer for customers and although competitors have cross-tagging abilities, their functionality is extremely limited to the task level. To track project progress, Wrike Analyze gives your team visibility and business intelligence without requiring access to a separate BI tool. Through our online collaboration tool, you can build customizable reports based on your use cases and choose from a range of visuals to convey the results. Any dashboard you build will update dynamically so you can get a snapshot of how your team is performing and where you’re experiencing bottlenecks. Topgolf relies on Wrike calendars and reports Meredith Selden, Senior Marketing Project Manager at Topgolf gives her thoughts on Wrike calendars and reporting: “Wrike is best for complex cross-functional projects where customizable calendars, dashboards, and reports are needed to automatically roll-up (to) projects and results in data... Applicable to any department and both waterfall and Agile methodology.” Alex Bacon, Assistant Communications Manager at Moneytree experienced the power of cross-tagging in Wrike: “...Through Wrike’s platform, we were able to create and deploy a new section on the blog in 2.5 days, complete with content. Wrike kept everything organized and transparent, so it was always very easy to see the status of the different elements and because of the tagging feature we were able to keep things moving very quickly...” Improve transparency and share work securely Increased workloads doesn’t mean that tracking work and transparency have to take a back seat. A team collaboration tool must be able to scale at your team’s pace and workload. Anything else is unsatisfactory. Download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the 16 most important components of a CWM solution. Then, try out Wrike’s online collaboration tool to see why 20,000 customers rely on our platform to get work done faster, share their work securely, and keep team members updated on project progress.
ContactsSync Makes G1 Users’ Lives Easier
The G1 phone is one of the most anticipated devices since the iPhone official release. One of the reasons for this is that it is the first phone empowered by Android, a complete, open mobile phone software stack. Android is the creation of Google, along with the Open Handset Alliance. Numerous experts have cited Android as a huge step forward toward openness in software, as this is the first stack open to third-party applications. The good news is our team decided to use Android's openness as an opportunity to make the new phone owners' lives easier. We have extensive knowledge and experience in incorporating e-mail into project management, and we understand the importance of maximizing the collaborative capabilities across as many devices as possible. We joined our efforts with Intermedia, the leading provider of collaboration and productivity SaaS solutions, and introduced a new application allowing users to easily download all of their Exchange contacts to their G1 phone. Our aim was and will remain to save you time and increase your productivity. ContactsSync is another step in this direction. The application is absolutely free, so you are welcome to download and enjoy it right now! You can also read more about ContactsSync.
New Hotkeys Make Navigating Wrike a Breeze
After spending the better part of 10 years as a video editor, keyboard shortcuts are like breathing to me. If you're like me, when you type, your thumb instinctively reaches for the Ctrl key, and your opposite finger effortlessly finds its way to a hotkey, sometimes before your brain even realizes what command it's looking for. That's why I'm excited to announce that Wrike has completely rethought our keyboard shortcuts, and has released a whole new set to speed up your collaboration experience in our workspace. After spending the better part of 10 years as a video editor, keyboard shortcuts are like breathing to me. If you're like me, when you type, your thumb instinctively reaches for the Ctrl key, and your opposite finger effortlessly finds its way to a hotkey, sometimes before your brain even realizes what command it's looking for. That's why I'm excited to announce that Wrike has completely rethought our keyboard shortcuts, and has released a whole new set to speed up your task management and collaboration experience in our workspace. Mapping Keyboard shortcuts sounds simple, but in reality quite a bit of thought needs to go into making the hotkeys instinctive, without causing confusion. For example, should "C" mean "Create Task" or "Complete Task"? These both start with "C", but have very different results. During my testing on my PC, I found our new shortcuts quick to memorize and put into action. Because browser shortcuts are activated by the Ctrl+Shift key combination (Shift+Command on a Mac), Wrike's shortcuts are activated with Shift+Alt. (On a Mac, you'll use Shift+Control). I'm excited to share a few of my favorites from my initial day of using them. Create, assign and complete tasks First and foremost, Shift+Alt+N will create a new task for you from anywhere in the workspace. Give the task a title, and use Tab to navigate through the commands of Assigning a task, picking a date, and jumping into the live editor. Press Shift+Alt+dot to assign the task to yourself, and once you're done, you can mark the task completed with Shift+Alt+Enter. Open a tasks in full screen view Another Shortcut I found very helpful is also a brand new feature: Use Shift+Alt+F to open your task in full screen view. It's a great way to reduce distractions, and focus for a few minutes. Press the same keys again to return to the classic three-pane view. Search tasks If you need to find a task quickly, use Shift+Alt+S to activate the search panel and start typing. Those are just a few examples of some of our new shortcuts. If you've never been a Hot Key user, It's never a better time to start. I recommend trying to incorporate 1 new shortcut into your workflow at a time. Today, start with Creating a new task (Shift+Alt+N) and use it until it becomes instinctive. Then pick another, and train yourself to use that. I like to think of it this way - If It takes me 5 seconds to grab my mouse and click the function I need, and I do that 300 times a day, that's 25 minutes a day I've spent clicking around my desktop. Who would argue with cutting that number in half? Improve your efficiency and try our Shortcuts today! Download the cheatsheet with all shortcut keys and keep them at your fingertips.