Small Business Computing is now taking nominations for their 2009 Excellence in Technology Award. We've been heads down with improving the TeamWork Live this past year, but we are finally ready to get the word out. If you have found TeamWork Live valuable in improving your business collaboration, we would really appreciate your help in nominating us for the Collaboration/Communication category. Thank you!

Nominate us »

We have just made a change to the way due dates work for tasks assigned to a milestone. Now, if you create a task and assign it to a milestone but you do not explicitly set a due date for it, the task will automatically default to the due date of the assigned milestone. Additionally, if you later change the due date of the milestone, all associated tasks that does not have a due date explicitly set will also be updated with the new due dates. We think this is a sensible default and it should make it easier to make changes to the project. We hope you like the change.

After a lot of hard work, we are proud to announce that you can now assign milestones and tasks to multiple people. This was a very difficult feature to add since the feature impacted almost every area of TeamWork Live, but we think you will like the result. You can now assign multiple people to a task or milestone by clicking on the add icon next to the "Assign to" option. Select the users that you want to assign the task or milestone to and save. Each user will need to complete the task for it to be considered completed.

We have made a number of other minor changes too. They are listed below for your reference.

Milestones
Unassigned milestones with due dates now appear in everyone's upcoming milestones list in the dashboard. This is so everyone can stay informed about upcoming milestones. Milestones assign to specific users will still only show up in the assigned user's upcoming milestones list.

Tasks
The milestones in the "group by milestone" view of the tasks section are now sorted by due date. You can sort milestones without due date using the reorder arrows.

Add/Edit Options
2. The "Working draft?" option on the edit page has been replaced with a "Finish Later" button. This is to make the save draft feature consistent with the "send message" and "add comment" features.
3. You can now upload a file by clicking the "retrieve file from web" link and entering the URL of the document or image. This saves you time from having to download the item before uploading it to TeamWork Live.

Miscellaneous
1. If you have an invitation to a new project team, it will automatically be shown to you when you first sign on.
2. We have converted most images used in TeamWork Live to use what are known as "CSS sprites". It basically involves combining the icons used throughout the site into larger files to reduce download time. This should result in faster load time for TeamWork Live, especially for users not located in the United States.

We have rolled out many features over the last month that we would like to bring to your attention. Most of these features are designed to save you time and make it easier for you to manage your TeamWork Live account.

Tasks
1. You can now create a new milestone when creating a new task. To create a new milestone, select "New milestone..." from the milestone selection box and enter the name of the new milestone. A new milestone will be created with the specified name and the new task will be assigned to the milestone. The permission settings for the new milestone will be the same as those of the task.

Repeating Tasks
We are happy to finally announce that that repeating task feature has been completed. This feature has been planned for a long time and it has taken us much longer than expected to complete it but we think you will like the result. You can now make a task repeat by selecting the repeat frequency when creating the task. Repeating tasks must be completed in order: if you have a task that repeats weekly, you cannot complete the task due on August 15 before completing the task due on August 8.

This feature entailed a lot of changes under the hood so there might be some lingering bugs in it. Please let us know if you run into any weirdness while using the feature and we will look into it immediately.

Calendar
1. You can now use the full-page add/edit form when adding/editing an event by clicking the "Full-page form" link from the top of the quick add/edit form. Be aware that any changes you make to the quick add/edit form are not saved when you switched to the full-page form.
2. The calendar now distinguishes between completed tasks/milestones and completed tasks/milestones that require approval. Items requiring approval are white with red borders.
3. You can now view a calendar that shows all the tasks, milestones, and events across all your project teams by selecting "All project teams" from the drop-down in your personal calendar.

Drag-And-Drop Moving of Items
You can now move items in the folders section from one folder to another by clicking and dragging an item by its drag bar to the new folder. This is a big improvement over the previous method which required you to edit each item individually to change the folder it belongs to.

We are celebrating the two-year anniversary of TeamWork Live this week! TeamWork Live has matured a lot already but we still have many more improvements planned for this coming year. We would like to take a moment to thank you for your continued support and for all your great feedback.

Some highlights from the past year include:
1. TeamWork Live became profitable—Thank you! We plan on being around a long time and to continue to provide you with the best tool for managing and collaborating with others on your projects.
2. Improved email integration—You can now create items via email, add comments via email, and reply to messages via email. Expect even better integration this coming year.
3. Client permissions—Our fine-grained permission system allows you to restrict items to only those who should see it.
4. Better user interface—We have made significant improvements to the user interface to make it easier for you to see how your projects are progressing and to accomplish things more quickly.
5. Increased Storage for all plans—Our infrastructure improvements have allowed us to provide you with even more storage for the same price.

Some things you can expect from us this coming year:
1. Advanced project management features (project status, task status, task dependencies, recurring tasks, etc.)
2. Deeper customization of TeamWork Live
3. Better branding with your look-and-feel
4. More reports that allow you to better manage your projects

We have also added some new features this past month that we would like to share with you:

New User Defaults
We have completed the feature that allows you to set defaults for new users. To set up new user defaults, select "Company" from the "Admin" tab and select "New User Defaults". New users invited to the team from that point forward will automatically start with your specified defaults. This feature is only available on group plans.

Create Item Via Email Enhancements
1. You can now assign a task to a milestone when creating a task via email. Put the milestone's name in brackets in the subject line of the email to do so (i.e., [Phase One]).
2. You can also assign an item to a folder when creating an item via email. Put the name of the folder in brackets in the subject line to do so (i.e., [Marketing Materials]).

Preferences
1. You can now set up a default invitation for company teams from the company preferences. The invitations can still be customized on a per-team basis when sending out invites.
2. You can change whether milestones, tasks, or events are shown in your calendars using the checkboxes on the left side of the calendar. This can help you reduce the clutter when viewing a full calendar.

Miscellaneous
1. We have made significant improvements to the algorithm for comparing changes between revisions of an online document. The new comparison feature does a much better job of comparing formatted text.
2. You can now save a contact as a vCard by clicking on the vCard icon to the left of the contact.
3. We have added the ability to view older activities for project workspaces. To view older entries, click the page numbers at the bottom of the recent activity list.
4. Support has been added for bi-weekly events.

Bug Fixes
1. We have fixed some display bugs for recurring events.
2. We fixed a bug where the "Include clients" checkbox was not visible when sending a message from an item's detail page.

We have been working on a lot of infrastructure improvements to TeamWork Live the last couple of months so we have not been adding as many new features as we usually do. We did have time to make a few improvements, however, that we would like to share with you.

Exact Search
TeamWork Live now supports searching for an exact word. Previously, if you searched for the word completed, the search engine would return documents with the word completed, but it would also return documents with the words complete, completing, and completion. Now, if you put the word in double-quotes (i.e., "completed"), only documents with the exact word will be returned.

Permission Icons
We have updated and color-coded the permission icons to make it easier to determine the permission settings for items in your workspaces. When you move your cursor over the new permission icons, a tooltip showing the item's permission will now appear. When we first updated the permission icons, we put the permission icons next to the action icons (edit, delete, etc.) in the milestones and tasks pages. This made it difficult to easily see the permissions for all the milestones and tasks at once, however, as you have to move your cursor over each item to see its permission. We have been informed by many of you of the importance of being able to easily see the permission settings of all the milestones and tasks. With the latest update, the permission icons are now always visible and appear where the bookmark icons used to be (the bookmark icons have been moved to the end of each row). This should make it easier for you to see the permissions for all your milestones and tasks at once.

The new permission changes resulted in the removal of the ability to change the privacy setting for an item by clicking on the lock icon. To make up for it, we have added the ability to bulk change the privacy settings for tasks from the bulk update tasks page. Some of you have private tasks list that you use as templates to create actual tasks. Now you can duplicate the tasks list and use the bulk update tasks page to change its privacy settings at the same time that you assign the new tasks to your team members.

Messages
1. The messages section of your personal workspace now includes messages from all of your project teams. This brings the messages section in line with the other sections of your personal workspace in that they now all show your items across your project teams. As a result, you no longer have to go to each project workspace one-at-a-time to view the new messages for each project.
2. The search functionality for messages has been moved to a separate search box on the left hand side of the messages page. The message search functionality used to use the site search box but this was confusing because the search box would search messages when used from the messages page but would search the entire site when used from any other pages.
3. When you save a draft of a message, it now remembers whether the "Alert recipient(s) of this message via email" was checked or not.

Notify Via Email
The users you selected to notify via email when updating a milestone, task, or document is now remembered. As a result, when you update the item again, you no longer have to reselect those users as they will be selected for you. The selected users are also saved when you save a comment as a draft and return to it later to finish it.

Bug Fix
We fixed a bug where related items were not appearing if the item being viewed was not editable by the person viewing it.

We have added many new features during the past few weeks in response to your requests. We hope you like the changes and thank you again for your continued support. 

Report Enhancements
1. You can now specify on a per-team basis who can view time reports and whose times they can see. From the time report, click the "Settings" link to edit the settings. The report settings page will show you a list of all the teams you are administering. You can restrict reports so that team members can either 1) view their own time only or 2) view their own time and the time of all team members. You can also specify whether clients can view the time report. Group plan administrators can also specify the default time report permissions for new company teams by clicking the "Preferences" link from the "Company" page.
2. You can now filter the team status report so that it only shows teams that have uncompleted milestones or tasks.

Calendar
Team items in your personal calendar now show the team that they belong to. This will make it easier for you to see which team an item is for. Additionally, the iCalendar feed for your personal calendar also includes the team name in the title.

Milestones/Tasks
1. It is now possible to arrange your milestones in the milestones page. To do so, select "Arranged order" from the "Order milestones by" option. You can then drag-and-drop to reorder your milestones. The new ordering will also be reflected in the tasks page.
2. We have improved the way you can sort your milestones from the "Group by milestones" view of the tasks page. Previously, you could drag-and-drop milestones (and any associated tasks) to reorder them. This worked well when you only have a few milestones but required a lot of hand gymnastics with your mouse when you have a lot of milestones and tasks on the page. Now, instead of dragging-and-dropping to reorder milestones, you simply click on the up or down arrow to the left of the milestone name to reorder it.
3. We have separated the buttons for marking a milestone or task as completed into two separate buttons: 1) the "Mark completed" button will simply mark the task as completed and 2) the "with comment" button will display a form for you to add a resolution comment along with marking the task as completed. As a result, you no longer have to show the form unless you have a comment to add.

Messaging
You can now link a message to an existing item. Previously, you could only link a message to a new task. Now you can link a message to not only existing tasks but to any item in your workspace. This allows you to keep related messages together with the item it is about so that you can easily reference the message when you are working with the item. To link a message to an existing item, select "Link to new item" from the options menu for the message.

Preferences
You can now specify a default currency to use for entering hourly rates in for time tracking from your preferences.

Administration
1. You can now reassign the administrator role for a company to another user by selecting the "Company Information" option from the "Company" page.
2. Team administrators can now clear the activity history for a team they are administering. To do so, click the "Clear activity history" from the overview page of the team workspace that you want to clear the activity history for.

Site Branding
Administrators of group plans can now choose to display the company name alongside their company logo by editing the company preferences from the "Company" page. Previously, you could only display either the logo or the company name but not both.

Bug fixes
1. When you convert a milestone or a task to an event, the due date is now used as the start date and vice-versa. This was not being transferred correctly before, which resulted in the date being lost during the conversion.
2. There was a permission bug that prevent some users from approving a completed milestone or task. This has been fixed.

We would like to wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year! To ring in the new year, we would like to announce the following new features:

Dashboard Improvements
1. It is now super easy to update the due dates for upcoming items in your dashboard. To change a due, simply click on the date. A pop-up calendar will appear to allow you to select a new date.
2. You can now edit and send a message about an item in your upcoming list without going to its detail page first. Simply move your cursor over an item and the available options for the item will now appear.

Subtasks for Tasks
You can now add subtasks for a task. To add a subtask, go to the detail page for a task and click the "Add Subtask" link and enter a description for the subtask. Subtasks currently work the same way as the to-do items in the Note Pad feature: you can edit a subtask by double-clicking on its name and you can reorder subtasks by clicking on its name and dragging it up or down to its new position. You can take a look at the quick start video for the Note Pad feature for a demonstration of how this works. We are going to keep subtasks simple for now and make improvements as necessary.

Duplicate Associated Tasks When Duplicating Milestones
When you duplicate a milestone, you now have the option of also duplicating all associated tasks too. One use for this feature is to create a "template" milestone and its associated tasks for a process that you perform frequently. You can then duplicate the milestone each time you have to perform the process instead of creating everything manually.

Miscellaneous
1. We have updated the messages and comments feature so there is no longer a limit on how long they can be. Previously, there was a 4000 character limit for both. This should resolve some problems where forwarded emails were being cut off.
2. You can now specify whether a team member is allowed to duplicate a team when creating or editing a team (available on group plans only).

Bug Fixes
1. Clients can no longer view the personal calendar of team members (only other team members can view another team member's calendar).

We have big plans for improving TeamWork Live this coming year so please stayed tuned. Thank you again for your continued support.