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Official Blog for TeamWork Live |
by TeamWork Live on August 16
It's only been two short weeks since our last announcement and we
already have some exciting new features that we would like to share
with you.
Group Projects By Clients
We have finally finished adding support for grouping projects by
client companies. This has been our most-requested feature so we
are happy to finally make it available to everyone. You can now
create client companies and add client users to those companies by
clicking on the "Clients" link from the "Admin" menu. You can then
associate the client companies with your projects (either when
creating a client company or when creating a project). Doing so
will result in the projects in your project workspaces menu to be
grouped by the client company, making it easier for you to see
which of your projects are for which clients. In addition, when you
add new client users to a client company, the client user will
automatically be given access to all the projects associated with
that client company. The same is also true when you remove a client
user from a client company.
If you only manage internal projects, you can still use the client
grouping features to group related projects. For example, you can
create a sales team as a client company and link all your
sales-related projects to the company. This will result in all your
sales-related projects being grouped together for easier
access.
Daily Status Report
The daily email digest has been improved and is now called the
daily status report. Similar to your dashboard, the daily status
report allows you to see, at a glance, what has recently occurred
in your projects and what you have coming up. The report now
includes all your upcoming, overdue, and high priority milestones,
tasks, and events in addition to the list of recent activities
from all of your projects. The report will make it even easier for
you and your project members to stay on top of your projects.
Recent Projects
If you are managing more than ten projects, the last five projects
that you accessed will now be listed at the top of the project
workspaces menu under the "RECENT PROJECTS" heading. This allows
you to quickly switch between the projects that you are currently
working on without having to search for them in the projects
list.
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by TeamWork Live on August 4
It's been over three months since our last blog post so we have a
lot of news to share with you. The most exciting news is that
the long-awaited API is finally available for your use. The
API took a lot of our development resources and, now that it has
been completed, we look forward to adding many of your other
frequently requested features in the next few weeks (including the
ability to group your projects by client companies).
Application Programming Interface (API)
We are happy to finally announce the release of the TeamWork Live
API. You can use the API to integrate TeamWork Live with
third-party applications, dashboard widgets, or your own custom
software. The API has been a long time coming and we appreciate
your patience as it took us much longer to develop it than we
initially anticipated, but we wanted to get it right. We are
excited to see all the great applications that you develop using
the API. You can get more information on using the API by clicking
the "API" link from the "Admin" menu. The API is currently in
BETA so please let us know if you run into any issues.
Data Export
One of the first features that we developed using the new API is a
data export feature for your projects. You can now export all the
data from individual projects for backup purposes or for import
into another application. We currently support exporting project
data in JSON or XML format. The data export feature can be accessed
by clicking the "Data Backup/Export" link from the "Admin"
menu.
Retainers Report
We have added a retainers report that team members can now view to
see the retainer hours that have been budgeted and accrued for
their projects. The report supplements the "Retainers" admin page,
which allows administrators to view and override the default
retainer hours for a project. The retainers report is only visible
if you have projects with retainers-type budgeting.
Customizations
1. It is now possible to select the sections of a project workspace
that you want to be available to team members and clients. This
allows you to hide sections that you don't plan on using to make
the site easier to navigate. You can customize the available
sections for each project when creating or editing it.
Additionally, you can specify the default sections which should be
available from the company preferences.
2. If you do not use the budgeting and time tracking features, it
is now possible to disable them from your company preferences. This
makes the site cleaner and easier to use for your team members and
clients.
Branding
We have increased the maximum size of the logo that you can upload
from 24x to 36px to make it easier to see. If you have previously
uploaded a logo, you will need to upload the logo again to take
advantage of the larger size.
Company Management
We have improved the user management feature in the company
management page. You can now add a team member to or remove a team
member from multiple projects at once. Previously, you could add a
team member to all company projects at once or remove the team
member from all company projects but you could not select a subset
of projects to add a team member to or remove a team member
from.
Messaging
You can now send a message to all project members at once by
selecting "All project members" from the "To" option of the message
window.
Milestones/Tasks
For milestones or tasks assigned to multiple users, it is now
possible for project administrators to select which users to mark
the milestone or task completed for. Similarly, project
administrators are now also able to specify which users to reopen a
task or milestone for.
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by TeamWork Live on April 24
We want to give you a quick update on the new features that we have
released this past month. The features in this release focuses on
giving you more ways of tracking your budget to make it easier for
you to complete your projects both on time and on budget. In
addition to the currently available fixed hours budgeting option,
you can now also specify your project budget using either retainer
or fixed fee.
Retainers
The retainer budget option allows you to specify a retainer for
your projects. This is useful if your clients agrees to pay you a
retainer for a specified amount of service. Retainers can be
weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly and you can specify a start
and end date for the retainer. We automatically track how your time
is tracking against the retainer and notify you and your team
members if the retainer is exceeded. You can override a retainer
for any month from the "Retainers" page (accessible from the
"Admin" menu). The retainer is automatically reset for you each
month without any additional effort on your part.
Fixed Fee Budget
The fixed fee budgeting option allows you to enter a fixed money
amount for your projects. The accrued amount will be calculated by
multiplying the tracked time with the hourly rate specified for the
time entry. A default hourly rate must be specified for fixed fee
projects but you can override the default when adding time entries.
You can see how your actual is tracking against the budgeted amount
from the project status report. Like the other budgeting options,
you can specify that team members be notified when the fixed fee
budget is exceeded.
Configure Project Member Visibility
You can now specify which project members are able to view each
other within a project. For example, you can specify that project
members are not able to see each other for a specific project. This
is useful if you want to create a project for sharing documents
common to all your projects. You can invite your team members and
clients from all your projects to this project so that they can
view the common documents without being able to see each other. The
new setting is available when creating or editing a project as the
"Who can see other project members?" option.
Membership Plans
We have finally written up a thorough explanation of the various
combinations of membership plans and project roles and which users
need to be on what plans. Previously, this information was
available but it was scattered throughout our FAQs and help pages.
Please take a look at understanding
membership plans for the new document that centralizes this
information.
Reports
Clients can now view the hours budget report.
Upcoming Features
We have begun work on an API (Application Programming Interface)
that will allow you to integrate TeamWork Live with other programs
and services. We are running a little late with the release date
but hope to have the feature available by mid-May.
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by TeamWork Live on March 11
Time has been flying for us here at TeamWork Live! We have been so busy working on our next set of features that we almost forgot to tell you about all the great improvements that we released last month. I'm sure you sometimes have problems keeping tracking of time yourself. Some of the features we are announcing this month should help you to better manage it.
Time Budget
We have added support for entering time budgets for milestones and tasks. The budget information is integrated with our time tracking feature. You can configure each project so that specific members are automatically notified when the budget is exceeded for any project, milestone, or task. For example, you can configure the project so that all team members are automatically notified when the time budget for a task is exceeded so that everyone can stop working on the task until the administrator has a chance to decide how to handle the overrun. This will help keep your projects from going over budget, which is especially handy if you have promised your clients that you will not exceed their budget without their approval.
In addition, we have added a project time report that allows you to see how your actual hours is tracking against your budgeted hours for your projects, milestones, and tasks. Team members on a pay plan and all clients will be able to view the project time report.
Multiple Attachment Support for Comments and Messages
You are no longer limited to attaching just one file to comments and messages. We have recently improved both features to allow for multiple file attachments. This change will make it even easier to share files with team members and clients. We will be extending this to milestones, tasks, and documents in an upcoming release.
Improved Editor
We have upgraded to a new version of our rich-text editor. The new version loads faster and is more responsive. Additionally, the new version fixes an issue we previously had with the formatting buttons occasionally not working correctly.
Automatically Shift Tasks Due Dates When Updating Milestones
You now have the option of automatically shifting the tasks associated with a milestone when you update the due date for a milestone. For example, if you have a milestone with a due date of March 15th and the milestones have associated tasks that are due March 1st and March 7th and you change the due date of the milestone to March 22nd, the due dates of the associated tasks will be shifted to March 8th and March 14th. To automatically shift the associated tasks, check the "Also shift the due dates of uncompleted tasks linked to this milestone" checkbox that appears when you change the due date for a milestone.
Create Items Via Email Enhancements
You can now specify a recurrence and a recurrence end date when creating items via email. You can also create specify subtasks for tasks when creating items via email. Please see the help pages for more information.
Navigation Reorganization
We have made some changes to the navigation for the accounts and company pages to make it more user-friendly. We have moved the "Plan Administration" into "My account". The membership plan selection has also been moved into its own section within "My account".
As always, thank you for your continued support. We will have more announcements coming soon.
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by TeamWork Live on January 25
We at TeamWork Live would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!
We have been very busy over the holidays and have many exciting new
features to share with you.
Timer
By popular request, we have added a timer for tracking your
time. You no longer have to manually track your time and then enter
them into TeamWork Live. Instead, you can now track your time using
our timer. The timer allows you to quickly move between multiple
items and quickly start and stop timers for different items. In
addition, we have added keyboard shortcuts for power users so that
you can use the timer even more efficiently.
The timer can be accessed from the "My Time" page, from the "Time"
section of a project workspace, from the time entries tab on the
detail page for an item, and from the milestones and tasks
page. The "My Time" page and the "Time" section of each
project workspace has a timer bookmark that you can add to your
browser's bookmarks bar to allow for easy access to the timer.
More Storage
We have moved to new file storage infrastructure that has
allowed us to achieve additional cost savings. We are happy to pass
those savings back to you in the form of increased storage. In
mid-December, we doubled the storage space on all membership plans
for the same price. We hope you enjoy the extra room!
File Preview for Adobe PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, and TIFF Image
Files
We now have built-in previews for Adobe PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint,
and TIFF image files. You no longer have to download these file
types to view their contents. Instead, you can view them directly
from your browser using our built-in viewer.
Tasks/Messages
1. You can now update the approver for a task or milestone from the
respective bulk update pages.
2. When you duplicate a milestone and the tasks associated with it,
it will now automatically update the due dates for the associated
tasks. For example, suppose you duplicate a milestone that has a
due date of January 1st and it has an associated task that has a
due date of January 10th. If you select February 1st as the due
date for the new milestone, the due date for the associated task
will automatically be updated to be February 10th. This should be a
big timer saver for you if you use milestones as tasks
templates.
Messages
You can now view all your unread messages by clicking on the
"Unread" filter from your "My Messages" page.
Contacts
We have enhanced the import contacts functionality to support
importing of any contacts that is exported in CSV (Comma Separated
Values) file format. If our importer does not recognize the contact
fields, you will be asked to help the importer by associated the
fields from the files with the contact fields in TeamWork Live.
Thank you again for your continued support. We hope you enjoy the
new features.
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by TeamWork Live on November 11, 2009
We are happy to announce the release of some new features to
TeamWork Live. As we mentioned in the previous blog post, this
release is focused on time tracking. We will have a follow-up
release with the rest of the time tracking improvements but we
wanted to go ahead and make the completed features available to you
so you can start taking advantage of it.
Weekly Timesheet
We have added a new report that allows you to see either:
1) the weekly number of hours logged for a project broken down
by team members
2) the weekly number of hours logged by a team member broken down
by projects
Dedicated Time Entry Section
We have added a "Time Entries" section to each project workspace.
From this page you will be able to quickly add time entries without
having to go to the detail page for each individual task or
milestone. This should greatly improve the usability of the time
tracking feature and we think you will find this addition to be a
real time saver. There is also a new "My Time" section under the
"Dashboard" menu that will allow you to view your recently added
time entries and add additional time entries.
Minimum Billing Increments
You can now specify in your preferences a minimum billing
increment for time entries. Time entries will be automatically
rounded up the next billing increment.
Coming Up
Our next release will continue with the time tracking
improvements as we add:
1. A timer for tracking your time
2. A budget feature that will allow you to enter a budget for a
project, user, or milestone and have TeamWork Live automatically
notify you when you are near your budget so you don't accidentally
exceed it
3. The ability to mark time entries as billed
Thanks again and please continue letting us know what we can
improve in TeamWork Live to make it more useful to you.
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by TeamWork Live on October 28, 2009
We have made a number of improvements to TeamWork Live recently
that we want to share with you. First, we added an agenda view and
support for creating milestones and tasks from the calendar page.
We have also made a number of usability improvements.
Calendar Agenda View
We have added an agenda view to the calendarr. The agenda view
shows the calendar items in list format and allows you to easily
print the details of the items in the calendars. Use the tabs on
the top right corner of the calendar to switch between the month
and agenda view.
Quick Add Milestones and Tasks
You can now add milestones and tasks from the calendar using the
quick add feature. Previously, you could only add milestones and
tasks form the milestones and tasks sections, respectively.
Usability Improvements
1. Users managing a large number of projects will now see a select
box at the top of their project workspaces menu that will allow
them to switch to different projects. Previously, it was difficult
to switch to a project at the bottom of the list if the projects
list extended passed the bottom of the browser without using the
scroll wheel found on some pointing devices.
2. When creating a new project, you now have the option of inviting
all members from an existing project to the new project. This
option allows you to quickly add a set of users to a new project
without having to manually invite them after creating the
project.
What's Ahead
Our next release, which we are already hard at work on, will focus
on major improvements to time tracking. Among the features being
planned are:
1. a weekly timesheet that allows you to see the number of hours
worked by team members for each project,
2. a single page from which you can quickly add time entries for
different tasks without having to go to the detail page of each
task,
3. a timer functionality so you don't have to manually track the
amount of time you are spending on individual tasks,
4. and support for specifying rounding increments for time
entries.
Thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to
bringing you more exciting changes to make running your projects
even easier!
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by TeamWork Live on September 30, 2009
We have added some exciting new features in the past few weeks that
we want to make you aware of. We hope theses features will make it
even easier for you to stay on top of all of your projects. Thanks
again for your continued support.
Comments Report
We have added a comments report that allows you to quickly see all
the comments that have been made across all of your projects. You
can filter the report to see only comments for specific projects or
for a specific time period. The report also includes a full-text
search engine that will allow you to quickly see all the comments
that match your search term. Like the message search, the search
result will have your search term automatically highlighted for
you.
Support for Viewing All Messages
You can now configure the messages section of your projects so that
they can be viewed by either the project administrator, the company
administrator, or by all team members. This is useful for projects
where you want specific project members to be able to read all
previously sent messages so that they can catch up on a
project. You could achieve a similar effect previously by
sending all messages to everyone in the project, but this had the
drawback of everyone being notified about every new message
even if it's not relevant to them. The new settings allow you
to send messages only to the relevant project members but still
allows you to review all previously sent project
messages.
For security reasons, messages sent before this feature is enabled
will not appear in the "All Messages" list. For information on how
to enable this feature, click the "Help" link and then on the
"Message Settings" link.
Create Item Via Email Improvements
We have made it even easier for you to create items via email. You
can now email or CC tasks@teamworklive.com, milestones@teamworklive.com,
events@teamworklive.com, or documents@teamworklive.com
from the email address used when signing up for TeamWork Live to
create tasks, milestones, events, or documents respectively. You
can continue to use your previous drop box address if you want but
we think you will find these new addresses to be easier to
remember. You can add the same keywords in the subject line of
your email to specify the responsible user, due date, etc. for the
created items.
Color Code Project Calendars
You can now color-code the items in your project calendar by the
project member that is responsible for them. Select "Responsible
user" from the "Color code by" selection.
Filter "My Tasks" By Project
In addition to filtering your tasks by milestone, you can now
filter the tasks in your "My Tasks" by project. This filter will
hide tasks from other projects when you are working on a specific
project.
Miscellaneous
1. We have improved the notification emails so it does a better job
of highlighting the changes that were actually made.
2. You can now disable auto-archiving of completed items from your
company preferences. This is useful if you want to keep previously
completed items in your folders around for reference purposes.
3. The comment icon now tells you the date of the last comment when
you move your cursor over it.
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by TeamWork Live on August 6, 2009
We would like to make you aware of the new features and
enhancements that we have made to TeamWork Live for our summer
release. We have been gradually releasing the features as we
completed them so you have probably seen some of these changes
already, but we want to make sure you are aware of all of
them.
Calendar Enhancements
You can now filter the project calendar so that it only shows
items assigned to a specific project member. This allows you to
quickly see the items for a project member in a particular
project.
Milestones/Tasks Enhancements
1. When deleting a milestone, you will now be asked if you want
to also delete any associated tasks.
2. You can now reassign the responsible user from the bulk update
milestones and bulk update tasks pages reached from the "My
Milestones" and "My Tasks" sections. Previously, you could only
reassign the responsible user when bulk updating from the
milestones or tasks sections of a project workspace.
Messages/Comments Enhancements
1. You can now add links and embed external images into
comments and messages.
2. When you move your cursor over "team" link for a message sent to
the entire team, you will now be shown all the members of the
project. This allows you to see who the message was sent to
without having to leave the message section. You can also do
the same in the message reply window.
3. Each conversation now has a "Link to conversation" under the
"More" menu for the conversation. The link can be used to refer to
the conversation from an email or another message.
Contacts Enhancements
You can now search your contacts from the contacts section
using the contacts search box.
Recent Activity Enhancements
Project status changes will now be shown in the recent activity
list.
Administration Enhancements
1. We have updated TWL so that company administrators are now
be able to view all company projects, even if they are not a member
of the project. Company administrators can access projects that
they are not a member of from the company management page.
2. You can now assign someone else as the administrator when
creating a project.
Preferences Enhancements
1. You can now configure TeamWork Live to send a confirmation
email when it processes an item created via email. The confirmation
email will detail how the email was processed, which is useful when
you are trying to figure out why an email is not being processed as
intended (i.e., an item is being created in the wrong project
workspace).
2. We have added the ability to have TeamWork Live email a copy of
messages you send to yourself. This allows you to retain an
archival copy of the messages that you send from TeamWork Live,
which can be important if you want to refer back to a message when
you are no longer a member of the project (and therefore cannot
access the message directly from TeamWork Live).
Miscellenous
1. We have added an upload progress bar that shows you the
percentage of a file that has been uploaded, thereby allowing you
to monitor the progress of your file upload.
2. On-hold items are now hidden from throughout the
app (including your dashboard, your milestones and tasks lists, and
from the reports).
3. The "Share this item" link for an item has been improved so that
the link now incorporates the project name if it is a project
item.
Thanks again for your continued support. We are working on some
exciting features for the next release that we will announce in an
upcoming post.
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by TeamWork Live on May 12, 2009
We would like to alert you some significant changes that we have
made to TeamWork Live over the past 2 months. These changes are
intended to simplify TeamWork Live—making it easier for new users
to get started with it—and decrease confusion over how best to use
certain features in TeamWork Live.
Reorganization of the Personal Workspace
The personal workspace has been one of the most problematic and
confusing area for new users to TeamWork Live. While the features
in the personal workspace were useful, calling it a "workspace" was
confusing as it was functionally different from the project
workspaces. For example, the calendar in the personal workspace
shows all the calendar items for a user, while a project calendar
only shows all calendar items for a project. New team members would
often add tasks and documents to their personal workspace instead
of a project workspace, which would cause problems because their
team members would never see them.
As a result, we have reorganized the project workspace while still
retaining the functionalities that made it useful. The following
changes have been made:
1. The overview page for the personal workspace has been completely
removed. The page was redundant with the dashboard.
2. The sections of the personal workspace are now accessible
from a drop-down menu from the dashboard tab. This will
remove their association with the "workspace" label so that users
will not think that they are functionally similar to the
corresponding sections in the project workspaces.
3. The sections have been renamed to make it clearer that they are
for the current user only. For example, "Calendar" has been renamed
to "My Calendar", "Folders" have been renamed to "My Folders",
etc.
Membership Plan Changes
As part of the simplification process, we have decided to
remove the per-user plans. Having both per-user and group plans was
causing confusion. Additionally, we have learned that most
administrators like to centralize management of their membership
plans and that the per-user plans were too cumbersome. The per-user
plans were mainly being used by people with 3-5 team members as
there was a gap in the group plans for that team size.
To address the gap, we have decided to introduce a 5-person
"Starter" plan for $39/month. This plan saves money for most of our
per-user plan members, makes it easier for plan administrators to
manage their users, and gives them access to the branding and
customization features found in the other group plans. Users
currently on the per-user plans can continue on them but they will
no longer be available to new users.
Color Coding of "My Calendar" by Project
You can color-code your personal calendar by projects instead
of by type and status (i.e., upcoming milestone, overdue task,
etc.). To do so, select "Project" from the "Color calendar by"
selection found below the calendar (see screen shot below). This
view makes it easier for you to see which calendar entries are for
which project.
Open Items Report Improvement
Now, when you sort the open items report by milestones, the
tasks are grouped under their respective milestones to make it
easier to see which tasks belong to which milestones.
Project Team
The invite team members window now only list users that are team
members of yours in other projects. Likewise, the invite clients
window only shows users that have been previously invited as
clients in your other projects. This will make it less likely for
users to invite people into the wrong role.
Thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to
making TeamWork Live even more useful to you in the future.
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