How to change the language interface within TeamworkPM

To make your lives a little easier when it comes to starting out with TeamworkPM I thought I would start a new set of videos based round the, How do I do that? theme.
Over the next few weeks I will post videos up showing how certain sections work within TeamworkPM.

The video below shows you how to change your default language for the interface per user.
El video a continuación muestra cómo cambiar el idioma por defecto para la interfaz de cada usuario.
La vidéo ci-dessous montre comment changer la langue par défaut pour l'interface par l'utilisateur.

Note: if the translations above are wrong, you can blame Google :-)

Please let me know your views on the videos and if there is any areas in particular you would like to see or know how to user within the App. Let me know via the comments below.

Brainwave time : comments welcome while this is in concept phase

I am in the middle of a project right now that has quite a few external users sending documents and instructions to me. The problem is that they are posting everything as messages and not assigning tasks to anyone.

This makes things extremely hard to process and delegate. This made me think back to a few Feature Requests from people that requested we add a feature to create a task from a message. At the time I thought they were crazy! Why would you want to do that? Now I understand....

It's early days and the idea is only slowly forming in my mind so I'd appreciate your comments on the best way to implement this.

These are my current thoughts:
  • You go into the messages section and view the message that was written
  • A button is somewhere on the interface Create Task from this Message (Obviously shorter....)
  • Clicking this button now needs to do the following:
    • Create the task - We could use the Subject of the message as the task name
    • Description : I don't like the idea of putting the body of the message as the task description as some messages are verbal diarrhea
    • Comments : This may be better. Add comments to the task from the message (A message could have some replies)
    • Files : Any files will be linked to the task
    • Assigned to : Pick from a list (or multiple people)
    • Due Date : Pick a date (or not)
    • Task List : Pick from a list of existing task lists
So, the above seems fine and do-able. The next bit is tricky, what do we do with the existing message? In an ideal world, we would have the ability to archive the message.

Most of the time the problem is that the person added a message when in fact they meant a task so it may be Ok to delete the message once the task is created. OR We link the task to the message.....not sure yet which is the best way. Linking a task to a message would be more work for us and complicate things a bit....(remember, we have to now think of the API so extra functionality needs to be approached carefully)

Do you think this feature would be useful? Would you use it? Let us know in the comments.....

Dan.

What triggers you?

I was listening to another great interview from Mixergy while driving home, the interview was with a woman called Sally Hogshead. She was talking was about triggers that people respond to in both personal life and in business. She also spoke about her  latest book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. 
It was a really interesting interview and really got me thinking about how I could use these triggers myself in both  business and in my personal life.
The other thing she spoke about was a test she has on her site called the F Score, it is a short test which tells you which triggers you naturally apply , which other you should consider and how to refine them to become more persuasive. 
Below is what came back from my test.
MEET YOUR TRIGGERS

Your primary fascination is LUST. (Nicely done, you.) Even without realizing it, you’re already instinctively applying this trigger when trying to persuade others. Your secondary trigger is POWER, and your dormant trigger (the one you’re least likely to apply in your personality and behavior) is ALARM.

Once you understand your own unique combination of personality strengths, you can start to create more influential ideas and messages.

HOW TO REFINE YOUR NATURAL TALENTS FOR SWAYING OPINION?

1. Explore your primary, secondary, and dormant triggers with the tabs above.
2. Check out the videos over there on the right.

YOUR PRIMARY TRIGGER: LUST

So lust is your primary trigger. That means you draw people closer with a warm and open style of interaction. You’re expressive with ideas, communicate well in person, and probably have a strong creative streak. Even when you mask your emotions, you feel passionately about your opinions.

You’re intuitive with information, often making decisions based on gut instinct rather than cold intellect. While other personality types prefer facts, you’re more attuned to the nuances of attitude, design, and a certain indefinable je ne sais quoi.

Lust is a powerful form of influence because it creates irresistible messages that overcome rational resistance. When you dial up your primary trigger, you have the ability to create messages that are extremely difficult to ignore.

You’re remarkably talented in creating messages that lead to a powerful intellectual, physical, and emotional response. For instance, you like to share experiences with others, and in conversation, you draw people closer with body language and eye contact.

By applying these natural strengths to your work, you can build warmer relationships and more trusting dialogue. And by applying to your ideas, you can create messages make people say, “I want that now!”

YOUR SECONDARY TRIGGER: POWER

While you’re not a power-monger, you are power-comfortable: an authority who likes to be in control.

Blindly following someone else’s orders? No, thanks. You prefer to actively lead situations, rather than sitting back and passively watching from the back row. You’ll follow other people’s rules, if needed, but you prefer to define a new set of rules on your own terms. You exude influence, compelling others to pay attention. Your strong opinions and bold action often spark reactions from others.

Your messages command influence, and your opinion carries weight. When you excel in positions of leadership, others look to you for cues of how to behave. At times, perhaps, you might come across as intimidating or even overbearing. When you expect others to obey your message, you define deadlines and demands of the alarm trigger to make them comply. By steering your use of power productively toward your goals, you’ll become more motivating and inspirational.

You’re a natural leader, and probably comfortable with authority. Next step? Hone your power trigger for greater respect, bigger audiences, and more loyal advocates.

YOUR DORMANT TRIGGER: ALARM

Laid-back and easygoing, you probably make friends easily, and make others comfortable. Your personality is probably relying more on trust or lust as main triggers, rather than the urgency and focus of alarm.

On the downside, without the presence of alarm in your personal brand, it’s quite possible you’re coming across as a bit wishy-washy. A judiciously zest of alarm adds a sense of urgency to your requests. In FASCINATE, you’ll learn how to intelligently apply alarm, motivating others sit up and take notice now.

New database server plugged in

This morning we performed another update to improve the framework and architecture of the Teamwork platform.

We have plugged in another high performance database server to the cluster. All done in less than 10 minutes thanks to Peter's planning.

Here's Peter performing the final steps....yes, that's a breakfast roll on the desk. The staple of Irish diets....

Assign tasks to multiple people now live

Just a quick post announcing that we have rolled out the Assign Tasks to Multiple People feature we have been working on for so long.

Sam, Peter, Ryan and myself scheduled an early Saturday start and after a few hours of last minute testing and polishing pushed the code live.

After the API, this was one of our biggest and most frequent requests and we are very proud of our final implementation. This was not easy to implement.

Peter (AKA Topper) will be describing the process, design decisions, challenges we faced etc in a follow up post in the next few days.

As always, we love hearing what you think so leave a comment or post a Tweet!

Dan.

Stolen screen shot of assigning tasks to multiple people.

Peter, AKA Topper, has been working away like a Golden God (his words not mine) on getting our latest new feature for TeamworkPM out the door. It is of course the ability to assigning tasks to multiple people.

I must take my hat off to him as it's looking pretty bloody sweet at this stage. I have just been in his office checking out how it looks and and how it's working.In fairness when he has his moments he's good ;-) it is a savage piece of work. Between Peter and Dan fighting it out they have done an amazing job in keeping this feature really simple and easy to use and I have to say I can't wait for this feature to launch as It's something I have needed myself loads when working on projects.

Below is a screen shot I stole off Peter's computer a few minutes ago when he had his back turned. It's just a quick shot of where the new feature is going to appear on the task screen.

Peter wanted to be the first to post up screen shots of his work but I couldn't resist beating him to it :-)
He has a load more screen shots that he will be posting up along with a nice detailed blog post here, in the engine room blog, in which he will outline how this feature works and looks. Hopefully his post will be up over the weekend for you all to read.

Until then enjoy my stolen pic.

Trying a bit of advertising with BuySellAds.com

I have been trying something new for getting the word out regarding TeamworkPM lately. We have tried a number of advertising systems before, including google ads but
we didn't really find them that effective. We did pull users into the site but the conversion rate wasn't great plus we had no idea what sites the ads were showing on so
it was hard to target sites that worked well. Plus Google adwords isn't the most straight forward system to use either so we gave it a rest. A while ago I signed up to buysellads.com but
never did anything else with it, then I heard an interview with founder, Todd Garland on www.mixergy.com (one of my new favorite sites)
It was a great interview with the man behind the site and got me thinking again about Buysellads.com, so I decided to go back to the website and take another look at what they had to offer there.

Once I logged in I decided to put $800 into my account to give the system a good testing. I went through the list of websites that they have signed up, I then picked a few sites to begin advertising on. The ones I decided to go with were:
www.macstories.net/
www.1stwebdesigner.com/
www.iconfinder.com/
www.erictric.com/

I decided on these because they spanned a cross section of users and also they had different styles of adverts so I could get a better idea of what type of websites and advert will work for us.
I have to say the interface with BuySellads is savage, everything is simple right from signing up to creating ad spots to uploading ads. It's just a really easy site to use.

One of the great features this site has is the A/B testing you can do with adverts, this lets you place a number of adverts in the same spot on a site so you can work out what ad version works the best and sends more people through.
through to your website. This feature is so unbelievably easy to setup as well. Just upload a few adverts and thats it. Now you just have to watch the stats.
After a while you can easily pause the advert that doesn't seem to be working out.

The screen shot is from one of the websites I placed an ad with, you can see the conversion rate for the different ad variation.
The middle one was not performing as well as the first one so I paused it. I then looked at a few other ads out there, went back to the drawing board and designed a new one, uploaded it, and we are letting the 2 battle it out for the top spot.

We are only about a week into the campaign so it's hard to tell yet how many users that come through from the adverts will convert into paid users but then again with all advertising
it's never as straight forward as that, we won't be able to know what user saw the advert and then typed "TeamworkPM" into google or some other search engine to find us. The real measures will be in increased site traffic, and the only one the really matters at the the end of month which is increased signups, if we keep up the growth that we been having lately then we will be really happy.

If your looking to try a bit of advertising yourself I think Buysellads.com is a great service and I would say give it a lash, the one thing I would love to see is more areas of interest other than just design and tech based websites within their network. I think it's a super service for both the publishers and the advertisers. For the advertisers it's a great way to advertise and get your message out there as it's very easy to budget your spends as you are dealing with flat monthly amounts and most importantly it's simple to use.

Nice email to wake up to this morning

Your software is a bloody work of art! I've scoured the earth for years for the perfect one (Redmine, Basecamp, ActiveCollab), and Teamwork beats them all, especially for multi-project tracking. It's so BLAZINGLY FAST to use, so gloriously intuitive, and astoundingly powerful all at the same time. When proposing proper PM systems to the powers-that-be, TW's beauty and ease of use counts a whole lot. Thanks for rocking my PM world! Please don't throw a bunch of junk features in. 

Thanks guys, 
Evan

Assigning tasks to multiple people....where we're at....

This is by far the most popular request and one that we get at least 3 emails a day about. I have even needed it myself lately.

There are some interesting questions posed from a development point of view. What seems like such an easy thing to add actually is quite complicated and requires LOT'S of thought and careful planning.

Let's talk first about what the feature actually does and why it isn't in the app right now.

You want to create a task and assign it to multiple people. What does this actually mean?
  • Does it mean:
    • Assign this task to 5 people but anyone of those 5 people need to complete it. When it's complete, it's done. Finito.
      • Example: Take out the office trash. There is only 1 trash can, when it's emptied, it's done.
  • Does it mean:
    • Assign this task to 5 people and all people need to complete this task.
      • Example: Take out your office trash. There are 5 cubicles in the office, all trash cans must be emptied.

Let's talk about the User Interface (UI) for this

We need to keep the adding of tasks fast and lean as this is the most frequent use of the app. Right now we have broken the Task form into tabs with the important bits on the first tab and any additional functionality hidden away in the other tabs. What do we do when you need to select multiple people?

We don't want to make a select list that requires ctrl+click to select multiple people. It needs to be fast and intuitive.

We have some ideas on this:


Basically, by using the drop-down select in combination with another button (icon to be decided) a quick menu is displayed allowing quick checking-off of people. This works well on the calendar for notifying multiple people but is not the best looking fish in the world so it'll get a lick of paint and some TLC.

Lets talk about the impact this has on the app and current architecture..switch off if you're not a nerd

Everything right now works around optimised queries looking up tasks based on the current user. It's a simple LEFT OUTER JOIN. We'll need to now hold another look up table in the database mapping tasks to users. This normally would be OK except tasks are tied to task lists which are tied to milestones and the date of a task can be inherited up the chain. Couple this with a lookup table for people attached to the task and it gets fairly hairy.

 (So what? I hear you say, feed the monkeys more peanuts and it'll get done)

Well, this affects everything. It affects the Dashboard, Project Overview, API, Everything Tab, Task listing page, Daily Report, Export, Reports, RSS.....ugghhhhhh

So, it's hard. We need to spend alot of time and lucozade on this one.

Lets talk about the listing of tasks

The last bit that this impacts is the actual listing of tasks. We have the name of the person as the first segment of each individual task.

This will have to change and again, we have some ideas on this....

So, to recap, we have alot to do to add this feature but as always (and along with everything else on the Roadmap) we are working away on it.....

Dan.

Feedback keeps us driving forward

One of the great things about running an online business is that you get to interact with so many people from all types of business throughout the world and that you get real time feedback from them. You get to hear about what they like, and what they dislike as well as suggestions about how they think certain areas of TeamworkPM should work.

The other great thing about feedback is that you do get the comments like this one below that keeps us driving ahead to produce the best online project management application out there.

It's great to get receive emails and comment like this from time to time and it's always good to know that we are competing well with market leaders in the space such as the mighty Basecamp.

To all our users who have sent us feedback, thanks and keep it coming.