TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

This update is due to some really helpful feedback we received from one of our customers, over the last few weeks. A big thanks to Matt for all his patience and help with this.


Moving multiple milestones has always been possible within TeamworkPM but the issue Matt was having was is that he wanted to move a large number of Milestones in one go and have them all stay off weekends, yet hold pretty much the same space between them all.


We had the option to keep milestones off weekends but if you selected this option, it would count the weeks as five day weeks and not as seven. This meant if you moved the first milestone forward by two weeks, or 14 days, it would move all the others forward by 14 working day. This means that any affected milestone could move forward by more than 18 days, as there are two weekend in two weeks. At this stage my head is starting to hurt, so imagine the headache Matt was getting trying to move forward more than 20 separate milestones. It was throwing his whole schedule completely out of whack.

This is about the time Matt starting emailing wondering what he was doing wrong . All he was looking to happen for was that no milestone landed on a weekend day. This means that if a milestone was going to fall on a Saturday or a Sunday it would just be pushed forward to the next Monday.

We all discussed Matt’s problem here and we all agreed that a change was needed. This month we are happy to annouce the rolled out milestone update.  We are really happy with update and we feel this will make the section easier for all users as well as making sure there is an option here to suit each user.

I have also put together a short video to demonstrate how this new update looks and works.

Last month, I explained that I am completely obsessed with making TeamworkPM insanely fast for you.

This month we've been working hard behind the scenes to finish what we started with last months update.

 

pushState everywhere!

I explained last month that "pushState" is something that allows us to serve you pages insanely fast without having to reload everything.

When we left you last month we had PushState rolled out for all project-level pages: Overview, Tasks, Milestones, Risk register, Files, Time and Notebooks.

However we didn't have pushState implemented for the top-level pages so clicking the Dashboard link for example, did a full reload of the entire page.

The good news is that we have now implemented pushState for all top-level pages! You should find that the Dashboard, All Tasks, Projects, All Milestones, Calendar, Statuses, and the People pages are now loading much faster than before.

 

Minimal login page

The login page of your TeamworkPM installation now loads faster. We've ripped out all the unnecessary stuff so it loads just what it needs to look pretty.

This is important because we want to show you the login instantly, even when you are on a slow connection. We want the entire TeamworkPM experience to be amazing for you.

 

JavasSript and CSS Pre-loading

Once the login page is displayed, we instruct your browser to start loading CSS and JavaScript libraries in the background. These files will then be in your browser cache so that when you login everything loads faster and seems snappier.

 

Object-level caching (V2 Caching System)

I'm so excited about this one! :D

At the moment we used project-level caching on all objects. So if you add a notebook for example, you've just invalidated all tasks lists on the project. This is less than ideal.

Internally we've started a new project lovingly referred to as the "V2 Caching System" (inventive eh!).

The new "V2 Caching System" is smart. Now if you add a notebook, only the "Notebooks" page is invalidated. And when you edit a comment attached to a task, the V2 Caching system is smart enough to know that it only needs to invalidate the task and not the task list or the project it resides in.

In addition, we now store the last-modified-date for every object in memory! This allows us to instantly serve you unique "eTags" for every object that hasn't been updated. Also we can now serve you something called "far-future expires headers" on specific data fetching URLs to prevent data from ever having to reload (this system is even faster than eTags).

Phew. All you have to know really is that over the coming weeks, as we carefully roll out the new caching system, you are going to be blown away by the speed of TeamworkPM.

 

So you see there are a lot of incredibly nerdy happenings behind the scenes to deliver you the world's best online project management system. It's a lot of work, but hey, you're worth it!

We've got a really nice update to the iOS app this month, we have added a few really nice new features to the App.

Search

First up, and the most obvious: full Search available right from the main screen.  Type in anything you waant and it will go search the server for the latest most up-to-date information possible. Tap on one of the results and if it's something that's not already on the phone the details will be instantly downloaded automatically for you - so no stale information here.  

The list of search results has been designed for quickly skimming through, however if you need more detail then tap the 'Expand' button and it will give you that extra bit of context. Hit it again to go back to the simple display.  And finally, to help you get around, start scrolling and a large index bar will fade in allowing you to jump straight to the section that you're most interested in.

Notebooks

The Project screen sports three new sections, one of which is Notebooks.  As you'd expect, this new Notebook section gives you the ability to read all of your Notebooks directly within the app.  So no more having to go out to Mobile safari and zooming around to fit the notebook to the display - the display fits the notebook. Exactly.

Files

Just like Notebook, the Files section gives you full access to all of the files available in your Project. Plus, as you can see from the screenshot, you can easily send the file to your favourite App.  So if you like reading PDF's in iBook or presentations in Keynote, no problem

Contacts

Finally, Contacts.  A full listing of everyone associated with the project, this screen has a couple of nice touches.  Each detail of the person's information can be used - so, for example, tapping on a Skype address gives you the option of starting a Skype call, a chat or simply copying the account name.  Same goes for GTalk, Email and, of course, Phone Numbers.

We hope you like it and as usual, let us know what you think!

Download the app from the App store today.

It’s a fantastic feeling to be able to announce this integration. We’ve been working on this feature for quite some time, refining the functionality and battling with Google’s Docs API.

We wanted the Teamwork Google Docs integration to be as smooth and flexible as our Dropbox integration. At times it felt like fitting a round peg in a square hole. Google Docs are not exactly files and they are not placed in folders as such but live in Collections.

We looked at many other cloud apps out there and how they handled Google Docs and we found them lacking. All these apps just gave a list of your Google Docs. No categorization, no folder structure and no way to allow editing of these documents without first sharing them with the user.

We knew we could do better, and we did!

Like Dropbox, Google Docs can be shared with multiple users. This allows us to link one main Google Doc account in to each Teamwork account to be used as the document repository. Individual users can then share their documents with this main account and the files magically show up in Teamwork.

Hooking your Google Docs account into Teamwork is a very simple process. Click Settings in the top right of your Teamwork account, choose Site Settings and pick the Integrations tab.

From the "Integrations" tab you can connect your Teamwork account with Google Docs and allow access. Pick the top level folder to use within your TeamworkPM account and you're up and running!

I have also run through all these steps in the short video I have attached here so you can see exactly how to hook your Google Docs account up with Teamwork.

As you would have seen from the video, if you watched it ;-) was that you can also create Google Docs from within your TeamworkPM account. It's a great enhancement and something that was brought up a good few times by the users who took part in the beta test. So we took the feedback on board and Dan got to work building this in for the final release. We also added the ability to create "folders/collections"

The last really important thing to run through is the Access Control for a Google Doc. By default, linking a Google Doc in to Teamwork sets the access control on the document to be viewable by any person who has the link.

You can set this to one of 3 levels

1. Anybody with the link can view
2. Anybody with the link can view and edit
3. Do not modify the access control list - This means that you have to explicitly share the document with Google Account holders from inside Google Docs.

After I finished the video (typical ;-)) we made a slight change to highlight the Access Control settings more and make it more obvious to users.

As with all our new features, we really hope you like it. We enjoyed building it and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

This month it's been all about behind the scenes updates and working on tweaks to current features. It's also been another month of integations and this month it's a big one with our Google Docs integration. This is now ready and available to hook into your TeamworkPM account if you are on the Business 1, Business2, Corporate or Enterprise plans.

Features/Updates

• Notebooks: Added the ability to copy a notebook from one project to another
• Dropbox: Added new feature so you can create a Shareable Link that can be emailed to people
• UI Themes updates (about time!)
• UI Project category listed on "Project overview" page
• UI Milestone delete animation added
• UI Prettier calendar
• UI Milestone improvements
• UI Improvements on User Statuses to match new comment listing style
• UI Comments/Messages: Attachments: Improved the layout of this. My eyes were bleeding looking at what we had
• UI Cleaned up style of View Pages for Tasks, Milestones, File and Resources
• Notify picker improved - "Everybody" option checks on everyone
• Comments: Added confirmation if you post a comment and have not selected people to notify
• Comments: Added link to close comments thread when inline
• Invoices : Updates to subscription receipts
• UI When you select privacy on Comments, Notebooks, Resources and Files; we now automatically select to notify "Everybody possible".
• Lockdown/Notify When privacy is set to at least one person or company, set Notify to all
• Speeeeeed push states - overview and tasks so far
• Push state support for "risk register"
• Push state - sidebar shows dynamically
• Push state supports for "notebook view" and "notebook categories"
• Push state supports for "notebooks"
• Push state supports for "task list view" and "time" view
• Update Project Report: Added in "Created Date" for tasks
• Added a confirmation if you try and send a message or reply and you haven't notified anyone
• Update Project Switcher: Match on company name associated with projects
• Update Search: Added in ability to search for projects associated with a company
• Optimization CSS/JS compiled in developer mode - static files for production
• Optimization Task page loads task lists dynamically with smart caching
• Update Everything: All Time: Added ability to edit time logs from this view
• Everything All Tasks: Retired old version of All Tasks page
• Update Task Lists: Reassign: Added in an option to pick whose tasks to reassign to another person
• Tech: Improved efficiency for Milestone listing
• Update Tasks Report: Excel: Add "Assigned To" column
• Update Tasks Report: Excel: Convert total mins to hours and mins for Billable and Non-Billable time logged
• Comments Added back in slurry green colour for comments posted by current user

Bug Fixes

• Billing not loading properly every time
• eTags were not being served for main content areas
• Item selected in billing displays above sceen on billing page with large items list
• Privacy not cleared on activity page when cleared on task
• Fixed issue with project new categories not showing up in select options
• Dropbox caching selection mode without (when using pushState)
• Clicking through to a project for the first time requires reload
• Dashboard/Project Overview: Fixed duplicate entries for people in owner company but not Administrators
• Messages: Added DISTINCT when looking up the number of people notified on a message or reply
• Everything: All Tasks: Inherited private tasks not showing for users who were not admins
• Comments: Markdown preview not firing
• Notebook Category Manager: Sleep deprivation induced typo
• Update Google Docs: Handle situations where refresh token is expired
• Log Time: Fix for possible NaN values
• Update Reply by email: Fix put in place when mail parse exception occurs. 

 

Between you and me, I've developed a bit of an obsession... I lie in bed awake thinking about it... and there's no support network I can join. Yes that's right, I've become completely obsessed with making TeamworkPM insanely fast. It's an issue. ;)

 

Introducing pushState

It started off as an experiment but I got so excited with the speed improvements that I worked solid for about 12 hours adding pushState support to the TeamworkPM.

So instead of a full page refresh which requires all the boilerplate HTML, CSS, Javascript and images to reload, only the part of the page that need to change is loaded.

So now if you are using Chrome, Firefox or Safari, pages will load much much much much quicker as you move between tabs.

Sweet... dreams are made of this. HTML5 rocks – the whole Internet will use pushStates shortly.

A little side note: We have pushState support coming for IE9 and IE10 shortly - we just want to do more testing to ensure that everything is perfect for you first. IE10 has 'proper' support for pushStates. Can't wait.

 

 

Page partials

It's a simple idea used by lots of high performance websites like Facebook and Google – load just enough primary top-of-page content so that the user sees something immediately, then load in the remaining segments as fast as you can.

We've applied this idea to activity steam sections on the Dashboard and Overview pages. We've also applied this to your task lists so you will see them subtly stream in now.

 

Browser caching with eTags

We've got incredibly serious about making sure your browser caches everything possible using eTags. So if you've loaded a task list a few minutes ago and there's been no changes to that task list, then when you revisit the list we tell your browser that you have it already. The result is that the task list loads instantly for you the second time round.

 

In-memory components

This month we also changed the internal architecture of TeamworkPM so that the underlying code that runs TeamworkPM is held in in-memory classes instead of slow template based files. It was a lot of work and we had a few glitches and long days but the result is definitely worth it.

 

Database optimisation

Last but definitely not least, this month we did some tweaking to the database servers settings to allow them to hold more data in-memory, allowing them to serve data quickly from memory instead of reading from the hard disk. It's very geeky so I won't go into too many details... (InnoDB cache size doubled).

 

This is just a start! We have some big plans to make TeamworkPM even faster including introducing pushState support to the entire application.

Hi,

Donal here! I'm 22 years old, live in the hills of Cork City. I love programming, music and design. I am one of the three developers here at TeamworkPM HQ. I joined the crew back in June straight out of university after doing work experience with them the previous summer. This was back when the lads were still involved in web consultancy.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to do my work experience in an area of computer science which interests me so much. I thoroughly enjoyed the six months I spent working with them and that hasn't changed.

Going further back..

My interest in computers, programming and the web stems from a lot of different places. For one, my father worked for a company who made components for macintosh computers (pre Jobs v2 and iEverything), so there has always been a computer in the house.  It being a mac there were not many games that I could play, so I had to actively find ways to entertain myself on it.

So most of my time was spent tinkering and doing things like making very short animations using Corel Draw and QuickTime. Later on- around the time I got broadband I became interested in how the web works. I started making websites using Microsoft word, then moved on to dreamweaver and later to learn the w3c's xHTML and CSS standards.

Before college I hadn't written one line of code (bar failed attempts at writing applescript scripts) but i quickly became hooked on all things PHP and JavaScript after having an excellent professor in first year.

In my free time I'm usually playing music around the place. My musical past and present consists of playing trumpet in a marching band and an orchestra, singing in a choir and later teaching myself to play the guitar and bass. I currently play bass guitar in a couple of bands. 

Some of the areas of Teamwork I am responsible for include:

• Teamwork Mobile
• All Tasks v2
• The API
• Search v2
• BlinkSale integration
• General maintenance

 

Tools I use for Development:

• Alienware Auora + 3 * 27" monitors
• Sublime Text 2
• Adobe Photoshop
• Navicat for MYSQL
• TeamworkPM =]
• TortoiseSVN
• IETester
• iPad
• iPod Touch
• Galaxy S2 - currently flashed with Ressurection Remix Pro
• Blackberry Bold 9900
• W7 Phone Emulator
• Cutters Choice
• PrototypeJS
• Sugarjs

Now, I am new here so I don't want to keep you.  I look forward to answering some of your feedback and helping the rest of the the team make Teamwork the best online PM solution digitally possible!

As great as it is to release and work on new features it's still really important for us to keep looking for more ways to improve and refine the current features of Teamwork. We are always looking out for ways to improve the user experience and user interface. This month we have rolled out quite a few updates to the UI to make Teamwork easier and more intuitive to use.

Project Category displayed on the project overview

The Category a project is part of not showing anywhere on the actual project overview is something we have heard many times from users through feedback. This month Peter finally got the chance to fix this. The project category is now displayed on the project overview for users who are part of the Owner Company.

Milestone listing and layout updates

This month has also seen a lot of tidying up done to the milestone listings within a project. We have removed the eye hurting bright bar and placed the colour into the milestone date display which lets you know if the milestone is late, upcoming or completed.

The milestone images and text here have also been improved to make them clearer and easier to read. We compacted some wasted space and also introduced more proportioned margins. 

Comment listing and layout updates

We have also given a lick of paint to the comments to make them more pleasing to the eye. You will also notice we have added a very handy hide comment link as well to quickly collapse the comments when they are opened inline from an item such as a task, milestone, file or resource.

The highlight for comments written by you is also subtler and we compacted the Add Comment form until you require it. Any attachments on the comments (and in messages) also got some love and attention.

Task List updates

We standardized the UI for Adding and Editing Task Lists. We had 2 different views when Adding or Editing and we've corrected this. We also added a small but very handy update so Milestones can be created when you are adding a Task List. Now when you create a new task list you have the option to also create a new Milestone directly from the task list creation area instead of having to jump to Milestones, create a milestone and jump back to add the Task List.

Having tried a number of different project management applications including Zoho and Basecamp, Colorado based graphic design firm Phases had been consistently disappointed with the lack of features and collaboration tools on offer. Dealing with small businesses, Phases were looking for an application that was easy to use allowing clients to take as much ownership of the projects as the company itself. In house web designer with Phases, Kandra Churchwell says they found exactly what they were looking for in Teamwork PM and since implementing it in the day to day running of the business, they have never looked back:

“We had tried many different applications, heck I think I tried them all, but they just didn’t scale well and didn’t offer the same mix of features, ease of use and great customer service you get with Teamwork.

Here's how we use TeamworkPM to help our projects go smoothly.

·       Adding a project is totally simple, and the customizable welcome email allows us to introduce our clients to the system in a very friendly and specific way, which is important to clients who don't have a lot of time, or the inclination, to learn a new software tool.

·       We use TeamworkPM from the very beginning of each new project, communicating internally about the prospecting and proposal process using tasks, the message center and the file uploading tools.

·       The privacy settings are great. We often go through several rounds of internal revisions on graphics files and word processing documents before we're ready to show them to the client. The privacy tools allow us to chat and share all of this stuff inside a "cone of silence," so we can discuss the project openly without fear of releasing anything before it's ready, or of our clients being inadvertently offended by our sometimes frank discussions.

·       The file-uploading tool is excellent. All the information you might need about a given file is available at a glance, and the version tracking is so simple, even our least tech savvy clients can easily tell what version of the file they're looking at, when it was uploaded, what category it's in, and who's been working on it. The new Dropbox integration has made file sharing even easier than it was before.

·       Did we already mention how great the Dropbox integration is? Several of our staff, team members, and clients were already using Dropbox for backup and cloud storage, so adding this feature was a no-brainer and has already simplified our process.

·       The time tracking feature helps us stay on top of the budget, even down to the task level, which keeps the stress level low for us and for our clients.

For Phases, ease of use and smooth communication between both company and clients made TeamworkPM stand out from other project management applications available:

“A powerful aspect of Teamwork is that it keeps all project communication, files, task lists, meetings, everything in one place where everyone working on the project can access it from their desktops or mobile devices. With team members working remotely, clients spread out over the country, and hundreds of files and messages that need to be tracked, stored and managed in a user friendly way, this is an invaluable benefit.”

As well as offering a wide range of features, the one aspect of Teamwork that stood out for Phases as a company was the speed at which the customer service department dealt with any issues:
“Teamwork PM has some of the best and most responsive customer service in the business in our opinion. We’ve requested features on more than one occasion that would make our workflow or communication processes more efficient and easier. Not only did we receive a quick response- in some cases the features we were interested in showed up in the production software just a few days later- now thats service!”, she added.

Denver Web designer Kandra Churchwell is a branding and graphic design guru at Phases Design Studio, the premier Colorado branding firm for emerging and established businesses seeking a unique blend business savvy, creative fire, and passionate customer service. Visit www.designfiles.net to view a selection of projects created and managed with TeamworkPM.