TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

One of the parts I love about my job is getting the chance to talk to all the different types of companies and organizations that use TeamworkPM. It gives us a great insight into how people use our system and it gives us the chance to hear both the bad and the good points about the software.

When we started out we never really gave much thought to users outside of company settings using TeamworkPM. As time goes on it's great to hear stories from people who have used TeamworkPM to arrange their weddings, parties, moving homes and even students using us to help organize their study groups. If only I had been that organized when I was in school ;-)

Recently we have started to get a lot of sporting organizations using TeamworkPM to help them run and keep on top of all the administration that goes into running a club.

I recently had the chance to talk to Dan Griffin who is president of the Yamba football club in Australia, about how they use TeamworkPM.

This is what Dan had to say, "The Yamba Football Club has used the teamwork for over two years. The club was in need of a management resource that could improve communication and management of our club and Teamwork provided.

Any small organization is time poor, this is amplified when volunteers run the organization.

For this reason TeamworkPM become central to the functioning of our club. Communication is no longer a two way process, it is now a recorded discussion. Club documents are uploaded to the site, ensuring that that all members can access the central storage space. The notebooks are used for the development of the club. Milestones have been established to enable yearly reminders for committee members taking up new roles.

A central portal for all club information is essential for the organizations succession planning. More generally the introduction of TeamworkPM has helped the club to run smoother and more professionally. This is in evidence recent recognition throughout our association."

Keep up the good work!

Dan Griffin

President 
Yamba F.C.

This one's been a long time coming. You can now attach files to comments in TeamworkPM.

We spent a lot of time making this feature easy to use and it works just like it does when attaching files to messages and tasks. You can even attach files directly from your company Dropbox account! We are happy with the interface and we hope you are going to love it too.

The new comment attachments look like this:

Posting comments via email will support file attachments in the coming days (Dan is locked in his office with the music turned up beavering away on this).

We hope you are all going to love this feature and that it will help you stay productive.

Thanks again for using TeamworkPM!

UPDATE

As promised above, when posting comments via email, email attachments are now attached to the comment.

December is always a short month but that hasn't stopped us ploughing through the feedback and suggestions. Here is what we got done this month.

Quick Add: Tasks, Milestones and Projects

One of the areas we really wanted to improve on this month was making it easier and faster to add tasks to your Teamwork account. Not just from within a project, but from any part of the app.

You'll notice a new feature in the top right called "Quick Add" Read More

Move or Copy a task list to another project

Before today, moving tasks between projects was a painful process. One by one...move...move...move...repeat until you die of boredom.

This month we added the ability to move entire task lists between projects. All tasks, comments, time logs get moved with one swift action. Read More

Move Milestones between projects

Since we added the ability to move Task Lists between projects, we decided to go one step further and also add the ability to move Milestones from one project to another. 

Sorting added to the Project Chart

Last month we released a new version of the Project Chart. The feedback on this has been excellent but it was missing a sort option. This month we added in the ability to sort by Start Date, Project Name and Company Name.

Blinksale now added as an export option for billing

A few months ago we integrated Freshbooks and Harvest with the Billing section of your projects. This month it was time for Blinksale to get some love. From today you can export your time and expenses to Blinksale! Just in time for the New Year invoicing :-)

Notebooks get a word count and resizable editor

Many people use Notebooks to draft letters, blog posts or PR releases. Sometimes it's handy to know how many words you have written. We also added the ability to resize the Notebook editor vertically! Spot on for long content...

Preview of new Everything->All Active Tasks page

The Everything->All Active Tasks page is by far the most used page in the app. It also needs to be the fastest and most customizable page in the app so this month we worked on improving this. Our aim was to reduce the clutter in the filtering bar, make the results faster loading and add in paging. Mission accomplished. We put an option for you all to try it before we roll it out next month.

Updates to the Workload Report

The Workload report is a great way to see how busy people are. This month we extended the report so Administrators in the Owner Company can now see all estimated tasks across all projects even if they are not explicitly on a project. Small but extremely useful addition.

 

New 24 hour Calendar time picker

When we launched the Calendar on Teamwork we thought we localized absolutely everything. We were wrong. People who use military time formats still had to use the am/pm type time picker. Not anymore!

 

Small Ticket Items

• Projects: When a project is renamed, it now creates a new Activity Log item
• File Thumbnails: We finally tracked down and killed a slight bug of incorrect thumbnails for files named the same.
• Time: When logging time and choosing a task, we shaved 1 mouse click off by not being dumb asking the user to click a button to finish
• Time: When logging time and choosing a task, we now show the people the task is assigned to
• Reply By Email: We improved this so Archived projects do not get new messages and comments added to it. We send an email back to the sender.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: We added a few more and fixed an issue on Mac Firefox when quick-switching tabs using CMD+number
• API: Various updates and documentation additions

So that wraps up 2011. We have some great plans for 2012 so keep an eye on our Roadmap!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We would like to thank everyone who took part in last months newsletter competition to win an iPad 2.

The draw took place on the the 7th of December using Random.org to make sure it was fair. The winner, drawn out of the virtual hat, was Nick van Silfhout, from Textcetera in the Netherlands.

Nick was delight to hear that he won. Once Nick had received the iPad I asked him to send in a pic of him holding up his new toy....I mean business tool ;-)

I also asked Nick for a few words as well on what they do at Texcetera.

Textcetera is a graphic design studio that creates publications in all forms: from regular printed books to the newest standard of eBooks.
We also design ads, book covers and other graphic illustrations.Since we have an average of 100+ active projects, it’s essential to have a decent project management system to efficiently streamline the workload.
We use TeamworkPM to keep track of the project status and it helps us to unite all the information about a project in one place.
The basic functions of TeamWorkPM give us great peace of mind in a chaotic branch!
To read more: www.textcetera.nl (Dutch only, unfortunately)

Thanks again to everyone who entered the competition.  Make sure you keep an eye out each month for the newsletter which will have all the latest news from TeamworkPM, as well a chance to win a few goodies from time to time.

Feedback comes in waves. The same feature is requested time and time again usually in the same couple of weeks.

Moving task lists from one project to another is one of them. Yesterday we added this feature to Teamwork.

No sooner was it released and the feedback started to pour in asking if it was possible to "Copy" the list instead of "Moving" it.

No problem. Today we rolled that feature out.

This also has a hidden benefit that may not be apparent right away. In Teamwork you can save any task list as a template. This only saves the names of the tasks, the estimated time, the descriptions and the privacy. There are good technical reasons for this.

Now, as you can copy any task list to any project, you can have a project set up to act as a "Template" which you can use if you need to create a new list with all the people assigned, due dates assigned etc

Hope this small but useful feature helps everyone! Send us a tweet and let us know what you think :-)

Once you are in a project on Teamwork it's really easy to add tasks to the project. Sometimes though a phone call comes in from a client or you think of a task that needs to be added before you forget. This means browsing to the Project you want, clicking the tasks tab and finding the task list you want to add the task to.

By the time you've done that you may have forgotten what the task was!

One of the areas we really wanted to improve on this month was making it easier and faster to add tasks to your Teamwork account. Not just from within a project, but from any part of the app.

From today, you'll notice a new feature in the top right called Quick Add

Quick add enables you to quickly add Tasks, Milestones and Projects to your Teamwork account from anywhere. We started with the 3 most common items and over time we'll add more.

The most useful is the Quick add tasks. Over the last few months we've received countless emails and feedback messages from people who want a faster way of getting tasks in to Teamwork. The majority of people wanted to dump tasks in and deal with them later when they get time.

We started by putting the same Add Task form in the pop-up window but it didn't really speed things up. It was overkill for what the Quick Add feature was meant to accomplish. We went back to the drawing board.

Our second idea was to simply allow tasks to be entered one by one. As you add a task, the box clears and you can add another one. It worked but it was still not 100% of what we were trying to achieve.

Then we got it right. We thought of how easy it is to create multiple tasks by email. It's simple. Each task you want to create just goes on a new line in the email. We also had added the ability to assign the tasks to people, set a due date, set the priority and of course the privacy and notification options. This is what we wanted from the Quick Add feature.

When you open the Quick Add Tasks feature, there is a box where you type your tasks and a select tool to pick your project.

You don't have to pick a task list if you don't want to - we'll create a default list called Inbox. (You can pick an existing list if you want to but we don't force you to)

You can create 1 task or you can create 100 tasks. Each task just goes on a new line of the text box.

You can assign people to each task, set a due date and a priority - We added a quick help tooltip so you'll never forget how to do it.

Lets look at some examples:

• @dan [today] Write a blog post on the new Quick Add Feature
  • This will create a task called "Write a blog post on the new Quick Add Feature"
  • It will be due today
  • It will be assigned to Dan
• [tomorrow] @sam @peter @dan Add an FAQ on the website about quick add items !!!
  • This will create a task called "Add an FAQ on the website about quick add items"
  • It will be due tomorrow
  • It will be assigned to Peter, Sam and Dan
  • It will be of High Priority
• [25/12/2011] Answer any Christmas Day feedback
  • This will create a task called "Answer any Christmas Day feedback"
  • It will be assigned to "anyone"
  • It will be due on the 25th December 2011

The order of the items doesn't matter. We'll figure out the people, dates and priority no matter where in the task it appears

The @person is worked out by joining the firstname and the lastname of the user together and figuring it out

For example, my name in Teamwork is Daniel Mackey so any of the following would pick me out:

• @dan
• @daniel
• @danielmac
• @danielmackey

The dates just need to be in square brackets and you can use a real date such as [25/12/2011] (or [12/25/2011] if your date format is set to that) or you can use Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, Next Monday etc

So that's it. It's live now and we're really happy with it. Let us know what you think!

We added the Project Chart feature over a year ago and since then it hasn't receive any love. This month we decided to revisit this feature, gut what we did before and start again.
The result is a more useful, better looking and printable chart.
We took all feedback in to consideration and we love how it turned out.

The big change here has been the underlying technology used to build the chart. The old chart was built in Flash. This was fine at the time but with the rise of Apple and their lack of love for Flash meant that it didn’t work on iPads or iPhones. This also caused issues when it came to trying to print the chart for meetings.
We decided this time we would scrap Flash and completely rewrite it. This means that the new project chart is fully supported on all iOS devices and it also has the ability to generate a great printable view.

As well as updating the look of the chart we have also added a few more goodies to it. You now have the option to filter milestones on the chart as some charts where becoming very cluttered with the amount of milestones used in each project.

We then added the ability to filter the chart by company. This allows you to just display one company at a time so you can get a better idea of where a specific company's project's start, end and overlap.
The last feature is the tool tips on the chart. If you place you mouse over a milestone or over a project bar it will display extra information about each such as who is responsible, due dates and the completion status.

We hope you find this update to the chart really useful and as always any feedback you have on this, please let us know.

And so another month whizzes by and we're nearly in to the Christmas funny season!

We have been busy little bees this month and now it's time to pop up for some air and let you guys know what we've accomplished this month...

Big Ticket Items

• We finally added Estimated Time to tasks. Feedback comes in waves and this was a top requested feature. We were spending so much time answering feedback on this item that we bit the bullet and implemented it. We took all good suggestions in to account, mapped out how best to implement it and added a few suggestions of our own. Read about this here
• We overhauled the Project Chart. The old version used Flash, looked ugly and couldn't be filtered or printed. It bugged us that we couldn't display the chart on iPad. Read more about this here....
• We added some required features to Notebooks. The major additions include moving Notebooks to another project, a new grid view of notebooks and some updates to improve the PDF downloading.

Small Ticket Items

• Dropbox: Added the ability to turn Dropbox off on a per project level
• Calendar: Project Events: Added ability to mark an event as editable by people on a project
• Tasks/Milestones: Added in the ability for an Administrator to change the date an item appears to be completed on
• Tasks: Added in a new drop down option so Administrators can change who create the task (Handy if you want to notify a client when the task is completed)
• Notebooks: Finally added in a way for people to tab through table cells in the Notebook editor
• Email: Creating tasks/messages by email got a new priority setting. You can add "!" for low, "!!" for medium and "!!!" for high priority
• Email: We are testing a new method of email parsing which allows you to create a friendly forwarding email to the tasks/messages Teamwork email address (e.g: Create an email address tasks@mydomain.com which forwards to the Teamwork email addres)
• Freshbooks: We now pull back and cache all your contacts when your exporting to Freshbooks. Before this there was a limit of 100 contacts. Now there is no limit!
• Milestones: Viewing a milestone now gives you the option to download a PDF document of the Milestone containing the milestone details, comments, tasks etc
• Tasks: Find out who created a task by hovering your mouse over the task name. Small but important update!
• All Milestones Page: Gutted this and re-wrote it to bring it up to date with other parts of the app
• API: We now have added full support for Resources
• API: We now have added full support for Notebooks
• Tech: Added new headers to force ISP Proxy Servers to always grab a new page

For a full list of changes and updates check out this page TeamworkPM Latest Updates

 

 

Just a short blog post to let you all know about a nice little update that has also been added to the notebooks section recently.
This update now gives you the ability to move notebooks from one project into another.

It’s very easy to do. Just click into the notebook you wish to move. Click on the options button and you will notice the new “move notebook” option there.

Select this and then pick the name of the project you wish to move the notebook to.
We hope you find this new feature handy.

As someone who was always responsible for quoting for new work back when we had a consultancy business, having a feature like our new Task Estimates would have really helped me gauge if I was quoting realistically for jobs and more importantly if we were making money on these projects.

There can sometimes be a massive gap between the time you quote for and the time you actually end up working....and it’s very rare that it’s in your favor.

We have been planning this new feature for quite a while and over the last 2 months in particular the amount of requests we received for this just grew and grew. This added to the motivation to push this feature up the Roadmap and to get it rolled out.

You now have the ability to add estimated time to a task. This feature will now really help you become even more organized. It will help you plot out the amount of time a project is going to take and for those of you that charge and quote by the hour this is going to become a vital tool.
Now over time you will be able to compare the time you estimated to the actual time you logged on the project.

With this new feature comes some very nice new reporting extras. The new workload chart and the extended Task list time report.

Right, so how does this feature work?

When creating tasks you will have the option to add an estimated time. This is available in the new Progress tab. Enter in the hours and minutes you think it will take to complate the task and save.

We also added a quick way to add estimated time to tasks. On the task page you will notice a plus sign as you place your mouse over tasks. Click this to quickly add estimated time for that task.
Once you have estimates added to your tasks across your projects you can view our new Workload chat. A lot of you have been looking for this. This new chart shows you the amount of work that you and your team have on across all your projects between certain dates. If a few of you have 20 hours work to do in 8 hours you might need to split the work up a bit ;-)
You can also see from this workload chart the estimated time verses the actual time logged

The last report that has changed is the time report on a task list. If you run this you get a break down of the total time estimated, actual logged time and whats billable across all the tasks.

We really hope you enjoy this new feature and as always, if you have any feedback, please send it on.