TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

The Notebook tab in your Teamwork projects has been on the receiving end of a long overdue overhaul this month.

The main issue with the notebooks section was that it had a different listing style and UI to the other sections of Teamwork. In all sections of Teamwork where items can be placed in categories, we list these on the left hand side so you can quickly browse the items in each category. The old Notebook tab on each project didn't have this resulting in a long scrolling page making Notebooks hard to find.

Even though the Notebook editor has been improved over time, the Notebook listing page pretty much remained unchanged ever since we launched the feature.

If you had a relatively small number of Notebooks, the old system worked really well at the start. As you started adding more notebooks and more categories there was no way to easily filter or sort the notebooks. Instead the page would just get longer and longer and you would have to scroll your way through all the notes to find the one you were looking for.

The new display system enables you to quickly filter the notebooks by the category and sort by date last updated or by the notebook name. If you have not picked a category to filter by you can also sort by Category.

The number of notebook versions is now also easily viewable from the top level just by glancing at the icon.
We've also improved the View Notebook interface.

You will see 3 new buttons in the top right corner of the view notebook page: Edit Page, Versions and Options.
The Edit Page button does exactly what it says on the tin. You are brought straight in to the content ready for editing. A new addition is the ability to Lock a page for editing. This lets you lock the Notebook from other users so your team can’t make any changes while you are working on the new version. Once you have made your changes, saved them and are happy to unlock the page you can click on the options button and click on Unlock this notebook. When a notebook is locked the icon changes to reflect this. A key icon will appear instead of the latest version. If you hover your mouse over it, a tooltip will tell you who has this locked this notebook.

The second button on the view notebook page is Versions. This feature was available before but it too has been enhanced and made easier to use. Clicking on a version allows you to view that version of the notebook. Clicking on two checkbox and then hitting Compare highlights the changes that were made between versions.

The Options button gives you various other functions such as Download Version, Add Comment and Edit Details. The Edit Details lets you change the notebook name, category, description as well as privacy settings. You can also lock or unlock the notebook from here. The last option is to Delete a notebook. This is available to Administrators and deletes the whole notebook and all previous versions.

We've received some great feedback on this new feature and we won't stop here. We have some great ideas on how we can enhance this section in the future.

As always we would love to receive your feedback on the changes.