TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

When we started out this year we made a decision that it would be the year of integrations with other apps. So far we have really stuck to this. This year you have seen some really useful systems linked to TeamworkPM such as Dropbox, Freshbooks, Google Docs, Harvest Blinksale, QuickBooks Online and now box.com.

For those of you who have already used Dropbox with TeamworkPM, box.com works in pretty much the same way. You select your top level box.com folder to add to your TeamworkPM account and then for each project you select both the folder and set the users that you want to have access to your box.com ffiles on that project.

Adding and removing access is dead simple. All the controls for each individual project are handled within each project's Settings page.

If you already use box.com within your business to handle large files and to share files with clients and work mates, having box.com now fully integrated into your TeamworkPM account is going to make managing and running your projects even more useful and efficient.

So how do you hook box.com into your account?

The first requirement is that you are using a Business 2, Corporate or Enterprise account.
Next you need to click on Settings->Site Settings and choose Integrations. Scroll down to the box.com section and authenticate your box.com account. Once authenticated you need to select your top lever folder to use within your TeamworkPM account. No user can browse above this top level root folder so choose wisely.

box.com is all set up and ready to attach to projects. Browse to a project where you would like to have access to box.com. Go the  Project Settings page and again scroll to the bottom where you will see all the box.com options.

The settings here let you turn on or off box.com on the project. You also pick the Box folder you wish to be use for the project and you also choose who you wish to have access to Box on this current project.

Once you have done this you will now have the option to attach files from your box.com account to tasks, comment and the files section within your projects.

It’s all pretty straight forward and easy to use. As with all our new features we hope you love this new addition and as always any feedback or questions you may have please let us know.

The ability to see comments across all your projects in one place was a feature we had been discussing at TeamworkPM HQ for a while, but as you can all see from our roadmap, there is always a lot on, so this feature kept getting pushed out.

Last week, after Dan had a long conversations with a customer, he decided to dedicate a few days to finally get the All Comments feature built and out the door.

For people who have lots of projects on the go, and who receive a lot of emails a day. You guys are really going to love this update to the Everything section. We have added a new tab within the Everything link called, All Comments. This new section allows you to view all comments across all projects to which you have access to, in one place.
There are also a nice selection of filters to help you narrow things down so you can just focus on the information you are looking for.

You also have the option to jump directly into any project by clicking on the project name. You can link directly to the task or file the comment was placed on as well using the first link. We have also built in tool tips as well on the first link. Placing your mouse over this link will display more information about the task, file etc. without having the leave the page.

As always we hope you find this new feature really helpful and if you have any feedback on this or any other areas please let us know.

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!

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.

We are excited to announce that we have just launched Dropbox integration for TeamworkPM!

We've been working hard on this for quite some time and it feels good to release this top requested feature for customers on the Business 2, Corporate and Enterprise plans.

 

How does the Dropbox integration work?

When you link a Dropbox account with Teamwork you can reference your Dropbox files through Teamwork so they appear within the files tab of your projects. The files reside on Dropbox so when you change a file on your local computer, the very latest version is available in Teamwork. This will also gives you the ability to reference the same file across all your projects easily without having to upload the files separately into each project. 

 

I'm itching to give it a go, how do I set this up?

Customers on the Business 2, Corporate or Enterprise plans get a new tab on the Site Settings page called Integrations. It's pretty easy once you visit that tab but here are some step-by-step instructions:

 

1. First thing you need to do is to allow Teamwork to access your Dropbox account.

To get to the Integrations section, click on Settings in the top right, then click Site Settings. On the settings page, click the new "Integrations" tab.

Click on Connect Dropbox button to go through the authorization process. You will be directed to the Dropbox website and prompted to log in. Once you log in to the Dropbox account you want to use with Teamwork, Dropbox will ask you if you want to allow Teamwork to connect to your Dropbox Account. Course you do, so click Allow.

 

2. Choose your top-level folder.

Dropbox will then send you back to your Teamwork account and you will be prompted to select the Top Level Folder for your Dropbox integration with Teamwork.

Don’t worry if you have other folders and files within your dropbox account that you don’t want others to have access to. Users will be limited to the Top Level Folder you select here and won't be able to browser below this.

Once you have successfully connected your Dropbox folder you're good to go!

 

Project Level Folders

Each project can have it's own Project Level Folder selected which users on your project are confined to. This can be selected in the "settings" tab of each project.

 

Settings Project Dropbox Permissions

When you choose a folder for a project, you can also specify who can browse and add files from this Dropbox folder to your Teamwork project.

If users have permission to access the Dropbox folder for a particular project, they will see a Dropbox button on the Files tab.

 

Browsing Dropbox and Linking in Files

Clicking the Dropbox button will now pull up a new file browsing interface for selecting a file (or files) from your Dropbox account and attaching it to the project you are working on. 

Once you have then selected the files you wish to upload to your project just click on "Link-in Selected Files" You also have the option to quickly view a thumbnail of any images within your Dropbox folder by hovering your mouse over the file for a second.

Clicking "Link-in Selected Files" will add the Dropbox files to your project. You can easily see at a glance which files are linked to from your Dropbox account via the logo displayed under the files.

 

And there's more....

When you create a new task or message (if you have permission to use Dropbox on the project) you will see a new option when choosing a file called "Dropbox". This allows you to choose and link the Dropbox files while you are creating your task or composing a message.

We thought we would finish off the week here with a nice update to the files page.

This update now allows you to change the view on the files page from a list view to a grid view which enables you to see far more files in one go. It's great if you want to browse through all the files on the page visually.

This is a screenshot of how the files tab used to look.

And this is the shot of the new files tab, notice the new icons in the top right for switching between list and grid views.

Once you click on the grid view you get a really nice view of all the images on the page side by side.

You still have access to all the same nice features as you do in list view, such as the ability to view the latest comment and access other file details.

We hope you enjoy this nice enhancement to the files section.

Today brings good news. The official Teamwork Project Manager Desktop Timer App has been released into the wild.

We built this app using Adobe AIR so it will run as a native desktop application on Windows, Mac and Linux. The app lets you to create timers and log the time directly back into your TeamworkPM account.

Downloading the app....

The app can be installed from the Desktop Timer Download page

Quick start guide.....

Once you have installed the app, you will need to authenticate yourself using your API key. This key is found in your account settings within your TeamworkPM account. Click on your name in the top right of the web app, select 'My details" and on the pop up click on the tab 'API". Copy the key from here and paste it into the Options dialog in the Desktop Timer App.

The options dialog also allows you to set other key features such as;

• Pause timer when you're idle after a set amount of time - When you go back working the timer will start again auto-magically.
• Return only starred projects when logging time
• Option to keep the Timer App on top of all other desktop windows - Perfect when you're using the mini view!

With the timer app authenticated, you can choose to create timers in a number of different ways.

The first way is to manually create a timer using the Add timer button. This creates a Plain-Jane timer where you choose the Project (and optionally the task) when you are finished.

The second way is to use the import function. This pulls back a list of all upcoming tasks that are assigned to you in Teamwork. You can then select the tasks you wish to bring through to the timer app. Holding down CTRL (on PC) or CMD (on Mac) will allow you to select multiple tasks at a time.

Once you have finished logging time on a task, click the Log Time button. If your timer is associated with a task, it will automatically place this logged time into the right project but if it's a manually created timer, clicking this it will give you the option to pick which project to log the time against. You also have the option to dig in further and select which task the logged time belongs to. You can then enter a description and choose whether the time is billable.

The last option here is reset timer or remove it from your list once the time is logged. Resetting a timer sets the time to 00:00:00 but keeps the timer in your list so you can log more time against it later.

If a timer is against a task, you also have the additional option of having the task marked complete when the time is logged.

Another nice feature is switching to mini-mode. If you double click the circular part of the logo it will minimize the app down to a more compact view that can sit out of the way on your screen.

We hope you enjoy this new addition to TeamworkPM and as with all our features we invite you to provide us with feedback on what you think.

Words of thanks...

We hoped to have this Desktop App released in January but due to some great feedback from our Beta testers (special thanks to Mike B. and Dennis M.) we moved some features from Version 2 to Version 1. This forced the expected release date back but allowed us to deliver a much better product. The app has an auto-update feature so as we add new features (and bug fixes!) you will be prompted to update to the latest version. Thanks for your support over the last few months and pushing us to make a better app...

Also make sure you check out our timer FAQ's page if you need any help.

It's my favourite time of the week again - update time!

Based on lots of feedback and suggestions (some old, some new) we have knocked a few items on the head and rolled them out live.

What's new?

• Calendar: If the event end date is past the current time of day we now slightly grey the event title and time so you can focus on what's next
• Calendar: A very popular request was the ability to see tasks per day on the calendar without having to click off to another page. We have now added this ability by hovering your mouse over the task count for the day.
  
• Tasks: If you hover over the time icon on a task we now pop-up a little tool tip showing you how much time has been logged so far

  
• All Time: Custom report now has the option to pick an arbitrary number of projects to run the report against all grouped nicely by Company
  

  
• Project Name: Some people have the same project name for multiple projects but for different company's. We now list the company name next to the project name where the project name may be ambiguous
• Time: You can now associate time entries with a task in the Time tab. Previously, you had to log the time from the Task options menu. We added this for new time entries and when you edit a time entry.
• Resources: We added a sort option (Sort by either date added or name)
  

  
  
  
• Project Report: If Start and End dates are set on a project we also include them in the project report
  

What's fixed?

• Backup download link in Internet Explorer wasn't working
• Milestones were missing in some backups for some users
• We added a handy new rule for Teamwork sites that used to be SSL but are now Custom Domains. Users no longer get presented with an SSL error.
• Basecamp Import: There was some funkiness happening with some imports which has now been resolved
• We improved the display of the Project Report late items when they are late due to a Milestone being late
• We now remember the person picked in the Time filter to make it easier when filtering to edit time entries.
• We darkened the "Un-Pinned" task list icon so it is more visible on the majority of screens
• Recurring Events in the calendar got a lot of love and work 100% now. We had a slight calculation error that caused many of our customers to get grey hair...

Thanks to everyone who sent us Feedback and Suggestions! We have some more on the way that didn't make it into this release!

A lot of people work with contractors in Teamwork and have requested that we add a setting so people can view time they logged but not time that other people logged.

Yesterday I totted up the number of Requests from Feedback on this item and decided to implement a new permission View other people's time

The change is now live in the app. For existing users, this is turned on by default so existing users time reporting will work as normal. You can now edit each person's permissions and un-check this permission if you only want them to be able to see time they logged.

Hope you like this improvement.

Dan.

Today we updated the live app to include some important features requested.

Features rolled out today include:

• Ability to "Pin" a task list so it never closes.
• New method of Collapsing/Expanding a task list - Move it from Task List options to an icon on the List title
• Ability to save a task list as a Task List Template
• Messages - From now on, you will be able to see per "Message Post" who received a notification email
• Time Reports now show include the company name so you can easily distinguish between projects with the same name
• A new Filter option of "Tomorrow" added to the Everything - All Tasks page
• A new option to quickly make all tasks in a list private has been added
• Added the ability to create a task from the Late/Upcoming/Today tabs on Dashboard and Project Overview
• Changed the behaviour of the Tab key in Notebook WYSIWYG editor so it indents list items
• Added the ability to see completed task lists attached to Milestones. Previously we only showed active task lists
• Modified the message post listing page to be neater and easier to digest

Bug Fixes rolled out today include:

• Fixed an issue where the iPhone zoomed the text which made getting your API key impossible in the app
• Exporting invoices to Harvest if the Invoice name included an ampersand resulted in a failure
• Daily Emails sent to Timezones GMT + 12 showed an incorrect date for the report
• Daily Emails sent to Timezones GMT + 12 did not send on Mondays (as from our perspective it was Sunday)
• Calendar : Default start time was not in the user's timezone but at GMT
• Files uploaded from Mac or Linux that had non-Windows compliant characters failed. Such as "|"
• Fixed an issue where the custom message was not included in invites to users when a user was created
• Fixed an issue on iPhone/iPad where content was in a scrollable div. iOS doesn't support overflow:auto

There a few other small tweaks and improvements that are not that visible but important none-the-less.

Hope you enjoy these improvements.

Dan.