TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

We’ve just turned on a great new feature we’ve been using internally for a couple of weeks - email notifications which include the most recent comments.

Before, when you replied to a message or added a comment on an item, the notification email only included the new comment body. 

The old email format:

When things get busy, or a reply is added days afterwards, it was easy to lose the context of the original discussion. 

The new email notifications are far more helpful and show the last 6 replies added. If there are more than 6 replies in the discussion we show a link to the full thread. 

The new format:

We’ve also made the email notifications “responsive” so that, on a small screen such as the iPhone, the layout changes with the date and time moving below the author’s name making the content easier to read on the go.

On the most recent reply we also link to the item on your Teamwork account so you don’t have to scroll down the email to get to the actual link.

We also took this opportunity to tweak a few nuances that people sent via feedback.

• We fixed some localization issues with email notifications so the recipient now sees the times and language according to their preferences. 
• We improved the subject line in comment email notifications to list the object type the comment was added to. This allows you to see at a glance if the comment was on a Task, Notebook, Link, Milestone or File. We’ve kept the item details at the bottom of the notification email and gave more room to the actual message being sent.

As always, we hope you find this new feature useful! It’s definitely improved our productivity and we’ve noticed people are more inclined to continue the discussion when the context of the notification is clearer!

During the week we added in formatting support to our message and comment areas within TeamworkPM. The new formatting option is called Markdown. It allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). 

Markdown is a way to format your text to add bold and italic text, headings and a few other things, without having to use HTML.

Since we have added this new formatting feature in we thought we better give you a way to see what your messages will look like before they are sent. So we have also included a new preview option into the message section to allow you to see how your formatting will look before it's published

Markdown: An introduction

Below is a brief introduction into Markdown and how to use it. You can also check out the Wikipedia page which goes into more detail as well as given examples of other tricks and tips for using it.

Bold and italic text:
To create italic text, surround one or a few words with stars:

This is how you create *italic text*.

To create bold text, surround one or a few words with double stars:

This is how you create **bold text**.

If you have to, you can make your text both bold and italic:

This is how you create ***bold and italic text***.

A bulleted list:

Create bulleted lists using stars:

 * Item 1  

 * Item 2  

 * Item 3

The text above will look like this:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3

You can also use plus (+) or minus (-) instead of a star.

Creating links:

Combine brackets and parenthesis to create links in the text. It's quite simple:

Here's [a great website](http://www.teamworkpm.net). It'll really help you manage your projects.

The text above will look like this:

Here's a great website. It'll really help you manage your projects.

 

Quotes:

Add a greater-than sign (>) in front of anything you are quoting, and the text will be moved slightly towards the middle.

 > " Time is the scarcest resource,   

 > and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed."  

 > – *Peter Drucker*

The text above will look like this:

 Note how the name, Peter Drucker, is surrounded by stars to make it render in italic text.

Headers:

Markdown has support for different levels of headers using the hash sign (#):

 # This is the title

Here's some very good boiler plate text. I don't even know what a boiler is, even less a plate. 

 ## This is the subheader

Subheaders are awesome. Even better than you think. 

 ### This is the third level header.

And so on.

The text above will look like this:

This is the title

Here's some very good boiler plate text. I don't even know what a boiler is, even less a plate.

This is the subheader

Subheaders are awesome. Even better than you think.

This is the third level header.

And so on.

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.