TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

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!

For the last few weeks I've been busy working on our first Desktop app for Teamwork to make logging time faster and easier.

Using the web app, you can only have one active timer running at any one time. This was by design. We wanted an easy to use tool within the app to help people measure the time spent they spent working on a task or project.

As Teamwork is used by a multitude of different businesses and teams, we wanted to also offer a more advanced, flexible and feature rich add-on using the API that could benefit from technologies not available to a web app. Features such as minimizing to the System Tray (on Windows) or the Dock (on Mac), auto-pause when the computer is idle (and resume when user is active again), multiple account support (for people jumping between Teamwork accounts), multiple timers etc

In the first version due to be released in late December or early January the following will be available:

- Multiple timers and fast switching between them
- Select your Teamwork projects
- Optionally choose a task from the current project
- Auto-Pause and Resume when the computer is idle. You can decide how long the threshold is in the settings.
- Always on top of all other windows setting
- Minimize App to tray or dock
- Automatic saving/loading of timers when app loads or quits
- Edit/Add/Delete timers
- Pause/Resume timers
- Log time to your Teamwork account

I built the app using AIR and Flex so this is going to be a cross-platform app for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The API must be enabled for your user account in Teamwork to be able to log time.

Future plans include the ability to update your Teamwork status from within the app. We have some changes to make first to the way Status messages work in the main web app and this Desktop version will compliment the planned changes nicely.

Dan.

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.

Just a quick post announcing that we have rolled out the Assign Tasks to Multiple People feature we have been working on for so long.

Sam, Peter, Ryan and myself scheduled an early Saturday start and after a few hours of last minute testing and polishing pushed the code live.

After the API, this was one of our biggest and most frequent requests and we are very proud of our final implementation. This was not easy to implement.

Peter (AKA Topper) will be describing the process, design decisions, challenges we faced etc in a follow up post in the next few days.

As always, we love hearing what you think so leave a comment or post a Tweet!

Dan.

Hey All! Thanks for all your great feedback on Twitter (@teamworkpm) and via email, I really appreciate people giving valuable feedback.

So, what have I learned?

• Details matter.
• When tasks are sorted by Due Date, the task is the important bit, the task list is secondary
• When tasks are sorted by Project, the task list is more relevant
• I'm not right all the time ;-)

I have been thinking about this non-stop all night. Peter liked my final version late last night. I liked it late last night but something in the back of my mind wasn't 100% confident that the final direction was the right one. People's feedback indicated that there was more work to be done.

Before I tuck into a massive Easter Feast, I decided to update my work last night taking the feedback into consideration and this is the result:

• If you sort by Project, you now get the view I decided on last night
• If you sort by Date, you get an improved view of version 2 that I threw away last night.

Sort By Project

Sort By Date

You'll also notice that Peter (after we discussed the issue last night) has made a great job of improving the aesthetics of the task listing view. The person responsible is moved to the end now and not BOLD so the tasks are easier to digest and look neater. There is another very good reason for doing this, assigning to multiple people. Once we are finished, you will see "You & 3 more" or "4 people...." and we needed to refactor the listing so we can move in that direction. It will be a thing of beauty!

Once we are 100% happy and the feature is live, we'll do a nice blog post on the main blog on the new changes. This blog (Engine Room) is a great sounding board and is a more personal blog than the formal blog.

Happy Easter Everybody! We like 2 kinds of presents: Easter Eggs and iPad's ;-)

Dan.

For ages and ages I have been meaning to fix up the Everything -> All Active Tasks page. To my surprise, it seems that this page is VERY important to people, it's pretty much the only page Fiona (our graphic designer) uses. I prefer to look at the Dashboard activity and work on my late and upcoming tasks. I might use this page more now ;-)

First, I started by fixing a bug we had. Tasks that were associated with Task Lists which in turn were associated with Milestones showed on the Everything page as no due date!

Second, I wanted to make this page more like a check list of what needs to be done. I always have an A4 Pad next to me when I'm working so as I was sitting back contemplating how I can make it friendly looking, I thought "How about an A4 pad type listing"

Here's what it looked like before I started:

You can see how boring this page is. There was no real distinction between the Projects and the Task lists.

After a few cups of coffee and a quick drive in town to help out a friend, this is what I came up with.

This was getting close and I tweaked the colours a 1000 times. I even contemplated scanning in my A4 pad ;-)

The problem I had with the above is:

1. It was a 3 column layout that cramped the data on small screens
2. It was hard to associate the tasks with the task lists
3. The project and task list name kinda merge together and it's not as user friendly as I wanted.
4. Long project names + Long Task List Names = Messy Screen

It's 23.53pm now and this is where I'm at. I'm getting happy with the layout now.

I like this because:

1. The project stands out even though there is less emphasis on it.
2. The task list is now an integral part of the task display and the indentation clearly makes it apparent that the tasks are part of that list.

That's it for now. All going well, you'll see the updates in the next live version of the software.

Dan.