The main items we have included in this update are:

• Added the ability to assign Milestones to multiple people (One of our top requests!)
  
• Edit event types on calendar
  
• Colour code Milestones by status on the calendar
• New company and people listing and editing (Peter did a great job on this)
• A - Z listing added
• Quick search
• List or Card view
• New editing/adding interface
• Sets the App up nicely for the new Contacts feature coming in about 2 - 3 weeks.
  
• Cut down complexity (and some confusion) on the Milestone calendars on the Dashboard and Project Overview
• Improved sending of the Daily Report to make it more reliable.
  
• Removed any auto-selecting of notify options if the user was not part of the owner company. This helped 10% of our users but confused 90% so it's gone.
• Improved the parsing of replies from Reply-by-email functionality (For the record, I absolutely hate auto-responders and have a lot more grey hair this week!) 

There are quite a few small changes (and a couple of bug fixes) around the app too and a few updates to the architecture that needed to be added now to set the groundwork for future updates.

We have a load of suggestions and updates queued up which we didn't get time to squeeze into this release so over the coming weeks you may see your feature implemented ;-)

Have a good weekend!

Dan.

I can across this news story while browsing the web yesterday and it gave me the idea to start a feel good friday video slot on our blog.

It's a great short clip about a guy called Matt Moman who ran a fake plant and flower business and how he developed a new business around fake limes, and Corona beer. It's an inspirational clip about how this entrepreneur turned a dream into a booming business.

Link through to the video:

We have a few nice new features locked in that we are looking to push live onto the system in the coming days. One of these updates is related to the milestone tab within a project. Like we now have with tasks, once this update goes live you will be able to assign milestone to multiple people.

When you create a milestone now you will be given the option to click on the little + sign under the who's responsible box to assign the milestone to more than one user. We feel this is an important feature to have within a project as a milestone is really the end point or goal that most people within a project are working towards so the ability to be able to assign certain milestones within a project to more then one person is really vital.

As with all our features within TeamworkPM if you have any feedback or questions, just click on the feedback link at the bottom of your install to send a message through to us.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.

I was reading a blog post earlier about how important it is to have transparency within an organisation and I couldn’t agree with this more. I was only just talking with a friend last night about this very thing. They just received a promotion a few months ago and how now they were being tasked with trying to increase business. One of the big obstacles they seemed to be facing was staff buy in on ways to move forward.

They are involved in a retail business and the staff are happy to just go through the motions till its closing time then it’s out the door for them. As an owner or manager it can be hard not to get frustrated by staff who are delighted that the day was quiet and there were few customers. To some staff this is a great day, same pay and no work, what more could they ask for.

This is where I feel a business needs to become far more transparent. Staff need to understand that there isn’t a bank account that has hundreds and thousands just sitting there waiting to pay wages and bills, their wages actually come from sales and cash in the till.  This ability for staff to know this and understand where the business is comes from having great team communication, and this needs to comes from the top down.

Staff need to feel that they have a kind of ownership in the business, not like shares or anything but just that their voices are heard and that they are part of the business. Granted some staff will never care but that comes down to hiring the right people. The other big area I feel staff are kept in the dark about is the mark up on products and services. Managers seem scared to let staff know what they make on a product, but I think it’s really important that staff know for two reasons.

The first, is some products make a lot less than staff think. Lets take the example of a chocolate bar, let’s say they sell for 1 euro/dollar. The average mark up on a product like this is about 20-25% so lets say the shop makes 25c for each bar sold. A box of 60 bars sells out and the staff see 60 euro/dollars in the till. Easy money they think, but the truth is the shop has only made 15 euro/dollars.  

The other area why this is important to let them know this is to combat theft. If over time staff take a chocolate bar here and there it only takes 15 from a box to mean no profit is made at all from that box. If staff understand this it gives them a better idea of just how much has to sell just to cover their wages and that all cash that is in the till is not actually profit.

The second reason staff need better transparency in a business is they need to know what to push/sell in a nice friendly manor. If you have two similar products and one has a much higher mark up, that is the product you want your staff to sell when the customers asks, “which one do you think I should get”.

This applies in every business, restaurants, coffee shops, chemist’s even offices where you are supplying a service. Some services you offer are easily to roll out; they have less work involved and thus have a much better mark up.

By having transparency in the work place it can really help a business to move forward. If you’re involved in the management side don’t hide your tasks and procedures, allow the staff to be kept up to date with what you are up to.

We are getting very close to releasing our new calendar feature which we are been working on now for some time now. Peter is pretty much just in the process of adding the final touches and tweaks to the calendar as I type, he also just has the final phase of tests to carry out as well.

A few of the new features with the new calendar are:

• Recurring events
• Drag and drop functionality
• Multiple reminders
• Quick add of events
• Start and end times on events
• And many more

Before we release it I thought I would quickly show you all it actually running. Now even since I shot this video yesterday there have already been a few improvements to it so you will really have to wait for the release to see how the full version turned out. In the mean time it does give you a very good idea of just how it is looking and how some of the functionality is working.

Now I'm afraid to say that this is not the greatest video I ever shot. It's a very rough and ready video which I shot using my iPhone. I had to do this because we are running it on our test server and I can't connect to that one via my mac, and it is my mac which I use for doing screen captures as it's the one with the software on it.

So I apologize for the shaking hand held video but it will still give you a good idea of how the new calendar is shaping up.

I have also attached a few screen shots here as well for you to all have a look at.

         

Click here to download:

preview-of-the-new-calendar-mcnDqCptalEkfItAuBny.zip (293 KB)

I came across this website today while going through my RSS feed http://locationindependent.com

The site was created by the original Location Independent Professionals, Lea & Jonathan Woodward.

Lea started out her professional life as a management consultant based in London, whilst Jonathan was a corporate graphic designer.

After Lea’s Mum died of cancer, she quit the rat race and became a personal trainer. A couple of years later, Jonathan was made redundant from his job. Fed up with the instability of the rat race and working for other people, they both decided to make a go of it and set up their own business.

Lea & Jonathan left the UK in early 2007, determined to find a ‘home’; instead they realised that they enjoyed the nomadic lifestyle that being location independent enabled – and are still travelling between some of their favourite countries including Thailand, South Africa and the Caribbean.

I love the idea of what they are doing and with todays technology it sure is getting a lot easier to achieve this type of lifestyle. I experience a small bit of this myself in the fact that we are based in Cork, Ireland and yet I have online meetings all the time with users in the US and UK and it works very well, and I don't need to clock up painful amounts of Air Miles to achive face to face meetings.

The whole idea of having to have a single base for staff to work at is no longer a must have. In a lot of interviews I have listened to and read lately of company's that have made it big it's unreal how many of the teams have built up the business while all working in different cities and country's and most of them from just an office at home as well.

If you’d like to find out how they – and how others do it, have a browse around their site for in-depth articles, inspiring interviews and more.

As you can see from the pic below we have addressed these issues. Hopefully this will make the emails far more meaningful and useful to everyone now.

As always we would love to get your feedback on this either through the comments here on the blog or via the the feedback link at the bottom of your TWPM install.

I just posted a link to a video on our Facebook page about a new feature that we are are in the middle of working on. The new feature is to help with a problem we were having around billable time and not always bee able to easily see what time we had already charge for. We also know quite a lot of you out there have also been having the same issues from the amount of feedback we have been receiving about this same issue.

The problem:

Some projects we were ending up with huge amounts of time been logged on them, then after a while it became very hard for accounts here to see which of this massive list of logged time had actually been billed and what was still due to be billed.

The solution:

What the new feature does is it now allows you to drag time, which has been logged as billable, over on to an invoice sheet. The idea behind this feature is that within a project there should never be any billable time that has not been assigned to an invoice.

The best way to get an idea of how this is working is to watch the short video I made which takes you through how it's currently working. Remember this is only our first working version and it's still a work in progress.

One thing I mention in the video is if your interested in Beta testing this feature in your install of TWPM just become a friend on Facebook and then we will be picking about 30 people to help us test this new feature and help us develop it further.

Below is a blog post from one of our customers who wrote this post on their own blog. We were so proud to receive this type of feedback that we just had to re-post it here in the engine room.

Top Notch Customer Service Is Teamwork Project Manager’s Killer App

About 6 months ago, Phases migrated our project management systems from Basecamp to Teamwork Project Manager – 2 web-based products that take the place of a desktop app like Microsoft Project. Now, I don’t usually take the time out to write a blog about a product/service that we use, but over the past few months I have been so impressed with Teamwork that I just had to take some time and let everyone know about this fantastic company!

Why We Moved

To put it simply, I felt as if the studio had outgrown Basecamp. There was no easy way to archive files once they were uploaded to the site, scheduling across projects was time consuming; we always found ourselves needing a feature that was not there, and updates were far and few between.

So we began to search for an alternative.

We demoed a few products, and Teamwork seemed to have most of the features we were looking for—not all, but most. The biggie was the ability to download files in batches. So we migrated our Basecamp data (yup, they offer a direct import from your Basecamp account!) to the new system and updated our clients.

Almost instant feedback response

After a few months I found an annoyance in the scheduling options, so I thought I would try out the feedback option. To my utmost surprise I had a response from one of the developers the same day. My request was a bit complex, but guess what? They have it scheduled for implementation!

Over the next several months I noticed a few little things that would make my daily chores much easier, so I used the feedback form again. And to my delight, I got the same speedy response from the guys at Teamwork with just one difference: some of my suggestions / requests had been implemented within just a day or two of my request! I felt like a kid in the candy store when I was using the new options that I had requested.

We’re from the Internet. We’re here to help you.

Today’s internet offers almost countless products and companies that are supposed to make our work-lives easier and more convenient. And while this is often true, because we no longer have to leave our desks, go down to the store and talk to other human beings in person, we end up missing the personal touch of a store front business.

Teamwork’s ability to supply the missing link of personalized client service is what sets their brand experience apart from other Web-based companies and what has made me into a brand evangelist. Kudos to Sam, Dan and everyone at Teamwork for the phenomenal customer service and fantastic product.

Here are just a few Teamwork Project Manager features that rocked our world:

• Notebooks: a way to easily share content with your team.
• Bulk file downloads: just check off the files you want and click the download button. Yup. That’s it.
• Risk Register: record and manage everything that might put a hiccup in your schedule.
• Resources: compile a list of resources (websites, google documents, anything and everything) that others on your team might need.
• File associations with messages: This one was fantastic to discover.  You can attach any file to a message after it has been uploaded, or upload a new file to the message.
• Task scheduling: (recommended by yours truly!) Reschedule an entire task list by “pushing” back the dates and maintaining time frame between each task.
• Calendar: Quickly view all activities across projects, and even schedule items independent of a project.

Check out the full list of project management tools the service offers for yourself, and don’t forget to look over the roadmap for future enhancements.