In this latest release, you’ll find the most popular new features requested by customers:

Documents & Timesheets have Moved

The Documents and Timesheet pages have moved to the “My Home” tab. The reason is that they are heavily used pages in the system, so people want to access them from their Home page more quickly and easily than before.

New Document Features

• My Docs: This folder contains files that only you have access to. That way, you can add files from your PC or Laptop to access them from anywhere, anytime.
• Security: Click a folder or file and select the Security button to choose who can access your files online.
• Shared Docs: If someone shares files with you, then a “Shared” folder will appear in your folder list, which contains the files you now have access to
• Trash can: If you delete a file, it will now go to the trashcan. You can then move it back to your personal folder structure anytime you want. If you delete it from your trashcan, it will be deleted permanently.
• Rename button: Click on a file or folder and use the new rename button to change its name.
• Attachments: On the timesheets, expenses, risks, issues and changes tabs you can now attach a file of any type. When you do, it will show on the Documents page as well.
• File Types: We’ve added 50 more types of files that you can store online. If you have a file type that isn’t accepted, then contact us and we’ll add that file type for you.

New My Home Features

As mentioned above, the Documents and Timesheets pages have been moved to the My Home. We’ve also added these new features:

• My Tasks: On the Home page, you can now enter the % complete, effort, notes and docs directly on the page.
• Calendar: This page shows your scheduled tasks across all of the projects you have been assigned to. In the near future, it will also allow you to set and share personal appointments and meetings.
• To Do List: This page allows you to create and manage your To Do lists day-to-day.
• Settings: Here you can turn off tabs in the system that you don’t want to use day-to-day.

Email Alerts

You can now receive an email alert every time you receive a message in your account.

Security

You can now change these additional security settings if you are the Admin for your account: Turn on or off the Roadmap, Project Calendar, Personal Calendar and Messages tabs for your team.

Timesheets

There is now a small round settings button at the top of the Timesheet page. Using it, you can add Admin tasks to your timesheet like Annual Leave or Sick Leave as well as create ones of your own. Note: Only an Admin or Project Manager can change this.

Reports

• You can now view your Timesheet report online.
• The Availability report has changed to a new format.
• All reports list your tasks once, as opposed to multiple times.

Coming Up

In the next 2 weeks we’re swapping over to a new content delivery platform called Akamai. You’ll notice that this website will run twice as fast when we do. We’re also building a mobile app for the iPhone, Android and Microsoft Mobile marketplaces. It will be released in the next few months.

Feature Requests

Have feature requests? Email Kathleen (kathleens@projectmanager.com) and she will add them to the list for implementation. Note: 100% of the features above have been requested by customers – so keep them coming!

This month we have released one of the largest new feature sets ever. With a big focus on “collaboration”, check out these new exciting features:

My Home

On the “My Home” page, you can now see in the right-hand column a list of all of the “activity” in your account. It looks just like Facebook. You can see every time someone adds new data their account, to keep you informed of your colleague’s activity. The small settings icon in the top right allows you to choose the type of content that you want to see on your activity page. You can also click to “comment” on any activity, keeping your colleagues informed along the way.

Messages

The new “messages” feature also works just like Facebook and LinkedIn. You can create a new message and send it to one of your colleagues in your team. Rather than having to rely on e-mail for your projects, why not send messages to your team instead? That way all your messages are kept in one place, online.

Roadmap

Under the “All” tab, there is a new page called “Roadmap”. This page allows you to see a high-level roadmap of all of your projects in one place. You can see when projects are due to start and finish, so that you can better manage them at the portfolio level. This popularly asked for feature also allows you to drill-down into each project. If you wish to edit the project then simply click on the “Edit” button and it will take you straight to the Tasks page for update.

Pre-pay

When you click on the “Accounts” page under the main menu, you’ll notice that you can now pre-pay your account quickly and easily. If you pre-pay for 36 months then you will get a whopping 30% discount on the monthly price of your account. After you pre-pay, you can still change the number of users if you wish. We have also added the ability to pre-pay by purchase order, check and wire transfer. Contact us (support@projectmanager.com) if you have any questions.

Calendar

Due to popular request, each project now has a separate “Calendar” tab. On the Calendar page you can see all of the tasks that are scheduled for your project, per month. You can change the view from “Tasks” to “Resources” in order to see who is working on which tasks on which days in the month. This new powerful feature allows you to see the work scheduled ahead.

Other new features

• Help: The help system now loads much faster than before.
• Login: You can now choose to stay logged in if you wish.
• Groups: The resource and workload tabs have been added to the project group level.
• Alerts: There is a new e-mail alert that tells you when your tasks have changed.
• Timesheets: If you delete tasks that have timesheets attached, the timesheets won’t be deleted.
• Dashboard: There is a new settings button on the top right corner of the portfolio and project group dashboards which allows you to choose the project status types that are included.
• Imports: The import of Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft project plans is even more efficient than before.

For more information, go to the relevant page and click “Help” to read more about it. Then send your first message to your colleagues to start collaborating on your projects.

Hardware Upgrade

This month, we’ve replaced our computer infrastructure with top-of-the-line server hardware, so that ProjectManager.com will run as fast as possible for you.

As you can imagine, with people from around the globe accessing ProjectManager.com at the same time, there is quite a load on the dedicated servers that we have in place. While our competitors typically run outdated hardware (as it’s cheaper) we try and run the newest, fastest (and typically most expensive!) hardware that money can buy – for the simple fact that we know speed and reliability is important to you.

ProjectManager.com uses complex calculations to determine if you’re on track and present the results on your personal dashboard. So with these new high end servers in place, we can perform these calculations and send the results to your web browser at a high rate of speed.

If you have any questions, then just let us know. We’re here to help.

This month, we’ve released an exciting suite of new features and the great news is that 100% of these features have come from our customers. So keep giving us feedback and we’ll keep releasing new features that you need to manage projects.

New Reports

We’ve released a suite of new reports and also made the existing reports customizable. Here’s a summary of what’s been done:

• Custom Reports: Every report now has the ability to turn columns on and off as you wish.
• New Reports: We’ve released new Expense, Timesheet, Workload, Risk, Issue and Change reports.
• All Projects: You now have the ability to report across all projects.
• Project Groups: When you create a new project group, you can now report on it easily.

All Projects and Project Groups

Due to overwhelming demand from our customers, we have changed how project groups work. They use to be virtual views of projects and each person had to create groups themselves. In this way, you never knew whether you were looking at the same data as your colleagues.

However now, when you click on the “All” tab at the top and then select “Projects”, you will see a number of options which allow you to create new groups. Project Managers and Administrators can create as many groups as they wish, and there is one hierarchy per account. They can move projects into groups so they are easier to find. In large companies, you might group by department (“IT projects”, “HR projects” etc) or you might want to group projects by the project manager’s name, by priority or other.

You can open a group and view a group report or dashboard by clicking on the “New” tab at the top and selecting the “Open a Group” option.

One great thing now is that everyone sees the same group structure. It’s easier to manage large volumes of projects and the group hierarchy is created only once for the entire account. That way, everyone can report on groups more easily, all viewing the same data.

Simplified Tasks

When you click on the Tasks tab, you’ll notice these changes:

• Menu Changes: We’ve simplified the menu so it’s easier to use. The extra menu options have been moved to the new “Settings” button.
• New Custom Field: If you click on the “Columns” button and select “Custom Columns”, then we’ve added a new type called “Checkbox”.
• Discuss: The new “Discuss” button allows you to hold discussions about tasks.
• Attach: If you click “Attach” then you can attach any documents to tasks more easily.

Discussions

The Discussions feature has also been changed, due to popular request:

• Discussions Tab: When you create a new discussion you’re now automatically subscribed, so you’ll receive discussion comments as they happen.
• Alerts Tab: If you set a Discussions alert on the Alerts page (under the main Menu) for a certain role, then anyone with that role will automatically be subscribed to new Discussions created from that point onwards.

Speed

You might have noticed that after logging in a few times after this release, it gets much faster to use. That’s because we’ve implemented a new Content Delivery Network. This means that the software is operating from a server near you, as opposed to our central server farm at Liquidweb in Michigan, USA. This is only phase 1. We’re rolling out the 2nd phase in a couple of weeks time, so it will then get faster still. Let us know if you find it faster to use and where you’re from. We’d appreciate the feedback.

This month, we’ve tried to focus on improving the features that already exist by either rebuilding them and making them faster, or adding lots of tweaks to make them simpler to use. Here’s what we’ve done:

Documents

We have completely rebuilt the Documents page, to make it dramatically faster:

• Speed: You can now navigate folders and select documents instantly.
• Search: We have added a search tab on the left and made it easier to use.
• Upload: You can now upload has many files as you want at the same time.
• Download: You can also download multiple files at the same time.
• Moving: You can select files and move them easily into other folders.
• Delete: You can delete multiple documents at the same time.
• Ease: It’s now easier to create a hierarchical folder structure.

Timesheets

We have also made a lot of changes to the Timesheet page, to make it easier to use:

• Select Tasks: Now, when you select tasks they will appear much faster in the pop-up.
• Auto-fill: We’ve added the ability to auto-fill your timesheet with all of the tasks that you are assigned, across all projects, for the current week. This saves you having to go and find them manually.
• Export: Now when you export timesheets, you can specify the users, date range and format you want the exported timesheet entries to be in.
• Summary: The total amount of time per task and per day is now displayed in the column and row summary cells at the end. This saves you having to calculate them.

Restoring Projects

Often, people delete projects accidentally and they want them to be restored. To save us having to restore your projects manually, you can now do yourself. On the “All”, “Projects” page you can click the new settings icon beside the Export button and select to view Deleted projects. When you do this, you can see a list of all of the projects that have been deleted since 1 June. There is a small icon to the far right for each project which allows you to restore the project. You can then change your settings to hide deleted projects and your list will resume to normal, with the deleted project restored.

Other Features

We have also made these changes for you:

• Copy a project: When you create a new project and use the “copy existing projects” feature, you can choose to copy all of the data, or just the task list only.
• All project settings: On the “all projects” page, there is now a new settings button beside the export button. When clicked, it will allow you to select the projects you wish to view. That way you can filter the view to only see open, closed and/or deleted projects.
• Workload: The calculations for the workload page have been changed so that they match the calculations for the resource reports. Before, they were slightly different. Now they are exactly the same, to the decimal place!
• Email Alerts: When e-mail alerts are sent to you, they now include a link which takes you to exactly the right place in ProjectManager.com
• Discussions: Before, when you created a new discussion, you had to manually set the e-mail alerts and these sometimes conflicted with the alert set on the Alerts page under the main menu (only Administrators can view this). We have now changed it so that any user can “subscribe” to any discussion on a project which they have access. This means that you will only receive comments for a discussion if you click the subscribe button. You have to subscribe to each discussion manually, even ones that you create yourself.
• Closed projects: On the project Info page, you can change the project status to “closed”. When you do this, it will be removed from the dashboard and reports automatically.
• Pop-ups: Most of the pop-ups in the system are now dramatically faster than before.