We at TeamWork Live would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! We have been very busy over the holidays and have many exciting new features to share with you.

Timer
By popular request, we have added a timer for tracking your time. You no longer have to manually track your time and then enter them into TeamWork Live. Instead, you can now track your time using our timer. The timer allows you to quickly move between multiple items and quickly start and stop timers for different items. In addition, we have added keyboard shortcuts for power users so that you can use the timer even more efficiently.

The timer can be accessed from the "My Time" page, from the "Time" section of a project workspace, from the time entries tab on the detail page for an item, and from the milestones and tasks page. The "My Time" page and the "Time" section of each project workspace has a timer bookmark that you can add to your browser's bookmarks bar to allow for easy access to the timer.

More Storage
We have moved to new file storage infrastructure that has allowed us to achieve additional cost savings. We are happy to pass those savings back to you in the form of increased storage. In mid-December, we doubled the storage space on all membership plans for the same price. We hope you enjoy the extra room!

File Preview for Adobe PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, and TIFF Image Files
We now have built-in previews for Adobe PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, and TIFF image files. You no longer have to download these file types to view their contents. Instead, you can view them directly from your browser using our built-in viewer.

Tasks/Messages
1. You can now update the approver for a task or milestone from the respective bulk update pages.
2. When you duplicate a milestone and the tasks associated with it, it will now automatically update the due dates for the associated tasks. For example, suppose you duplicate a milestone that has a due date of January 1st and it has an associated task that has a due date of January 10th. If you select February 1st as the due date for the new milestone, the due date for the associated task will automatically be updated to be February 10th. This should be a big timer saver for you if you use milestones as tasks templates.

Messages
You can now view all your unread messages by clicking on the "Unread" filter from your "My Messages" page.

Contacts
We have enhanced the import contacts functionality to support importing of any contacts that is exported in CSV (Comma Separated Values) file format. If our importer does not recognize the contact fields, you will be asked to help the importer by associated the fields from the files with the contact fields in TeamWork Live.

Thank you again for your continued support. We hope you enjoy the new features.

We are happy to announce the release of some new features to TeamWork Live. As we mentioned in the previous blog post, this release is focused on time tracking. We will have a follow-up release with the rest of the time tracking improvements but we wanted to go ahead and make the completed features available to you so you can start taking advantage of it.

Weekly Timesheet
We have added a new report that allows you to see either:
1) the weekly number of hours logged for a project broken down by team members
2) the weekly number of hours logged by a team member broken down by projects

Dedicated Time Entry Section
We have added a "Time Entries" section to each project workspace. From this page you will be able to quickly add time entries without having to go to the detail page for each individual task or milestone. This should greatly improve the usability of the time tracking feature and we think you will find this addition to be a real time saver. There is also a new "My Time" section under the "Dashboard" menu that will allow you to view your recently added time entries and add additional time entries.

Minimum Billing Increments
You can now specify in your preferences a minimum billing increment for time entries. Time entries will be automatically rounded up the next billing increment.

Coming Up
Our next release will continue with the time tracking improvements as we add:
1. A timer for tracking your time
2. A budget feature that will allow you to enter a budget for a project, user, or milestone and have TeamWork Live automatically notify you when you are near your budget so you don't accidentally exceed it
3. The ability to mark time entries as billed

Thanks again and please continue letting us know what we can improve in TeamWork Live to make it more useful to you.

We have made a number of improvements to TeamWork Live recently that we want to share with you. First, we added an agenda view and support for creating milestones and tasks from the calendar page. We have also made a number of usability improvements.

Calendar Agenda View
We have added an agenda view to the calendarr. The agenda view shows the calendar items in list format and allows you to easily print the details of the items in the calendars. Use the tabs on the top right corner of the calendar to switch between the month and agenda view.

Quick Add Milestones and Tasks
You can now add milestones and tasks from the calendar using the quick add feature. Previously, you could only add milestones and tasks form the milestones and tasks sections, respectively.

Usability Improvements
1. Users managing a large number of projects will now see a select box at the top of their project workspaces menu that will allow them to switch to different projects. Previously, it was difficult to switch to a project at the bottom of the list if the projects list extended passed the bottom of the browser without using the scroll wheel found on some pointing devices.
2. When creating a new project, you now have the option of inviting all members from an existing project to the new project. This option allows you to quickly add a set of users to a new project without having to manually invite them after creating the project.

What's Ahead
Our next release, which we are already hard at work on, will focus on major improvements to time tracking. Among the features being planned are:
1. a weekly timesheet that allows you to see the number of hours worked by team members for each project,
2. a single page from which you can quickly add time entries for different tasks without having to go to the detail page of each task,
3. a timer functionality so you don't have to manually track the amount of time you are spending on individual tasks,
4. and support for specifying rounding increments for time entries.

Thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to bringing you more exciting changes to make running your projects even easier!

We have added some exciting new features in the past few weeks that we want to make you aware of. We hope theses features will make it even easier for you to stay on top of all of your projects. Thanks again for your continued support.

Comments Report
We have added a comments report that allows you to quickly see all the comments that have been made across all of your projects. You can filter the report to see only comments for specific projects or for a specific time period. The report also includes a full-text search engine that will allow you to quickly see all the comments that match your search term. Like the message search, the search result will have your search term automatically highlighted for you.

Support for Viewing All Messages
You can now configure the messages section of your projects so that they can be viewed by either the project administrator, the company administrator, or by all team members. This is useful for projects where you want specific project members to be able to read all previously sent messages so that they can catch up on a project. You could achieve a similar effect previously by sending all messages to everyone in the project, but this had the drawback of everyone being notified about every new message even if it's not relevant to them. The new settings allow you to send messages only to the relevant project members but still allows you to review all previously sent project messages. 

For security reasons, messages sent before this feature is enabled will not appear in the "All Messages" list. For information on how to enable this feature, click the "Help" link and then on the "Message Settings" link.

Create Item Via Email Improvements
We have made it even easier for you to create items via email. You can now email or CC tasks@teamworklive.com, milestones@teamworklive.com, events@teamworklive.com, or documents@teamworklive.com from the email address used when signing up for TeamWork Live to create tasks, milestones, events, or documents respectively. You can continue to use your previous drop box address if you want but we think you will find these new addresses to be easier to remember. You can add the same keywords in the subject line of your email to specify the responsible user, due date, etc. for the created items. 

Color Code Project Calendars
You can now color-code the items in your project calendar by the project member that is responsible for them. Select "Responsible user" from the "Color code by" selection.

Filter "My Tasks" By Project
In addition to filtering your tasks by milestone, you can now filter the tasks in your "My Tasks" by project. This filter will hide tasks from other projects when you are working on a specific project.

Miscellaneous
1. We have improved the notification emails so it does a better job of highlighting the changes that were actually made.
2. You can now disable auto-archiving of completed items from your company preferences. This is useful if you want to keep previously completed items in your folders around for reference purposes.
3. The comment icon now tells you the date of the last comment when you move your cursor over it.

We would like to make you aware of the new features and enhancements that we have made to TeamWork Live for our summer release. We have been gradually releasing the features as we completed them so you have probably seen some of these changes already, but we want to make sure you are aware of all of them. 

Calendar Enhancements
You can now filter the project calendar so that it only shows items assigned to a specific project member. This allows you to quickly see the items for a project member in a particular project. 

Milestones/Tasks Enhancements
1. When deleting a milestone, you will now be asked if you want to also delete any associated tasks.
2. You can now reassign the responsible user from the bulk update milestones and bulk update tasks pages reached from the "My Milestones" and "My Tasks" sections. Previously, you could only reassign the responsible user when bulk updating from the milestones or tasks sections of a project workspace.

Messages/Comments Enhancements
1. You can now add links and embed external images into comments and messages.
2. When you move your cursor over "team" link for a message sent to the entire team, you will now be shown all the members of the project. This allows you to see who the message was sent to without having to leave the message section. You can also do the same in the message reply window.
3. Each conversation now has a "Link to conversation" under the "More" menu for the conversation. The link can be used to refer to the conversation from an email or another message.

Contacts Enhancements
You can now search your contacts from the contacts section using the contacts search box.

Recent Activity Enhancements
Project status changes will now be shown in the recent activity list.

Administration Enhancements

Miscellenous
1. We have added an upload progress bar that shows you the percentage of a file that has been uploaded, thereby allowing you to monitor the progress of your file upload.
2. On-hold items are now hidden from throughout the app (including your dashboard, your milestones and tasks lists, and from the reports).
3. The "Share this item" link for an item has been improved so that the link now incorporates the project name if it is a project item.

Thanks again for your continued support. We are working on some exciting features for the next release that we will announce in an upcoming post.

We would like to alert you some significant changes that we have made to TeamWork Live over the past 2 months. These changes are intended to simplify TeamWork Live—making it easier for new users to get started with it—and decrease confusion over how best to use certain features in TeamWork Live.

Reorganization of the Personal Workspace
The personal workspace has been one of the most problematic and confusing area for new users to TeamWork Live. While the features in the personal workspace were useful, calling it a "workspace" was confusing as it was functionally different from the project workspaces. For example, the calendar in the personal workspace shows all the calendar items for a user, while a project calendar only shows all calendar items for a project. New team members would often add tasks and documents to their personal workspace instead of a project workspace, which would cause problems because their team members would never see them.

As a result, we have reorganized the project workspace while still retaining the functionalities that made it useful. The following changes have been made:
1. The overview page for the personal workspace has been completely removed. The page was redundant with the dashboard.
2. The sections of the personal workspace are now accessible from a drop-down menu from the dashboard tab. This will remove their association with the "workspace" label so that users will not think that they are functionally similar to the corresponding sections in the project workspaces.
3. The sections have been renamed to make it clearer that they are for the current user only. For example, "Calendar" has been renamed to "My Calendar", "Folders" have been renamed to "My Folders", etc.

Membership Plan Changes
As part of the simplification process, we have decided to remove the per-user plans. Having both per-user and group plans was causing confusion. Additionally, we have learned that most administrators like to centralize management of their membership plans and that the per-user plans were too cumbersome. The per-user plans were mainly being used by people with 3-5 team members as there was a gap in the group plans for that team size.

To address the gap, we have decided to introduce a 5-person "Starter" plan for $39/month. This plan saves money for most of our per-user plan members, makes it easier for plan administrators to manage their users, and gives them access to the branding and customization features found in the other group plans. Users currently on the per-user plans can continue on them but they will no longer be available to new users.

Color Coding of "My Calendar" by Project
You can color-code your personal calendar by projects instead of by type and status (i.e., upcoming milestone, overdue task, etc.). To do so, select "Project" from the "Color calendar by" selection found below the calendar (see screen shot below). This view makes it easier for you to see which calendar entries are for which project.

Thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to making TeamWork Live even more useful to you in the future.

We are excited to announce our first major features release of the year. This release is focused on improving the management of projects. We have added support for project status and the archiving of completed projects.

Please note that we have renamed project teams to projects because the "project team" name was causing confusion.

Project Status
You can now specify statuses for your projects. The available statuses are:
1. Planning - Projects in the planning stage are only visible to the project owner and company administrators. Putting a project in the planning stage allows you to set it up before making it visible to your team members and clients.
2. Active - Active projects are fully functional and visible to all team members and clients.
3. Critical - Critical projects are active projects that are highlighted as requiring increased attention.
4. On-Hold - On-hold projects are fully functional, but their upcoming milestones, tasks, and events are not shown on the dashboard. Clients will continue to see on-hold projects as active projects.
5. Archived - Archived projects are not shown in your workspaces list and you cannot invite new users to them.

The "Project Workspaces" drop-down menu is now grouped by project status with "Critical" projects listed first, followed by "Active" projects, "On-Hold" projects, and "Planning" projects.

Project Management Page Improvements
We have completely redesigned the project management page to make it clearer and more responsive. The page is organized into tabs by project status. The first tab list all your active projects, followed by separate tabs for each status. The far right tabs contains your archived projects and project templates. The user management features have been moved to a separate page that can be reached by clicking the name of the project. See below for a screen shot of the new project management page.

Page Tutorials
The project management pages feature a quick tutorial that highlights the major features of the page. We will be rolling out these tutorials to other sections of the site as update them. We hope you find them useful.

Unification of Workspace and Permission Selection
The full-screen edit page has been updated so that the selection of the workspace and permission matches that of the quick edit option. This should result in a more consistent user experience.

Bulk Update of Permissions
You can now update the permission settings for milestones and tasks from the bulk update milestones and bulk update tasks page.

Bug Fixes
1. We fixed a bug where you could not unassign a task using quick edit.
2. Activity for completed tasks and milestones are now included in the daily digest.

We will be rolling out many more improvements in the weeks ahead. Thank you for your continued support.

We've been quiet on the blogging front over the last couple of months as we've been hard at work improving the inner workings of TeamWork Live. We spent December and the first part of January improving the site infrastructure to make it more reliable. We also made changes that will make it easier to add additional features going forward. We believe you are going to see the benefits of these changes in the coming months as we start full-time development on new features again. 

Infrastructure Improvements
1. Live monitoring of email processing and notification system so that we can be alerted if email notifications are not being sent to you or if our system has problems processing any emails that you send to TeamWork Live.
2. Live monitoring of database for potential problems (such as deadlocks) so that we can address any issues before they become problems for you.
3. Improved clustering and failover of our servers so that a failure of a server will have minimal (if any) impact on TeamWork Live. This improvement should also allow us to perform future upgrades without requiring any extended downtime.
4. Rearchitected many areas of the site to make it easier for us to add additional features going forward.

New Features
Along with the infrastructure changes, we were also able to add a few new features that we would like to share with you.

Basecamp Import
Basecamp users will now be able to get a jump start on TeamWork Live using our Basecamp import tool. The tool will allow you to import all your Basecamp projects including the files and images in those projects. You will be able to assign your Basecamp users to existing TeamWork Live users or create new users for them during the import. There are currently some limitations with the import tool due to the differences between the two applications. The major limitation is that since TeamWork Live only supports one file attachment per comment or message, so it will only import the first file for each Basecamp message or comment. We will be addressing this when we add support for multiple file attachments in the future. 

Small Business Computing is now taking nominations for their 2009 Excellence in Technology Award. We've been heads down with improving the TeamWork Live this past year, but we are finally ready to get the word out. If you have found TeamWork Live valuable in improving your business collaboration, we would really appreciate your help in nominating us for the Collaboration/Communication category. Thank you!

Nominate us »

We have just made a change to the way due dates work for tasks assigned to a milestone. Now, if you create a task and assign it to a milestone but you do not explicitly set a due date for it, the task will automatically default to the due date of the assigned milestone. Additionally, if you later change the due date of the milestone, all associated tasks that does not have a due date explicitly set will also be updated with the new due dates. We think this is a sensible default and it should make it easier to make changes to the project. We hope you like the change.