Project News and Project Management Updates

1 December 2009

December 2009 Release

We've just released a major new version of the software, focused primarily on speed. Here are the changes made:

Tweaks

We have relabeled the "Portfolio" tab to "All" and changed the general layout of the resources page, so they are more easily understood. And we have changed the big round "Start" menu button label to "Menu" to its clearer.

We have also made it so that you can select "All Projects" on the Resource Allocation Report, so that you are able to report on the under / over utilization of resources across all projects.

Speed

With this release we have improved the speed of the Resources, Expenses, Risks, Issues and Changes pages. When one of these pages is loaded, you can now click on any risk / issue / change etc without having to wait - and the data will be displayed to you instantly. This makes the system much more user friendly and it saves you time entering new items.

Also, when you first click on any of the above pages for a New project, all of the information that you don't need to see is hidden, so that you can create that new item quickly.

Note: We are making further speed improvements over the coming months.

Tasks Page

We have implemented a few changes to the Tasks page, to improve usability. The changes are as follows:

• To improve the speed of the Tasks page, we've removed the "Risks / Issues / Changes" tab in the Task Information area at the bottom, and we've also removed the relevant buttons on the button bar at the top. You can still assign risks, issues and changes to tasks by right mouse clicking in the Gantt area and selecting the relevant option.
• There are 2 new buttons in the button bar at the top. They are: "Columns" and "Timescales". When you click Columns, it will pop up the list of all available columns in the system. And when you click on the Timescales button, it will popup the Timescale panel.
• Before this release, the Start and End date for the project did not match the Timescales in the Gantt on the Tasks page. So we have changed it to make them match. Now, when you change the project Start and End dates on the Details page, the timescales in the Gantt will be updated automatically for you.
• You can now extend the project timescales by simply clicking on the new Timescale button in the Tasks page and choosing a new project end date.
• We have added a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) field, and we have made it easier to edit task notes.
• Within the next 2 months, we're making a suite of other improvements to the Tasks page. These planned improvements include Task Filters, a new Cost per task field, and the ability to have part day tasks as opposed to whole day tasks - to name a few. So watch this space...

1 November 2009

November 2009 Release

To help improve your use of the system, we've just done a major release. Here's what we've changed and improved:

Tasks Page

We have improved the usability of the Tasks page. Now, you can use your keyboard to navigate across columns, and down rows. You can use the arrow keys to navigate left and right, as well as up and down. You can also use the tab and shift / tab keys to do the same.

Another major improvement is that no longer do you have to leave the Tasks page, to create new resources. Instead, click on the Resources button in the button bar, and you will see a popup that allows you to create new resources on the fly. This will save you time using the system.

Navigation

In the old version, when you navigate to a new project, the system would always take you to the "Task" page by default. The reason is that this page was the most frequently used page in the system. However we found that a lot of people like to stay on the same page, as they navigate around projects. So for instance, they would open the "Reports" page and then want to navigate around different projects, while staying on this "Reports" page for each project.

So in this latest release, no longer will the system automatically take you to the Tasks page by default. Instead, it will leave you on the same page (e.g. "Reports") but just load the new project. This will save you time, when navigating between projects.

Speed and Task Navigation

We have improved the speed of the system, when navigating between projects. Part of this speed improvement required us to change the way that you navigate from the Tasks page to other pages in the system. Before, when you were on the Tasks page and you make changes, when you navigated away to another page the system would ask you to click "OK" to save your changes. The system now asks you to click "OK" to return to the current page so that you can save your changes by clicking the Save button. Please note this change as you navigate, so that you don't lose any tasks data.

Coming soon
In the next 2 months we will improve the speed of the system so that it's faster to use, especially from slower speed countries. We will also improve the usability of the system to make it simpler to set up and manage new projects. And we will build a suite of new features focused on team collaboration. So watch this space.

21 October 2009

Series of Upgrades

After three months of continual minor upgrades, we can announce that we will be performing a major upgrade of Project Manager.com within the next 4 weeks. This upgrade will focus on usability, allowing users to be able to navigate the system in a more intuitive manner. The majority of the changes will be on the Tasks page, allowing customers to create customized project plans more easily.

After this release, we will be making a number of speed releases which will greatly improve the speed in which the system operates. You will be able to navigate the pages almost instantaneously, so that it's quick and easy to use the system. And then in the early New Year, we will make new feature releases focusing on security, reports and collaboration. So watch this space.

1 August 2009

August 2009 Release

We've just released a major new version. There are stacks of new features within the product. Here we identify the main new features we've added:

Exports
You can now export your project data into Microsoft Office. This allows you to integrate ProjectManager.com with other business applications you are using to deliver projects. Here's how you can export your project data:

• Tasks: Export your tasks to Microsoft Project (XML), Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and CSV formats.
• Resources: Export your project resource list to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and CSV formats.
• Time & Expenses: Export your timesheet and expense forms to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and CSV formats.
• Risks, Issues & Changes: Export your risks, changes and issues to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and CSV formats.
• Reports: You can now also export your reports to Microsoft Excel, as well as PDF.

Tasks
We've made some major improvements to the way you manage tasks. Here are the highlights:

• Today's Date: When you view the Gantt, you can now see a vertical bar which shows today's date. That way you can immediately see tasks that are late.
• Weekends: Now you can see the weekends, as we've shaded them in light grey. For those working from Monday through Friday, this makes it easier to plan. If you want to turn this feature off, then click on the Gantt date header and deselect the item "Show weekend shading".
• Effort vs. Duration: Before, like Microsoft Project, everything was auto-calculated. So when you added a new resource to a task, it automatically changed the duration. If you changed the effort, it changed the duration. If you changed the duration, it changed the effort and so forth. However customers wanted to be able to override these figures manually. So now, regardless of whether you change your resource allocation or the planned effort, the planned duration will not change. This means that as you work on your project the schedule will not change automatically. So your schedule is protected. To allow advanced users to still override these settings, a small message will appear in the Info column when you make changes, so that you can still select to change the duration if you wish.
• Right mouse menu: If you right mouse click on a Task Name in the data column area, a new menu will appear that allows you to perform all of the main menu features, quickly.
• Change task colors: If you right mouse click on a Task Name in the data column area, then you can select to change the color of the task bars. Have a play around. By changing the task colors, it's much easier to identify different types of tasks from the rest.
• Milestones: You can now link tasks to and from Milestones. And you can click and drag Milestones to the left and right to change their timescales.
• Data Columns: You can click and drag data columns around to change their location. And you can click and drag the column edges to change the column widths.
• Tasks complete: We have made a new data column available called "Complete". So if you want to mark tasks as 100% complete, just put a checkbox in the column field and it will be done automatically.
• Reports: You can now also export your reports to Microsoft Excel, as well as PDF.

Coming up
Over the coming months, we're going to work on further boosting the speed of the application, and also add two new areas:

• My Tasks: A way of seeing all tasks for you or another resource, across all projects.
• My Workspace: This is an area that will display all information that relates to you, such as your tasks, alerts, risks, issues and changes, as well as many more items. So watch this space.

Have a great feature idea? Let us know by emailing us at

10 June 2009

Major Upgrade to ProjectManager.com

We have released today, another major upgrade to ProjectManager.com which includes the following new features:

• Pricing: We have dropped the pricing from $45/month for a single user, to $25/month to meet the needs of our clients.
• Get Started Panel: We have added a "Get Started" panel which allows you to navigate to the most popular areas of the system, all from one location. To save you time, we've also automated most of the functions, so that you don't have to complete multiple steps to set up a new project for instance.
• Gantt Printing: You can now print screenshots of your Gantt chart easily, from the Task page. In the menu at the top, you will see a "Print" button. Click it to be able to print out a screenshot of your current project plan.
• Gantt Scroll Speed: We've dramatically increased the speed of the vertical scroll bar on the Gantt chart. You can now immediately scroll to any area of the Gantt, through the simple click and drag of your mouse.
• Gantt Reliability: We have fixed almost all known bugs in the system. This new version of the Gantt chart is faster, more efficient and more reliable than any version ever released.
• Support for Larger Projects: We have fixed all known bugs associated with large project plans. And we have increased the number of tasks you see on each page; from 50 tasks to 200 tasks to limit the amount of paging you have to do, to manage your projects.

1 June 2009

June 2009 Release

This month, we've released another major version of the software, to make it faster, cheaper and more reliable for our customers. Here are the major changes implemented:

Pricing
We have dropped the pricing from $45/month for a single user, to $25/month to meet the needs of our clients. The price for subsequent users remains the same at just $10/user/month.

Get Started Panel
We have added a "Get Started" panel which allows you to navigate to the most popular areas of the system, all from one location. To save you time, we've also automated most of the functions, so that you don't have to complete multiple steps to set up a new project for instance - you can do it all through the click of a button. Try out each of the links on the "Get Started" panel to get a better feel for what ProjectManager.com has to offer.

Gantt Printing
You can now print screenshots of your Gantt chart easily, from the Task page. In the menu at the top, you will see a "Print" button. Click it to be able to print out a screenshot of your current project plan. Within the next 4 weeks, we're importing full Gantt printing. This allows you to print data which is seen outside the screen, so that you can print a project plan that is 5 pages wide and 10 pages long for instance.

Gantt Scroll Speed
We've dramatically increased the speed of the vertical scroll bar on the Gantt chart. You can now immediately scroll to any area of the Gantt, through the simple click and drag of your mouse.

Gantt Reliability
We have fixed almost all known bugs in the system. This new version of the Gantt chart is faster, more efficient and more reliable than any version ever released.

Support for Larger Projects
We have fixed all known bugs associated with large project plans. And we have increased the number of tasks you see on each page; from 50 tasks to 200 tasks to limit the amount of paging you have to do, to manage your projects.

Have questions? Email us at

13 May 2009

Project Manager .com gets another Speed Boost

Today, another major speed boost was released for our online Project Management Software.

"We want the application to work like lightening, for our existing users" says Jason Westland, CEO. "So we have implemented a new architecture that allows you to cache most of the commonly used pages in your browser, so that the pages can be loaded almost instantaneously when required."

This release helps people in both fast and slow speed internet connectivity countries, to access the application quickly and easily. The team at Project Manager .com has even further speed releases coming out over the next 12 months.

1 May 2009

May 2009 Release

This month, we released a major new speed boost to the website. It works like this...

Image downloads
When you visit our website, we download all of the web page images you need, to your browser memory (i.e. "cache") on your PC. Because the images are stored in your browser, you only need to download the images once - making your navigation experience faster than before.

Image downloads
When you login to ProjectManager.com, we download in the background all of the web pages you might want to access. So while you're reading the Dashboard panel for instance, we working away in the background by downloading all of the pages such as Tasks, Risks, Issues and Changes so that when you navigate to them, the page requested shows instantaneously. Note:

• You might notice that when you do click to visit that page, it shows instantly and then grays out for a few seconds. This is because we need to check that the data the page is displaying is the latest data in the system. That way you always have the latest data at your fingertips, while getting the best speed performance possible.
• This feature works only when you are navigating within a project. When you navigate to a different project, we need to re-download all of the pages in the background to give you a fresh view.

Future speed increases
We have a suite of speed increases planned for later this year. We will use "Local Content Servers" placed in each of the major regions of the planet, to serve the web pages to you as fast as possible. That way, you don't always have to communicate with our servers in the USA. So if you're based in New Zealand for instance, then you would communicate with a server locally. This year, we intend to place content servers in South Africa, Dubai, Singapore, UK and Australia to further improve the speed of the application. So watch this space...

15 March 2009

Support for Large Project Plans Released

Today, we released the ability to load in large project plans to ProjectManager.com and view them online. You can now enter project plans with thousands of tasks and manage them quickly and efficiently.

We've also released a stack of new features, some of which are provided below:

• Task Autosaving: You can set up ProjectManager.com to automatically save your project plans.
• Task Alerts: You can receive automatic emails when anyone updates your project plans.
• MS Project 2007: We now support the import of MS Project 2007 Project Plans. Simply click on the "Import" button on the Tasks page, to import MS Project Plans in either 2003 or 2007 format.
• Task Start Date: When you create new tasks, the default start date for the task will now be today's date, as opposed to the start date of the project. This change was implemented due to populate customer request
• Percent Complete: When you view a task, you will notice that the percent complete is now showing slightly different information. Before, it showed the percentage of time that the person was assigned to the task. It now shows the percent of the task completed to date. This change was implemented due to populate customer request.
• Default Project Rate: When you create a new project, you used to have to enter the Default Rate for the project. This is the chargeable rate of a resource and it helps you to calculate the cost of the project. Due to popular customer request, we have changed this so so that the field is optional rather than mandatory.
• Start & New Project Buttons: The big round menu button is now labeled as the "Start" button, just like the Start button in Windows XP that customers are familiar with. And the design of the button fits in with Windows Vista. That way, it's intuitive. We have also added a label to the tab that allows you to create new projects. We've labeled it as the "New" project tab.

1 March 2009

March 2009 Release

Task Autosaving
You can set up ProjectManager.com to automatically save your project plans.

Task Alerts
You can receive automatic emails when anyone updates your project plans.

MS Project 2007
We now support the import of MS Project 2007 Project Plans. Simply click on the "Import" button on the Tasks page, to import MS Project Plans in either 2003 or 2007 format.

Task Start Date
When you create new tasks, the default start date for the task will now be today's date, as opposed to the start date of the project. This change was implemented due to populate customer request.

Percent Complete
When you view a task, you will notice that the percent complete is now showing slightly different information. Before, it showed the percentage of time that the person was assigned to the task. It now shows the percent of the task completed to date. This change was implemented due to populate customer request.

Default Project Rate
When you create a new project, you used to have to enter the Default Rate for the project. This is the chargeable rate of a resource and it helps you to calculate the cost of the project. Due to popular customer request, we have changed this so that the field is optional rather than mandatory.

Start & New Project Buttons
The big round menu button is now labeled as the "Start" button, just like the Start button in Windows XP that customers are familiar with. And the design of the button fits in with Windows Vista. That way, it's intuitive. We have also added a label to the tab that allows you to create new projects. We've labeled it as the "New" project tab.

Security
Before, you had to view the Tasks panel in SSL mode. For those customers who have strict firewalls and have problems accessing the page in SSL mode, we have made it compatible with both SSL and non-SSL modes. If you're not sure what this means, then don't worry - it just means that more people can access the site, to create their project plans online.