Another recent enhancement to Team Effect that shipped out quietly a couple of weeks ago was the expansion of the Notes system (Messages and Files).

Until this change all conversations (Messages) and file sharing was conducted at the Project level.  But on a big project this isn’t necessarily useful.  In fact on a big project is down right annoying because your Task-oriented team’s chatter gets lost in the full project noise.

Now that we have extended this functionality to Tasks it means you can shield other teams from the noise of your task’s chattering.

To do so expand the “Other chatter Steams” panel…

and then select the Task.

Too easy!

Now, wouldn’t it be great if we sent you an email notification periodically when there was new Chatter activity on your  project or task?

Aren’t spreadsheets handy?!

Try as you much as you like to live without them but it is pretty hard to do without them.  We have very few customers who haven’t asked us for the ability to export some of their Team Effect to Excel so we put it in.

We don’t want to make a big song and dance about it but we thought you might not have noticed the button silently appear on the Actions tab.

Next thing you know there will be Export buttons popping up all over the place!

Stop... Collaborate and listen,

Team Effect is back with a brand new invention...

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned some exciting new collaborative features we were working on. Well we have put the finishing touches on those funky new features  so I thought I would jump online and tell you what's in the upgrade.

Messages and Files

The center piece of our new release is the new notes tab. Despite its humble name this tab gives you and your team the ability to run complex project discussions. You can upload files, comment as you would in a blog and as you would expect it all happens quickly with no page loads getting in your way.

Project-related messages and files on the new Project Notes tab.

A Screenshot doesn't do it justice at all. You really need to jump on in and try this functionality for yourself.  Posting messages and uploading files is snappy, fresh and fast. Uploading files is slick, even when uploading several files at once.  Right from the outset we wanted to enable uploading of multiple files at once because real projects often have dozens of files and this is what we have done.

Dashboard Chatter Feed

All this new dialogue you're going to create has the potential to quickly devolve into information overload so we've put an "update stream" on the Dashboard so you can keep track of the updates to all your projects, tasks and actions all from one central place.

Dashboard showing the new Comments and Messages steam.

No RSS feed yet, but that is coming very soon - along with a vast range of other exciting developments.

So stay tuned! 

With a change in the weather comes a change in the beer my palette prefers.  With the autumn leaves falling and the first frosts I'm looking forward to my first brew inspired by Theakston's Old Peculiar.  It's already got a whif that could put hair on your chest.

Awe inspiring!

Another awe inspiring change in the air is the next release of Team Effect.  We have responded to persistent customer requests for collaboration features in this next release by adding the ability to leave messages for your project team and attach files to your projects.  

Did I just hear some of you gasp "at last!"?  ;)

We are currently in the last phases of testing this new functionality and we're pretty excited about it.  Also pretty darn exciting are the changes to the application navigation.  

Although possibly not as sexy as the collaborative features, we've responded to customer complaints about the navigation by grouping all the functionality that works for a specific project and made it into tabs.

We've been busy this year working on many requested enhancements which combined make Team Effect easier for those just getting started.  Our focus with this release was about improving the experience for new users and introducing a much-requested "Dashboard" to summarise all your projects.

Dashboard

The major piece of new functionality in this release is a new start screen (or dashboard) that pulls together a summary of your projects.

Highlights include...

1. One click access to quick start help guides and one click to create new projects.
2. One click access to all of the projects you are working on. 
3. Summary of all tasks, schedules and actions for the current week across all projects.
4. Summary headlines of this blog.
5. Create Projects and setup new People in one click.

Get Started Faster

The new dashboard gets you creating and planning a new project straight away.  Enter nothing more than a name for your project and click Go.  Now you're straight into the new project's schedule ready to break it down into tasks and sub-tasks

Task Management

Many people didn't realize that you can create tasks/sub tasks directly in the schedule by right clicking the bars.  In this release our goal was to make this functionality easier and more obvious.

You can now edit task details by simply clicking on the task names or the task bars (as well as right-clicking on the bar representing the task as well).

More tasks can be created directly from the task details panel - this makes it easy to setup a detailed project without ever leaving the schedule screen.

We have also added links so you can jump into and back from the task screen if you want to do any bulk editing or change the task order.

Help

We have refined the help articles and and made them more accessible.  Two new "getting started" guides are accessible straight from the dashboard.