The anonymous accounts below (one per line) were screen grabs from just a page or two of the accounts list and show some really heavy use.

We’re really happy that people are adopting the software and using it well. We’re often told about the improvement ProWorkflow makes to businesses and love to hear stories of how it’s going. Check out the testimonials!

Interesting to compare the stats anyway!

It’s been a really great exercise and has already helped us make some improvements including making articles a little clearer and easier to find as well as tweaking the structure to mirror the main app.

The key thing I discovered is how very important it is to use the ‘Setup Assistant’ and follow the ‘Make it yours’ and ‘Let’s get started’ steps.

I think many people bypass these because they want to get stuck in straight away but I found that just following those simple few steps really helped ease me into ProWorkflow and gave me a good basic insight into the layout and functions.

The benefit of using the Setup Assistant is that it quickly covers a lot of the key settings in ProWorkflow, like adjusting Currency, Time and Date and using the Look ‘N’ Feel settings to customise the interface for your company, after all not everyone likes orange as much as we do!

After completing the Setup Assistant I suggest heading to the Help Center to check out the Admin Guide which walks through creating your first project and has links to some great articles on Tracking Time, adding Files & Messages and exploring some of the most useful features in ProWorkflow.

Once you’ve done that, you should have a pretty good grasp of ProWorkflow and your next step is probably to get some of your team using the solution.

The two best tips I can give here are to get them to watch the Introduction video and to make sure you check their permissions and remove any features they don’t need so they get a streamlined view of the system.
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So, in short, my top tips:

Don’t skip over the Setup Assistant and Videos! – they may take a few minutes, but they will save you time later!

Add the Help Center to your favourites; it’s a great resource for you and your team.

If you get stuck then get in touch, we’re always happy to help and the support team here are fantastic.

If you’re reading this after signing up and have lost the Setup Assistant then you can find it in the Administration section.

- Aimee

There’s no single solution that fits everyone, but it’s great to see a company do a proper indepth evaluation of some available tools and even better to see where we sit with ours (ProWorkflow).

We did think it was a well balanced report so have a read and see what you think. Feel welcome to try a free ProWorkflow trial account!

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Project Management and Time Tracking

Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers.  I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.

Here are the criteria I used to narrow down the possible project management and time tracking solutions:

• Web based application
  Our dev’s use various platforms and it needs to run everywhere without install and upgrade headaches, I also considered Air and Flash apps
• Support for 5 users
  Because, yanno, we need five people to record time
• Time tracking must include timer with start/stop capabilities
  We are multi taskers and like accuracy; we considered products with timer widgets as well
• Feature list and pricing prominent
  Excluded all sites with vague details, no screenshots,  or “contact us for details and pricing” models, due to sheer volume and time needed to research
• Must have a free trial evaluation
  Yanno, so I could evaluate them
• Professional and sharp web site
  Attention to detail is critical to good software design and project management, how they run their site should reflect this

After nearly ten hours of research, I narrowed the field to fifteen products. Then I evaluated each product by importing several of our current projects into it and using the time tracking tools for one day. After which I ran reports and recorded my findings in a spreadsheet. The final ratings were on a 1-5 scale, based on usability, project management capabilities, time tracking capabilities, invoicing features, reporting capabilities, and API and integration tools. Here’s what I came up with:

Once I had some numbers to work with, I weighted each product to meet our needs, based on the following criteria:

• Usability: Ease and speed of use is very important to us, as we have little time for project management (x2)
• Time tracking capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Project management capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Low price:  we want to keep the price under $50 a month, so our value calculation was tweaked accordingly:  rating *3 – (price per month/10)
• Invoicing, reports, and so on are nice, of course, but we can make due with our external, existing solutions

So, using this data, here were my findings:

It should be apparent that ProWorkflow is, hands down, the best overall project management software on the market. It’s quality, well thought out, bug free, fast, and powerful.

Skylight was by far the best for our needs, according to price versus quality. The rest of the data is interesting, but several of the products listed had a time tracking or project management rating less than three, which is insufficient for our needs. So the final choices for us were as follows:

• Skylight – use this and put up with the slow, laborious interface; our preference for now
• Basecamp + MyHours/Harvest/Tick – together, these products are a complete package, but pricey
• ProWorkflow – very pricey, but we could bite the bullet on this and get the best quality product on the market.

If you’d like to view or download the complete data, including links to all of the product sites, you can find all the gory details in the Google spreadsheet. You can also view the same data sorted by total quality instead.

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Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

If you didn’t get time to reply then I do encourage you to make your suggestions known via our feedback page because we use this to gauge interest in a particular feature or functionality. With so many diverse customers we love to get your suggestions, ideas, wishes and dreams (as well as the occasional gripe). Every day we receive the ‘what about’ and ‘why not’ questions and it’s important to us that you know we do read, listen and respond to your ideas, even if we can’t act on all of them.

We were really pleased to see that the most common feature and improvement suggestions are for areas that we are already working on. We won’t ruin all of the surprises we have in store for you but the next few months will bring enhanced usability, improved scheduling and easier timesheet entry as well as huge speed improvements due to a big investment in new infrastructure.

One of the questions we asked related to the use of mobile devices and for the time being, Apple dominates our customer base. We were a bit surprised that Android numbers were so low because we have many more requests for Android rather than Blackberry compatibility. Again, it would be great to hear from people on both sides as well our iPhone/iPad devotees.

 
As a direct result of these figures we’re looking into creating a cross-platform mobile version of ProWorkflow that will work on nearly any mobile device, we’ve had terrific feedback on our iPhone app and we want to build on that even further so that ProWorkflow really is a platform you can use anywhere, anytime on anything!

Another result we found was that where we’re focusing our next round of development is where our customers are pointing us also – it’s great to know that what we’re hearing is what you’re after! Kudos to the classic comment that was full of great ideas:

“Anyway, great product! I guess i’m just being a brat and I want more things under one roof ”

So expect lots of love for the speed and usability and there are some exciting developments on the scheduling front…
– not too far past the horizon!

There are two features that we’ve had several requests for:

1)  Google Calendar compatibility – Google uses the same ‘bot’ to fetch ics files as it uses for trawling the internet. This is causing an issue because we prevent Google from indexing our account servers (so your subscription doesn’t appear in Google search results). However, this prevents Google Calendar from downloading the ics files. We are awaiting a response from Google to try to find a fix for this issue.

2) Syncing multiple projects using one ics file – Currently we generate one ics file for each project, we’re monitoring load closely before we decide whether to allow a single ics file per client or for all projects.

Now for an awesome tip!
For any customers who need either of these features immediately, you can use Yahoo Pipes to create an ics feed that can consolidate multiple ics files and will also work with Google Calendar.

We have recorded a short video below that explains the process for using Yahoo pipes to generate an ics file that combines two project feeds.

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iCal Integration Guide!
http://www.screencast.com/t/MmQ3ZWUwMjk

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iCal Integration Guide!

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Check out the above video to learn how to setup and use the iCal integration. It’s fairly easy, but we’re here to help if needed!

How does it work?

Step 1. Enable the iCal integration

All you do is go to your ‘HOME > Personal Settings’ popup (accessed from the dashboard when you login) and in the popup, scroll down to the ‘DEFAULT CALENDAR SETTINGS’ section.

As shown below, you can enable the iCal integration for Project Tasks, General Tasks or Events (or all). Just tick what you need!

Note: If choosing ‘Events’, you can subscribe to the calendar from the link that will appear below when you tick the ‘Events’ option.

Step 2. Subscribe to a Project

Click the ‘Subscribe’ link on a project to subscribe to the project’s calendar items. This will make the project calendar’s address (URL to .ics file) appear. Click this to finish subscribing to the project.

The image below shows the project calendar address. click this and the

Step 3. Select the calendar application

You should see a popup window showing a list of your available calendar applications (iCal, Outlook etc). Select your preferred calendar app and the items should be added to the calendar. As an example, below I used my Outlook calendar.

And here’s the Project’s items in the calendar!

Note: Adding Events

Another place you can subscribe to the Events calendar is from the Calendar page in ProWorkflow. All you nee to do is click the link and a green section will appear showing the calendar address. Click this and follow the same process as above.

And here are the events showing in the Outlook calendar.

If you have any questions, please feel welcome to contact us.

Update: We aware of an issue affecting Google Calendar users relating to robots.txt file. We are waiting on a response from Google on this issue which stems from the fact that they use the same search bot for ics files as for their main search algorithm. This means that working with Google Calendar currently would mean having all of your projects and tasks potentially indexed on Google (obviously not a good thing!).

• PRO/ADV: iCal Integration!!! (Will be explained in separate post)
• PRO: End dates and times on events.
• PRO: ‘Add File’ issue in task popup in IE resolved.
• ADV: New setting allowing Staff to view ‘ALL messages’ on a project.
• ADV: Project Archive has extended search fields and filters.
• QuickBooks: now showing an error on page where there is a sync issue. This is to assist with troubleshooting various QB versions.
• Misc other bugs and tweaks

You can now manage and set file space per team. We’ve improved this process so it’s easier to keep your file usage under control.

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Roles

We have allowed you to set default Start Page and View for each ‘Role’. This means that all users with a particular role, (ie: Designers) can be easily made to all have the same Start page, (ie: Projects Page)

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My Project Requests

The ‘My Active Projects’ and ‘My Pending Project Requests’ sections now have their own section on the new ‘PROJECTS Manager > My Projects’ page. These are all the projects you have requested internally that you are essentially the ‘Client’ of.

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Auto-Numbering for Projects

• We’ve added a new variable {team} for simple Auto-Numbering.
  ({team} = the team that is doing the Project)
• We’ve added an advanced Auto-Numbering option that lets you set different auto-number prefixes and individual numbering (for each team). Currently used by some of our custom customers, we have brought this through into ADV as the larger groups may find this useful for reporting and identifying different Project types.

Note: If the update doesn’t work, you may need to reinstall AdobeAir and then reinstall the Widget. Your settings will remain intact.

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The most recent Adobe Air update that was released on Friday has caused the ProWorkflow Time Tracker to stop working for some customers.

Our development team are investigating this issue as a high priority and anticipate that a fix will be released within the next 24 hours. In the meantime as a temporary fix for any customers who need to use the Time Tracker, you can uninstall Adobe Air 2.0 and then download and reinstall the working 1.5.3 version using these links:

Adobe Air 1.5.3 for Windows

Adobe Air 1.5.3 for Mac

We will post an update as soon as a 2.0 compatible version of the Time Tracker is available and are very sorry for the inconvenience, we realise just how important the Time Tracker is to you.