It can be difficult for a start-up company to survive and thrive in the market. Start-ups need all the help they can get to save money and become more productive.

Wrike has profound expertise in improving project management and increasing organizational productivity, and we decided to share our knowledge and our service with start-up founders. We are happy to announce that Wrike Inc. became one of TheFunded Founder Institute partners and offered its assistance to the start-up companies that are trained there.

The Funded.com, created by Adeo Ressi, has long been known as a great resource for start-up founders when it comes to raising money. TheFunded’s new initiative, Founder Institute, expands on this idea. The Institute is a four-month program that aims to groom start-up founders into CEOs. In addition, the entrepreneurs increase their chances to be funded, get excellent PR and use best-of-breed resources from the Institute’s partners, like Microsoft, PRNewswire and Wrike.

As one of Founder Institute’s official partners, Wrike will grant a free Wrike account to each founder accepted into the program in the first round.

“We’re happy to let founders to take advantage of the most practical project management software free of charge. We believe that our solution will help many great start-ups to grow, become successful businesses and create new jobs,” said Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike Inc.

Love Facebook? So do we! That’s why we decided to create a special place on Facebook where we can network, share news, discuss project management topics and stay connected with you. 

We welcome you to become a Wrike fan on Facebook. You’ll be able to connect to other people who think that Wrike is the most practical project management software, ask them about their Wrike tips and tricks, upload your pics, chat about Wrike’s new features, and find out about our events!

Wrike is a project management software provided as a service. Every day we work hard to make our service even better and more valuable for you.

On top of small enhancements every week or two, today, we are glad to introduce a significant system upgrade that will bring a great productivity gain to you.

Today, we present several new productivity features that are added to your existing user subscription for free, as well as extra features that can be additionally purchased with the new pricing.

Among the new free productivity features added to your subscription are 1) project and task discussions and 2) estimation of tasks in hours.

Finally, we’ve enhanced our user management engine and pricing model and made it more tempting for you to invite more co-workers, clients and contractors to collaborate with you on Wrike.

Click on the links above to find out more details about the new features and the pricing.

Besides Wrike’s new, cost-effective pricing model, you will also be pleased with the enhanced Wrike’s user management engine.

1. The new engine lets you have many user administrators in one account (1).  User administrators can create new users (2) in the account, as well as redistribute subscriptions and additional features among the users (3), but they cannot make purchases or billing changes.

All purchases can be made by the account billing administrator – the person who subscribed to a Wrike trial on wrike.com and then entered credit card information to continue using the service after the trial. The billing administrator also has all privileges of user administrators.



2. The new engine allows administrators to have more control over users. For example, administrators can instantly delete users. If administrator removes a user, the user account is instantly deleted with all user’s information, including tasks and attachments created by the user.



3. The new engine supports a long-requested feature: If you accidentally or deliberately included some person in your email correspondence and CCed wrike at wrike.com, the user is not automatically invited by Wrike.

Instead, the person’s name goes to the administrators' user management tab marked as a “user awaiting invitation” (1). And it’s up to administrators if and when to invite the person to Wrike (2).



4. Finally, storage space was increased up to 5GB per user on the new subscriptions.

All features described above are tied into new subscriptions, so if you are subscribed to an old plan and like the feature, you need to upgrade. To upgrade, contact our support department at support at team.wrike.com.

We are glad to share news about the enhanced pricing model with you. We’ve revised our pricing and made it more tempting for you to invite more co-workers, clients and contractors to collaborate with you on Wrike.

To make it happen, we’ve introduced new subscriptions, such as "Manager," "Collaborator" and "Viewer," and let you mix these user types within one account.

Viewer
The special "Viewer" subscription helps you inexpensively involve an UNLIMITED number of people who need to access tasks assigned and shared with them, but do not actively participate in project collaboration. Viewers can mark tasks assigned to them as completed via e-mail or the Web interface, they are also notified about changes.
In short, features available for Viewers include:
•    View unlimited projects
•    View unlimited tasks
•    Discussions (view only)
•    Intelligent Email Engine™ (only notifications and marking tasks as completed)
•    Flexible Structures™ (view only)

Unlike other Wrike subscriptions, "Viewer subscription costs do not depend on a number of Viewer users, you simply pay as small fee as $9.95 for a package that includes unlimited number of Viewer users.

Collaborator
The "Collaborator" subscription costs $9.95 per user per month and lets people create and edit tasks and projects using Wrike’s interactive Web site or their favorite e-mail software. They can use Wrike’s unique timeline to visualize and schedule their tasks. Collaborators can share files in Wrike and discuss tasks. In short, features available for Collaborators include:
•    Unlimited projects (create, edit, view and delete)
•    Unlimited tasks (create, edit, view and delete)
•    Discussions
•    Intelligent Email Engine™
•    Flexible Structures™
•    Dynamic Timeline™ (besides creating task dependencies)
•    500MB of file storage

Manager
The "Manager" subscription is specially created for managers and people who need full control of the projects. In addition to collaborators’ features, managers can create templates, using Excel export and import. They can build task dependencies, using Wrike’s unique, interactive timeline to easily control the schedule. Managers also can run reports and see the task-changes history. If a user has Microsoft Project files, the Manager subscription lets the user easily import them to Wrike, share with team members and work on them together. The manager’s subscription costs $19.95 per user per month and includes a wide range of Wrike’s unique features, such as:
•    Intelligent Email Engine™
•    Flexible Structures™
•    Dynamic Timeline™ (including task dependencies creation)
•    Unlimited projects (create and edit)
•    Unlimited tasks (create and edit)
•    Discussions
•    MS Project import
•    Excel import and export
•    Templates
•    Revision history
•    5GB of file storage

With the new pricing some features are now separated from the main subscriptions, and you can add these features exactly to those users who really need them thus saving your money. These features are
•    Time-tracking ($7.95 per user per month),
•    Windows Mobile sync ($3.95 per user per month),
•    Outlook sync ($3.95 per user per month), 
•    RSS and iCal feeds (both for $1.95 per user per month).

For new customers, the new pricing model went into effect on May 25, 2009.  For more information about the new pricing, please visit http://www.wrike.com/pricing.jsp. For existing customers, the new pricing is optional and they can switch to it at any time.

We hope that the new “mix and match” pricing with unlimited Viewer accounts will help you grow your accounts cost-effectively and plug more people from inside and outside of your organization in the process. To upgrade, contact our support department at support at team.wrike.com.

Besides project discussions, another feature often asked for by many of our users--estimation of task duration in hours--is now live.

To help you build a more precise schedule, we’ve added the ability to set task duration to minutes (1).



Examples of valid entries in the duration field: "2h 30 m", "5d", "3h",  "15m". In other words, you can use the following format to set tasks’ duration: "3d 4h 5m". The task duration feature allows you to enter the correct number of days, hours and minutes or to remove unnecessary parameters.

If you enter a fractional number of days, like "0.5d" Wrike will turn it into "4h" to represent half of the working day. If you enter a fractional number of hours or minutes, Wrike will round it to the nearest whole number.

Project and task discussions are a feature frequently requested by many of our users. We worked hard to create a neat solution that will let you add comments to tasks not only online but also via e-mail. This is a big step forward in project communications, enabling you to leverage the benefits of email and the web interface at full power. Let’s look at the details.

Tasks in Wrike now have a special tab called "Discussions" (1). There you can leave your comments (2) with images (3) and attachments (4) to the task and view messages of other team members (5).



When you update a task via email by adding wrike@wrike.com to the task recipients, Wrike intelligently identifies your comment (6) and adds it to task’s discussions (7).

All attachments to the comments are also visible from the "Files" tab (8). This lets you access important project information from both places.



How much does the useful upgrade cost you? Nothing! The feature is added to your subscription for free.

[05.27.2009 Update: the features were released]

You, our customers know that Wrike is a living project. We keep improving the solution and adding new, important features that bring even more benefits to our customers. We want our users to save more time and money. That’s why you can expect more productivity, collaboration and cost-effective solutions from Wrike this May. 

We’re thrilled to announce the new, big release that will turn Wrike into the greatest ever productivity and project management tool. What will this new release include? Several exiting enhancements:

•    Windows Mobile Sync: First of all, we’ll make it easy for you to manage tasks with your Pocket PC or smart phone. The new release will feature a Windows Mobile plug-in that will synchronize your tasks in Wrike with the built-in tasks application on your device. As previously, you’ll be able to create tasks in Wrike from e-mails sent from any mobile device, whether it is iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or G1. 

•    Outlook Plug-in: Do you use tasks in Outlook to organize your life? Wrike’s new Outlook plug-in will make your task management more effective, as all your tasks will be kept in one place (be it  Wrike or Outlook). With its help, you’ll be able to instantly sync your tasks in Wrike and in Outlook.

•    Task Discussions: This feature was asked for many of our users, and we worked hard to create a neat solution for discussions. With the new release, Wrike users will be able to add comments to tasks and projects not only online but also via e-mail. Wrike will intelligently identify the task by the e-mail subject and elegantly extract the user’s comment and the task description.

•    Upgraded pricing structure: We’ll not unveil all the details on the new pricing model yet. We’ll only say that soon our customers will be able to mix various user types within one account, choose what features they want to use and create a cost-effective solution for their project management needs.

Can’t wait to try the new features? You’ll have to hold on for just a couple of weeks! 

Have you ever tried to manage 50+ projects with each in a separate workspace? If yes, then  you’ll know that it can kill your productivity and turn into a real pain. If not, imagine opening 50 separate Web sites and updating about 10 tasks in every project at a time. Sounds rough, right? Why can’t all those projects be kept in one place? This was exactly the question that Nick Doherty, managing editor of Television for SBS Online, had when he started his search for a better project management system.

Read Nick’s story and find out how Wrike helped him to minimize stress, as well as become 50% more productive and 100% happier, while managing 50+ projects in one workspace.

If you use IE as your primary Internet browser and have already upgraded it to version 8, you may face a problem with the correct loading of your Wrike workspace. While we are working on compatibility with IE8, let us share a nice workaround with you.

In IE8, there is a button by the address bar that allows you to revert back to the older versions of reading a web page by IE7. Once you click on that button, Wrike loads correctly and works fine.