Wrike Turns a Marketing Firm into a Project Management Rock Star

Published by Daria   |  Friday, 19 September, 2008
Today, for numerous companies, distributed teams have become a way of hiring the best people, regardless of their location. However, geographically distributed teams face additional challenges when establishing effective collaboration and overcoming some of the frictions of time and geography.

For the marketing and IT consulting firm 3rd Wave Research, the need for efficient, real-time collaboration was one of the main reasons for using Wrike. They needed a system that would allow their distributed team members to share ideas, collect project information and plan their work in one common workspace, as well as allow their clients to get insight into where the project stands. "Without such a system, project efficiency losses would compromise our ability to deliver complex marketing solutions to our clients," says Aaron Anderson, account strategy manager at 3rd Wave Research. Wrike turned out to be the solution that fit 3rd Wave Research’s distributed team in every way.

Read the whole story of how 3rd Wave Research turned into project management rock stars with Wrike.
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Update a Task without Logging in To Your Wrike Workspace

Published by Valerie   |  Wednesday, 03 September, 2008
We continuously add new capabilities to Wrike’s Intelligent E-mail Engine. Today, we introduced the processing of replies to Wrike’s e-mail notifications. As you probably know, Wrike notifies you about changes made to your tasks by your colleagues. You can now reply to those notifications, and your answer will be added to the task description!

Create and send a reply message:



The task description is updated:



The author of the changes and other team members, who are subscribed to immediate notifications, will receive a message about the updates. This increases usability, helps to improve your productivity and brings more information from e-mails into the shared workspace, where it’s visible, shareable and editable.

Patent-pending Intelligent E-mail Engine is one of the strongest features of Wrike. It helps you save a lot of time by letting you manage tasks without logging in to the workspace. You can create tasks via e-mail, update tasks via e-mail and receive notifications about the changes. You can use it on the go or when you are offline. You can plug in to Wrike users  who don’t want to leave their familiar environment (e-mail). With Wrike, you can combine the benefits of traditional e-mail with the benefits of collaboration on the Web.

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Wrike’s Project Management Features Enhanced with Wiki

Published by Valerie   |  Wednesday, 03 September, 2008
What is a wiki?
A wiki is a collection of Web pages that allow teams to keep, share and update information. As information is updated, everyone on the team gets a notification about the change. People do not have to ask the administrator’s permission to update a wiki’s page, so contributions to it can be made in real time.

The most successful wiki is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an example of how groups of people demonstrate more intelligence than isolated individuals. In contrast to other encyclopedias that were created by closed groups of people, Wikipedia shows a tremendous growth, thanks to the open approach to collaboration. Wikipedia has been created by hundreds of thousands of contributors. Anyone can contribute to any subject in which he or she has expertise. As a result, each of the 10 million articles contains data collected from multiple sources. This makes Wikipedia comprehensive. According to the Nature journal, Wikipedia is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same in accuracy. High-quality articles attract users every day, making Wikipedia one of the most popular and helpful resources on the Web.

How do businesses benefit from wikis?
Thanks to the support of collaboration, wikis have become a popular business tool. Wikis are often used as an alternative to intranets and other classic software platforms for sharing of knowledge. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes a designing structure prior to use, wikis and other enterprise 2.0 software programs allow people to start with one page and then grow it into a comprehensive knowledge base. The growth happens through many simple interactions. One person creates a page, another person corrects it, the third person adds something, and the first person contributes one more piece of information. As a result, you get a shiny wiki page that reflects a common view of the participants on the subject. This process is also known as emergent structures, the pattern of intelligent behaviors that  emerge bottom up from people with no or little central control.

Companies use wikis to get more team members involved in project collaboration, for knowledge management, as a Web portal and as a content creation tool. With a wiki, team members can easily access the up-to-date project information and work together on shared documents. For example, a wiki is a good way to store a series of phone scripts for salespeople or a presentation that many departments are contributing to at once. Since everyone is empowered to contribute in real time, using wikis facilitates information exchange and improves team productivity. Ultimately, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools make companies more agile and, thus, more competitive. 

For more information about how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and technology, such as wikis, to be successful, you can read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.


How you can use Wrike as a wiki
In addition to its inherent project management features, Wrike has the most important wiki features – collaborative editing, revision history, e-mail notifications about changes and links between pages.

Collaborative editing
Wrike’s tasks can be edited by anyone with whom they are shared. Instead of multiple versions of a document kept in different places, you get a single master document (a task) that everybody can access.

Everyone on the team can view, edit and update information easily, at any time. Your team members can discuss requirements, elaborate on product design, create a conference agenda and find solutions to problems. It minimizes the necessity of meetings and calls to update a piece of work. It also saves team members from having to send e-mails with revised documents back and forth, and it releases your team from the nightmare of comparing document versions.

E-mail notifications about changes
The changes are instantly visible to all of the team members online, via e-mail and RSS. This allows you to stay up-do-date and quickly react to the changes.

Revision history
Wiki is generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. That is why most popular wikis have a built-in version control tool. Wrike’s Premium and Enterprise versions provide version control for tasks, so that no original thought is lost. It keeps the information about what changes were made, when they were made and by whom. You can review, compare pairs of revisions and restore tasks to previous versions.



Links between pages.
Information can be easily cross-linked. Each task and folder has a unique hyperlink, so you can refer to it easily.



Wiki features organically fit in to the overall Wrike experience and help  Wrike better meet your needs. You get a true project management 2.0 experience, thanks to collaboration brought into the planning process. Compared to traditional project management tools that place the project manager in the center of the project communications, Wrike allows everyone on the team to immediately see the latest updates and contribute to the project plan in real time. This streamlines communications and increases the productivity of your team. Meanwhile, the ability to restore tasks to the previous version at any time allows project manager to keep control firmly in his or her hands.

The revision history, which allows you to use Wrike as a wiki, is available with Wrike’s Premium version, Enterprise version and the old Professional plans.

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Wrike as Event Management Software

Published by Valerie   |  Tuesday, 12 February, 2008
Wrike can help you manage events very successfully.

You are welcome to view a demo in which our users, Darren and Lisa, tell you how easily they manage call for papers, organize their teams, control contractors and communicate with sponsors. They replaced heavy spreadsheets by Wriks’ easy-to-access online database. View a demo:

How Wrike Helps a Conference Manager to Run Events Successfully


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Wrike as Marketing Project Management Software

Published by Valerie   |  Tuesday, 29 January, 2008
We prepared a video in which our users, Philip and Laura, tell you how Wrike helps them to plan and manage product development successfully. Additionally, you will learn how to:
  • create tasks
  • attach files to tasks
  • set the due date of tasks
  • add folders
  • organize tasks in folders
  • delegate tasks to your associates
  • give the responsible party 24/7 access to tasks
  • be notified about changes in tasks
  • and, finally, how to get control and a unique visibility of operations
Watch the full-sized video:
How a manager plans a Product Launch in Wrike



Feel free to ask questions and make comments. We’ll be happy to give you additional details about how you can benefit from Wrike.
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Make Wrike a part of your 7 habits for becoming highly effective

Published by Daria   |  Thursday, 13 December, 2007
Have you ever thought about being more effective in business, in relationships, in life? If so, you probably have already read the book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Dr. Steven Covey. Millions of people became more productive encouraged by the powerful lessons collected in this volume. If you have not yet gotten a chance to read this book, we recommend that you do so, as it can become a gold mine for ideas about how to improve your personal and professional management and how to form quality relationships with other people.

Among other concepts of effectiveness, Steven draws our attention to organization. How can you organize your life? Steven’s idea is that you should get a good tool that will help you to organize. A good organizing tool, according to Steven Covey, should match 6 criteria. They are:
  • Coherence
  • Balance
  • Motivation
  • Ability to deal with people
  • Flexibility
  • Accessibility

If you have a tool that matches all these criteria, you will be able to organize your plans and activities. Steven notes that there 2 ways to organize: organizing yourself through a schedule and delegating to other people. The biggest challenge here is to be able to control your own schedule and follow the results of the others at the same time. How can you do it? Wrike has the answer.

Wrike is project management software that lets you organize your personal and business to-dos in one place.
It perfectly combines two methods of organization: your personal time management and your delegated tasks.

Wrike has all of the characteristics of a good organizing tool, giving you a big picture prospective. If you work in a team, every team member will have the opportunity to organize his or her life with Wrike, and your business plans will still be interconnected.

First of all, Wrike gives coherence to your vision and mission, your goals and roles, your plans and your commitment. Steven draws our attention to one observation: we play many roles in life. For example, you can be a manager, a designer, a sales person, or even a combination of all three. To perform successfully in all those roles we need to define our goals and then write them down into an organizing tool like Wrike. In Wrike you can create tasks for every plan and every goal. The best thing is that you can review them anytime you need. We suggest you create special folders for your different roles, for your long-term commitments and your short-term plans. Wrike lets you organize your tasks in various ways, so that it is easier for you to organize all the information and figure out your priorities.

This is how you get balance with Wrike, which is the second characteristic. You keep everything in one place you can wisely spread your time and energy between your family, professional preparation, and your colleagues. Wrike gives you the whole picture of all your roles and goals, both business and personal, as you get all of them neatly organized in folders. You won’t neglect any important part of your life and you won’t forget anything. Wrike will “press against you,” sending you smart notifications and reminding you of every event you have scheduled for yourself or for your colleagues.

Steven states that a good tool should encourage you to spend time on your long-term commitments and spare at least half a day for the things that are most important in your life. You should not spend all of day trying to solve routine problems. You should reserve time for bringing your mission and vision to life; otherwise, you won’t be able to fulfill them. The key to success here, according to Steven Covey, is weekly planning. Wrike will help you plan your activities through a week or even through a month and set your priorities. You set due dates for every task as you create it and then see what things you and your team members need to get done this week and this month on a timeline.

Then, according to Steven, it is absolutely necessary that a good organizing tool should deal with people and help you to collaborate and delegate.  No other tool will help you collaborate better than Wrike. Wrike gives you a unique opportunity to store all the communications on each task and every project and everybody involved in the project can easily access them. Your main benefit is that you can always go back and review your communication and the results you’ve agreed upon. Nothing is lost!

The beauty of Wrike is that it lets you to delegate seamlessly. Wrike lets your associates control their own tasks, make plans, set and change due dates, and make updates. You and everybody involved in the project are informed of all the progress in your team’s work with Wrike’s smart email notifications. Wrike lets each person on your team get a progress report on how well he or she is doing. This way people become less dependent upon you and you get the complete delegation. People get an opportunity to organize themselves around their priorities. Here you benefit from the 5th criterion of a good tool that is found in Wrike - flexibility. You start using Wrike by creating several tasks that later can be organized in folders according to projects, departments or clients. You environment may change every day.  Wrike lets you reorganize your plans, your goals and roles in seconds. You can tag your tasks, including them in folders according to your daily, weekly or monthly priorities.

You can make changes to your plans, to your tasks and projects from any computer with an internet connection, since Wrike is Web-based. Being easily accessible, Wrike gives you and your colleagues the freedom of working anywhere and anytime.

Even at home, even at the airport waiting for your plane, Wrike will keep you organized and let you track the results of others. Wrike lets you schedule your life and delegate tasks to other people, so that you can spare time for the most important things like: leadership, recognizing new opportunities, defining the goals and having a rich private life.

Wrike can be the best supplement for your 7 habits as it lets you be highly effective in your organization.
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User rights in Wrike

Published by Valerie   |  Wednesday, 05 December, 2007

Wrike supports an open and collaborative environment.

From its beginning, Wrike has embraced an open and collaborative environment. Collaboration makes your team more agile, helps you to adjust to ever-changing market conditions  and brings you better results. That is why Wrike is a very powerful platform for managing small and medium businesses that encourage team members’ initiative, aiming to obtain more for less time and money.


You can collaborate with people from different accounts.

You can easily collaborate with your business partner who already subscribed himself and his team to Wrike. You also can easily collaborate with team members to whom you granted a professional subscription to Wrike. Likewise, You can easily collaborate with your spouse, who has a free Wrike account. You also can invite your friends to collaborate on your shared tasks. Apparently, you will be able to collaborate with your friends, whether they decide to keep their free accounts or upgrade to the professional version. No other project management software offers such an opportunity to you.

Our software, Wrike, is more like email where people’s accounts may be registered with different companies, but they still can email each other.


Share exactly what you want with exactly who you want.

Wrike allows you to manage the access rights of your associates within every part of your plans. Depending on your needs, these rights can be managed on the level of a concrete task, a folder with tasks or an entire project. You have one workspace, no matter how many tasks or projects you are involved in. You can share one task with your partner, another task with one of your clients and your support team, and a third task with your HR manager and project leader. This gives you unique visibility of all of your projects in one account.



Permissions in Wrike are based on the Wiki model.

Taking into account all the above comments, it becomes evident why Wrike’s permission system is not complicated by granular rights, such as view, edit, delete, etc. Granular rights would create formal boundaries on contributing to projects and add a level of complexity for people who share tasks. Therefore, in Wrike, there is one type of sharing. Either an item is shared or not. If you share the item, the user gets all the permissions (view/edit/delete). If you do not share the item, the user has no permissions (no view, no edit, no delete). This model is also used in wikis. If you give a person access to the task, a person can easily update it. Wrike's permission system is very easy to use and convenient, especially when backed up by a revision history and e-mail notifications.

You can get the best of project collaboration with Wrike. Thanks to Wrike, your business will become more flexible, mobile and transparent. Transparent business means openness to customers, openness to new markets, openness to new techniques and openness to learning. Your organization becomes empowered and more competitive with Wrike.

Also read: Ultimate Benefit that You Obtain with Wrike.

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Ultimate Benefit that You Obtain with Wrike

Published by Valerie   |  Tuesday, 20 November, 2007

You can manage multiple projects in one place. “One place” means only one account. You create an account and organize ALL of your plans there.

Unlike other tools, Wrike provides you uniquely convenient way to achieve total information awareness on all projects. In other words, you can share any part of your project plans with the appropriate associates, then manage them in one workspace simultaneously. At the same time, you can safely keep one client's information secure from another client, one project information secure from other project participants.

This approach to organization of plans perfectly serves the needs of those who have multiple products, projects, teams, departments or offices. Wrike will make you happy if you are tired of keeping track of your plans in disconnected files. Wrike will make you happy if you are tired of  holding conversations about your projects, tasks, issues, ideas in your email inbox.

You can log in to your Wrike account and check the sales pipeline shared with your sales team, reschedule marketing plans shared with your marketing managers, examine clients’ projects. Each of them is shared with the appropriate list of people.

This saves you a tremendous amount of time on planning, organizing and monitoring your projects. Unlike other software tools, Wrike doesn’t have boundaries that prevent people with different accounts from collaborating with each other. Thus, you can easily manage different projects and share project parts with your associates when necessary.

Other benefits: boundless collaboration, email-friendliness, timeline (Gantt chart), unique flexibility, data security; time tracking and tasks dependancies in our roadmap.

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Notifications have become much more intelligent

Published by Valerie   |  Tuesday, 05 June, 2007
We are happy to tell you that now you can customize the notifications that you receive.

If you are overwhelmed with the notification e-mails, you can switch to a daily digest, instead of immediate delivery, by going to the Account section (My Profile tab).

We have also changed the default notification criteria.

Starting today, by default you will only receive notifications about the tasks that you have created or the tasks assigned to you. Before today, you were receiving notifications about changes in every shared item.

Of course, sometimes you want to keep an eye on projects more attentively. You can modify your commitment within each folder: open the folder to edit and change e-mail notifications to “All.” Notice that every subfolder inherits the settings, and you receive the same type of notifications within them, as well.

You are welcome to contact us if you have any questions.
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How to organize several projects if each contains overlapping activities

Published by Valerie   |  Thursday, 10 May, 2007
You deal with several clients, and hence you have several project teams. Or your responsibilities imply co-operation with people from different functional directions.

You start with a couple of tasks to explore how Wrike works. The next day you want to structure all your activities and manage them further with the help of Wrike. Here is an example of how you can organize projects and introduce your associates in Wrike.

Different projects
Let's say you have a marketing department (where Alice and Mary are managers) and a development department (where Bob and Greg are developers). You create two folders: "Marketing" and "Development". You then share the "Marketing" folder with Alice and Mary. From now on, Alice, Mary and you see everything that is going below "Marketing"(tasks, folders, changes). You also share the "Development" folder with Bob and Greg.

  img

In this scenario, Alice and Mary do not see the "Development" folder, just as Bob and Greg do not see the "Marketing" folder.

Different projects, a common activity
Let's say Alice wants Bob to put a new logo on the Website. Alice assigns the task "put a new logo on the Website" to Bob and shares it with Greg. She is able to do that. Alice, Bob and Greg will see the task (each in the folder "My Folders").

If Alice does it under the "Marketing" folder, then you and Mary will also see this task. Nevertheless, Bob and Greg still don't see the "Marketing" folder.

  img

If Alice does it in another folder that is not shared with you, then you will not see it.

Regularly overlapping teams and activities
Different teams may often have overlapping activities. Let's say there is a joint project between Marketing and Development called Web Site. So you create a folder named "Web Site" and include it in "Marketing" and "Development." This way you, Alice, Mary, Bob and Greg can all collaborate on tasks for this folder.

Another possible option for doing the same: Alice creates "Web Site" folder under "Marketing," and she shares "Web Site" with Bob. He includes it under "Development".

The view of the personal workspaces is following:
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Having tested many project collab and management tools in the past which always seem to end up having something missing... Fortunately, Wrike is one of the tools which I’ve found to be complete in many ways... Secondly, what is really the ‘killer’ feature of Wrike is the ability to assign tasks and manage projects through e-mail... Given its simplicity with an appealing and familiar interface, it’s a great product."

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