Protect & Simplify Your Workspace: New LiquidPlanner Features
Liz PearceAccess Controls Are Here At Last!
It was our longest sprint yet, at 1396 total hours of work (and probably more that went uncounted). At times, it felt more like a marathon. But as of April 16, LiquidPlanner customers can do more to protect and simplify their project plan for their users than ever before.
Access Controls are designed to give teams the ability to restrict access to specific clients or projects. The first step in setting up access control is to choose the access level for each member:
If you set someone up as a restricted member, you can then choose which clients or projects they should see. Co-owners, managers, and full members have varying levels of privilege but can see every project in the plan.
Why Restrict Access?
Our customers have been asking for access controls for many different reasons. Here are a few of the top needs:
1) To simplify the project plan for large teams. Managers want to see the big picture, but individual contributors need to stay focused on the just projects they're working on. By setting up access to specific projects, you can pare down the information that team members see, while still managing a large number of projects in a single workspace.
2) To protect sensitive information. You may have certain projects in the works that are not yet ready for public consumption. You can plan, schedule, and collaborate on those projects in your central workspace, but keep them private from other workspace members for as long as you choose.
3) To manage & collaborate with contractors, clients, or partners. Clients or partners may want to be deeply involved in the management of their own projects. Make sure they only see their part of the plan by restricting access, but continue to allow your core team members to work on all projects in one central location.
But Wait, There's More...
Critical Path Highlighting
Projects are a complex web of implicit and explicit dependencies. Throw a bunch of different resources into the mix (all working on multiple projects) and it can be hard to see the forest for trees. Critical Path Highlighting is a navigational tool that can help.
To use it, just select the task or container you care about. Right-click to the option shown below, and turn on Critical Path Highlighting for that item.
Ta-da! Instantly, you'll see all items on the critical path highlighted in yellow. That even includes higher priority items from other projects. Essentially, anything that's driving the end date of the selected item will be called out. If you keep the highlighting turned on, it's a great motivator to the team members whose work is most time-sensitive to stay on track.
Visual Indicator of Schedule Flow-Around
If you use LiquidPlanner, you know the schedule engine will schedule lower priority tasks into gaps left over after scheduling the higher priority tasks. We've made it easier to see when higher priority tasks get interrupted as the high priority tasks come back into play.
New Training Videos
Train on your own time. We've redone our first five training videos, incorporating the most frequently asked questions and the key concepts you need to know to get the most out of LiquidPlanner.
If this is your first introduction to LiquidPlanner, learn more about our revolutionary online project management solution.
Reader Comments (2)
Critical path is great! Access controls are a welcome and necessary additional.
But fix your f'n bugs that you introduced with the newest release!!!! It's driving us nuts!
Thanks Matt. There is one reported issue with non-US timezones causing events to be off by a day and a couple of small things we found in our testing. Fixes going out tonight for that. If you register with the forums we can contact you or better yet, please email support [at] liquidplanner [dot] com with the specific issue you are experiencing and we'll get it sorted out.