October Release: New Features for Blissed-Out Planning

We’re very excited about the new features you’ll find in LiquidPlanner as of last Friday’s update. Just treats, no tricks – we promise! They're designed to let you add more of your own data to your online project plans, and use it for all kinds of things. Allow us to take you on a brief tour...

Custom Fields

Now you can add up to five custom project fields to your workspace. Each field has a list of values that you define in the “Data Customization” section under “Settings.” For example, you might want to give each project a “Stage” with options like RFP, Pending Approval, and Planning. You’ve got five custom task fields to use as well – they work the same way.

Once you’ve set up your custom fields, you can view them, filter by them, and see them in your export files.

Details Page Refresh

And where can you view these fields, you ask? Along with the schedule grid and the edit pane, you can see them in our newly redesigned Details Page. The Details Page is already the collaboration hub for comments, descriptions, and attached documents. Now it’s also a place to view and set item details, like custom field selections, task assignments, and logged progress.

Teams

Moving right along, the next new feature on our list is Teams. Now you can assign each member of your workspace to a different team. Once you’ve assigned each member to a team (via the Member List), you can filter by team, send a message to a team (@Design, for example), and view team associations on the schedule view and in your export files. 

Project & Task Budgeted Hours

Here’s one for the project budget managers! With our new max effort field, you can input the budgeted number of hours you have to spend on a task or project (via the edit pane).

LiquidPlanner then sums up the number of hours logged and the expected number of hours remaining on the item, and alerts you if you’re at risk of going over. Even if you don’t want to put in max effort for your project or task, you can expose the “Expected Total” column in your schedule to see the new calculation.

There are a few other new treats you may stumble across in LiquidPlanner this week. If you spot them, list them in the comments and we might send you a treat of your very own!

Please enjoy, and send your comments and questions to support@liquidplanner.com.

Comments

[Michael Cunningham]

I really like the ability to create and filter to work teams and customized project status! Thanks.

Enhancements to the the formatting of the Workspace Comments are also appreciated.

[Andre]

Hmm, exciting updates. Looking forward to figuring out what the new Alerting and Reporting functions do. When will the help pages for those items be available?

[ieee projects for IT chennai]

hi
this is gokul
its a nice information about the blisse out planning
thanks for sharing such a nice blog
keep going
ieee projects for IT chennai

[Alison]

Andre, I think these articles on Max Hours and Actual Start and Finish Dates would be really beneficial for you. Let me know if you have any other questions!

http://www.liquidplanner.com/help/planning-and-scheduling/max-hours-and-risk-alerts.html
http://www.liquidplanner.com/help/reports-and-analysis/viewing-actual-start-and-finish-dates.html

[Eric Novikoff]

These features are nice, but I'm rooting for more 'standard' project management features like task priorities and even link priorities. It's quite dificult to plan certain Professional Services projects to flow around fixed tasks without making the schedule illegible. Also, grouping tasks should have an effect on priority such that you can track sub-tasks without having them slide outside the bounds of the parent task and making it stretch out to much longer than it would normally take.

[Robert]

Thanks for the great updates and the new features on the details page! Also really like the team section. I really hope that in your soon-to-be pipeline of upgrades/improvements is a better way to communicate and interact with outside clients. Similar to the "Teams" functionality just released, it would be great to have a place where you could have "client groups" and add emails/contacts to those groups and then be able to assign entire "projects" or "folders" to the "client group".

Currently, for outside clients to view individual tasks and the discussion/comments associated with it, we have to manually "share" each individual task and each individual folder with that client. It would be so much easier if we could create a client folder, and have all the project and tasks within it be automatically shared and viewable by that client.

Keep up the good work!
Robert

[Travis Miller]

The user icons in the member list also now have fancy green hair :)

[panama city web design]

New features are really good and helpful to see it here.