February Release: Google Calendar Integration and More

Over the weekend, we rolled out our first 2012 LiquidPlanner update. You know what this means: it’s time to introduce some new features! These particular features have been frequently requested by our customers for some time, which makes this reveal even more exciting:

Google Calendar Integration

Though calendar integration was a feature before this, Google Calendar was not supported.  And you can’t leave Google out of all the fun, can you?  Now, you can integrate LiquidPlanner with Google Calendar via the iConnect button on your My Tasks Page:

Enhanced Icons for Attached Files and Comments  

A quick glance at the left margin will now tell you if there are files, comments, or both attached to a plan item.    

Workspace Owners & Co-Owners Can Edit Member User Names 

This is particularly useful when you need to correct the problem of more than one member with the same user name. Or, perhaps you want to change all user names to a standard format. Workspace owners and co-owners can now do this via the Edit Profile link on the Member List.

  

Also good to note: don’t upset your workspace owner. You might wake up one day to find that your LiquidPlanner user name has been mysteriously changed to “Sir Didimus Fuzzytail."

Questions or concerns? Drop us a comment, say hello on Facebook or Twitter, or email support@liquidplanner.com.

New LiquidPlanner Notifications: Email That Your Inbox Will Actually Like

It’s become a holiday tradition at LiquidPlanner to dedicate the last software update of the year to something straight off our customers' wish lists.  So what’s our “End of the Year” gift in 2011? A complete overhaul of the LiquidPlanner email notification system.

Starting this Monday, your LiquidPlanner change notifications are going to look very different. If you’re new to LiquidPlanner’s online project management software, we’re talking about email integration features that help you and your team stay informed and engaged with the projects and tasks in your LiquidPlanner project workspace.

These notifications keep people informed about changes to their tasks, as well as tasks and projects they choose to watch, without ever having to log in to LiquidPlanner.

The Old

To be honest, the circa 2007 email design we were using didn’t even look like LiquidPlanner, especially not since we upgraded to LiquidPlanner 3.0. The design was weak and a little, what’s the word? Oh, right: boring. 

With this release, we’ll be jumping forward to a new contemporary HTML design that is much more useful and easier to navigate. We’ve been using it internally for a month now and we can’t even look at the old design anymore.

The New

Here’s what you can expect after we deploy the update this Saturday:

• One e-mail per task instead of batched updates. If you’re subscribed to real-time notifications, you’ll receive a different email for each task that changes. The name of the task will be in the subject line, which means multiple changes will get threaded in most email clients (i.e. you can group by conversation). It also means you’ll also be able to scan subject lines and quickly decide if you need to pay attention to the email, saving you valuable time. 
• “[LP]” in the title. This will make it easy to spot notifications and to build an email rule to move notifications into a folder.
• No more “Do not reply to this mail” warning. Instead of hunting for “Reply” links in the email, you can simply hit “Reply” in your email client to add to the conversation. This is the best part of moving to per-task emails.
• Human readable changes. The text in the change notifications has been reworked to be more human-speak and less machine-speak. It should be much easier to follow what’s going on with your projects.
• More relevant information will be included. Recent change notifications will include more relevant information, like document thumbnails, important updates, and full text descriptions, notes, and more. This is particularly helpful when a task is transferred from one person to another and they need to get up to speed.
• Low volume option. If you don’t want to be blasted by too many change notifications, you can subscribe to a daily digest that will summarize the day’s changes for you.
• Upcoming Tasks. The “Upcoming Tasks” email has also be redesigned. We dropped the weekly mode in favor of a daily mail that focuses on what’s planned on your list today and tomorrow.*

I know that we’re all very sensitive to how products respect our inbox, and I hope we’ve done a good job with this particular upgrade. We definitely want to make staying connected with your work easier and quicker, and we always listen to what our customers are saying. Let us know what you think, and I hope we’ve made email a little less tedious and a little more fun.

*But Wait, There's More!

Email notifications are definitely the star of this update, but here are a few more changes you don't want to miss: 

• We added the @All function for commenting.  This allows you to address a comment to every person in the workspace at once.
• We renamed the Promise Date feature to Deadline Date.  There's no change to the way it works; we just gave it a new name to better reflect its function. 

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.

The LiquidPlanner iPad App is Here!

A few weeks ago, you may have heard some celebrating happening over in our corner of the Internet:

It’s true: LiquidPlanner 3.0 is now available for iPad (and iPhone), and we hope you’ll like what you see.

If you’ve used our mobile app in the past, get ready for a vastly different experience this time around. When we started developing LP 3.0, we knew we had a great opportunity to overhaul our mobile app at the same time (truth be told, LP 3.0 wasn’t actually compatible with the old mobile app, so we had to overhaul it).  The new version of the web app gave us the opportunity to ask the question: what do our customers really need from a mobile app?

The way we work today is vastly different from how we worked even a few years ago. Project managers are bringing their iPads to meetings instead of their laptops. Executives want to stand in line at the coffee shop and update their customers on project progress. Employees work on their presentations while commuting on the subway.

With these needs in mind, we set out to give project managers and team members the ability to perform the most important project management functions from their mobile device. In our old iPhone app, users could primarily view their personal tasklists and the workspace’s comment stream. In the new version, you can browse your entire portfolio, view your schedules, edit and update tasks, view attached files and detailed notes, and more – no matter how many items you have in your plan.

We designed the app completely in house, and now we're hard at work on an HTML5 version so we can extend the experience to other mobile platforms. We also have a big fat file of enhancements we’d like to make to the app. Your feedback and comments will help us prioritize that list, so please let us know what you think!

Last but not least, we’d like to send a big thank you to our customers, who were patient and supportive during the development and approval process. We hope it was worth the wait.

Don’t have the LiquidPlanner app yet? Download it for free from the Apple Store on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates and information.

Hot Off The Presses: New LiquidPlanner Features

Over the weekend, we released an update to LiquidPlanner with some new features that were requested and inspired by our customers feedback. We hope these new improvements will make your lives easier, and don’t forget to leave a comment or tweet us your thoughts!

Workspace Page Renamed As Settings

The Workspace page has been renamed to Settings for the sake of clarity. You will still be able to find administrative functions here, such as Timesheet Review, Portal Controls, and Billing Settings. We have also made the layout a little more user-friendly, and all administrative icons will now be displayed to all users (they will be faded and inactive for users who do not have the proper access level for a particular function).

Timesheet Review: Multiple Selection

Owners can now select multiple people in the Members filter. Before, you could only select one person at a time. Now, a subset of members and their timesheets can be selected. Just go to Settings>Timesheet Review to try these new changes out.

Dependencies

Along the same vein of the timesheet review filters, you can now add multiple dependencies to a task at once. Start by double-clicking the task and opening up the Details Pane. Select the Dependencies tab, and click “Edit.” You will see that you are now able to select multiple tasks. This new feature will make it so much easier to create one-to-many dependencies.

Gallery View for Attached Files

When you attach documents to a task, you used to only see a generic file icon to represent that file. Now attached files will be presented in a gallery format, including image thumbnails.

Rate Sheets

It’s easier than ever to create a rate sheet in LiquidPlanner. Rate sheets allow you to associate both bill rate and pay rate with various clients, projects, activities, and members. Before the update, you had to build your rate sheet in a spreadsheet and import it into LiquidPlanner.  Now, you can build a rate sheet directly in the user interface. Give it a try at Settings > Timesheet Management > Rate Sheets.

In addition to these features, you'll find a few more fixes and modifications sprinkeled throughout LP 3.0. We hope you enjoy them!