All Videos » Upgrading to LiquidPlanner 3.0
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Have you ever heard the saying that three’s the magic number? When it comes to LiquidPlanner Version 3.0, we think you’ll know what we mean. Hi, I’m Charles from the Product Team and I’m going to walk you through a few of the new things coming in Version 3.
One of the big things in this release is we’ve completely overhauled the user interface. The new version of LiquidPlanner feels light and easy compared to the old design. Let’s take a peek at the homepage. It’s been upgraded and simplified. You can see five sections across the top: Home, Projects, My Tasks, My Timesheets, and Workspace. Most of the good stuff is in the Projects section. All the views have been consolidated here. There’s a new view gallery that is customizable and all the commands have been cleaned up and simplified in a new menuing system. One of the most exciting things is that all of our controls have been rewritten. This means when you have to move things around, it’s going to be a whole lot easier to find stuff. You can expand, collapse and search within these controls.
Now if you take a close look at this new interface, you’re going to see something. The organize and prioritize button is gone. In LiquidPlanner 3.0, you won’t have to switch back and forth between these two modes to see your plan. Then new design is going to show you everything in one view. We call this new solution Project Packages, and it really is a better way to manage multiple projects at one time. Let’s take a look at how it works. In LiquidPlanner 2.0, every time you create a project folder you get a prioritized task list to go with it. So over time as you add projects, you end up with multiple projects and multiple tasklists. Tasklists are the tool to allow you to reprioritize things, so people would often reprioritize the tasklists as shown here and they would also add additional tasklists to represent their process structure and of course one of the powerful things about LiquidPlanner is that you can override priorities and move things from those tasklists up higher in the priority structure. People found all kinds of creative ways to use tasklists. Sometimes they would abandon the default tasklist altogether and create ones like high, medium and low priority to prioritize their tasks. Some people organized their priority structure around the calendar.
So this system was good at giving us a powerful way to manage multiple projects concurrently but this organize/prioritize design was a bit tricky to use. You’d have to switch between the two views and it wasn’t always clear where you would put your structure, so we designed away the two modes. Designing away the two modes wasn’t really that hard. We like to think of it as being as easy as 1, 2, 3. Step 1: We made project folders prioritizable. This allowed us to cut the tie with that default tasklist. We just didn’t need it anymore. Step 2: We let projects be grouped into packages. Step 3: We let tasks get priority overrides only as needed, up into higher priority packages. In practice this creates a really clean workspace where you can see both your projects and your priority overrides in one view. We’re also happy to report that the upgrade process to this structure is going to be smooth and easy. We will automatically upgrade your old tasklist into the new more powerful packages. All your existing tasks will be prepackaged into those new packages and over time you can simplify your workspace to take advantage of these new features. Thanks for watching this quick introduction. We’ll have more information as we get closer to the release.
