Now that Clarizen project management software 2.0 is behind us, Clarizen 2.1 is cooking. Taking advantage of our pure SaaS infrastructure, that allows us to churn out frequent updates, next month we are coming out with some more new features, most of which are a direct response to your feedback and requests.

Some of the new features include Advanced Reports, Clarizen SOA, Outlook Plug-in, Custom Logo Firefox Support, Links to web-based documents (See details below).  Read

1. Advanced Reports
   As part of the day-to-day work, almost every team member in a project needs to get a specific report to view and be able to work on his\her assigned items. 
   Clarizen will supply an advanced tool to manage public and personal reports of all kinds, including a rich list of predefined reports and metrics, such as: Resource Overload & Usage.
   
   
2. Clarizen SOA and Outlook Plug-ins
   Clarizen will provide a rich interface of web services that will allow other applications to seamlessly integrate with your projects.
   Sample of integrations developed on top of this technology include Outlook, CAD and other engineering environments.
   
   
3. Attachment Improvements
   Users will be able to reference a document that resides in the intranet or somewhere on the web without needing to upload it into Clarizen. This is essential especially for development environments, where files are located centrally inside a dedicated Document Management System (DMS) or on the network (e.g. CAD design environment).
   
   
4. Firefox Support - Beta
   Clarizen on Firefox browser will be coming out initially in beta mode. Users interested in taking part of the beta program, please contact us via the web site.
   
   
5. ProjectMail Improvements
   Users reporting their progress over email will also be able to submit plain text with their completion. Thus far users could only submit over email their percent or effort of task completion. With this new feature, users can also enter text and submit it over email. The text will be captured as a new Note and show up on related team members' What's New panel and marked New in the Current Project view.
   
   
6. Co-Branding
   Users interested in showcasing their brand and logo will be able to do so by uploading their logo into the Clarizen application.
    

Clarizen 2.0 project management software has gone live and with it more than a dozen new features, as well as usability and existing feature enhancements.

New Features and Functionality

1. Usability Enhancements
- Right-click is now available across the entire application.
- For easy navigation, Clarizen now features an interactive tooltip when doing mouse over cells in the grids, showing the item's path and links to available actions wherever relevant.
- Screen length is now optimized allowing you to view more rows in the grids and is no longer fixed.
- Session time-out has been extended from 15 to 60 minutes, allowing you to keep Clarizen running in your browser for a much longer period if you are inactive.
- Multi- indent is now possible when highlighting more than one item. Read

2. Export to Excel
You can now take the data from your Clarizen projects and export them to Excel where you can later generate reports, charts or simply have offline access to your data. You can export to Excel from the following Clarizen views: Current Project, Projects, Tasks and Resource Load.
To do the export, click on the Excel icon on the top right corner of your screen and select one of the export options.

The Excel .csv file is emailed to the user currently logged in.

3. What's New
From now on when you log into Clarizen you will see be able to see instantly in your dashboard (Home) all the new information that was added to projects where you have any role.

When clicking on one of the groups of new items a new window opens displaying a list of those items that are new, for example, new 'Projects'.

You can select from the dropdown menu to view all the other groups of new items. From the list of new items you can select one or more of the items and mark them as 'Read' or 'Unread', similar to the behavior in common email applications. Items that are kept Unread will remain this way until you view them or mark them as 'Read'. Clicking on one of the new items will take you to the actual item in the Current Project view.

Throughout the Clarizen application you will notice all New items via the bold font and red asterisk on the icons.

4. Set Duration in Various Time Units
From now on you can set the Duration field in Minutes, Hours, Days, Consecutive Days (allows you to override non-working days), Weeks and even Months. (You can even customize the working days and non working days on the organization’s calendar.)

See Part II of Clarizen 2.0 Release Notes

Continued from Clarizen project management software 2.0 Part I Release Notes

New Features and Functionality

5. Change Type
Now you can change the type of work items, say a Task to a Milestone so long as they are direct children of the project. Read

6. Export to MS Project
Now you can also export your projects to MS Project, not only Import. (please note that some fields will not export accurately due to the different calculation methodologies used by each solution).
To export, select the 'Export Project' option from the Project's context menu (right-click project name).

7. Resources Can Create Sub-Items
Thus far Resources were limited to reporting the completion for items they were assigned to. With Clarizen 2.0, now they can also add sub-tasks to those items.

8. Resources on Milestones
Users can now assign Resources to Milestones.

9. Reviewers Replaces Sponsors and is Unlimited
You can have more than one view-only team member, called from now on 'Reviewer', per item.

10. Modular Projects
For total flexibility Clarizen enables restructuring project hierarchies allowing users to move sub-projects from one parent to another or converting a parent project to a sub-project of another project.

You can move an existing project by selecting the 'Move' option in the Project's context menu:

or, add a Child Project that already exists in your project pool:

11. View Options
With the new View dropdown in the Current Project , users can select between the available views. Currently Budget and Basic views are available with more to come soon.

As always, we welcome your feedback (complements too) and, as many of you may have already noticed, we respond to it accordingly with our ongoing delivery of new and enhanced features.

Lots of great stuff coming your way with Clarizen V2.0

After several months of intensive development efforts, we are proud to announce that Clarizen V2.0 project management software will be available very shortly (a few weeks!).

This major release will include many new features and enhancements, including Export to Excel, What's New indicators, Improved UI, Budget Planning, and more.

and see

Here's some of what's coming:

1. A facelift... - As part of our emphasis on improving the user experience, you will notice a very refreshing and user friendly design, thanks to our design partner fluidik and our internal 'artists'.

2. What's New - Users will be able to immediately see unread items ('What's New') via bold text and the New icon indicator across the different views as well as in the dashboard in the "What's New' panel.

3. Budget Planning - We are releasing the first phase of Clarizen's Budget Planning feature. Users will be able to keep track of Actual vs. Planned budgets as part of the overall Work Plan (WBS).

4. Duration - Users will be able to enter different time scales for the Duration, including Hours, Days, Weeks and Months.

5. Export to Excel - From now on you will be able to export data from within Clarizen to Excel spreadsheets. This will allow you to generate customized reports that are used in your organization as well as have offline access to your data. Excel export will be available on your Current Project, Projects, Tasks and Resource Usage views.

Stay tuned for more updates at they become available and published in this section.

Coming soon!

Product roadmap updates so that you know what to expect to be delivered in the upcoming releases. In general, we release updates almost on a monthly basis, however major updates are typically quarterly.   

Planned releases:

• Service Release 1.04 - January 13, 2008 - RELEASED
• Major Release 1.1 - by end of Q1 2008

Here are some of the new features currently in the pipeline:

• "Export to Excel" - Export your projects, tasks, resource usage and more to an Excel spreadsheet that will allow you to generate personalized reports.
  
  
• "What's New" - Get an immediate indication of what has been added since your last login to Clarizen.
  
  
• "Budget" - Additional columns added to your Current Project WBS (Work Plan) that will allow you to see your Actual vs. Planned budget. The initial phase of this new feature has already been released with SR 1.04 on Jan. 13. If you cannot see the two budget columns in your WBS (Current Project view in the actual grid) and want to enable it for your organization, please ask your Clarizen admin to enable it in the System Settings.
  

What's New in Clarizen SR1.03

Send Message via Email (regarding specific work item)

• Extended collaboration features through email
• Send email messages to your team members regarding any work item - a task, milestone or project

Print Functionality

• Print project Roadmap, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

Now you can write and send email messages to your team members regarding any work item - a task, milestone or a project directly from within your projects.

A link to the work item is automatically added to the outgoing message, allowing users to quickly access it.

A member may use it to send a link to the work item (Task, Milestone or Project) to any related members or groups of members in the project team. The following scenarios are covered:

• Send a message regarding a specific work item (could be at the project level) to the project team, notifying them of an update or a new item that was added and inviting them to view it.
  
• Make an initial plan of a project, assign managers to milestones or sub-projects, and invite only the managers to help you co-plan the project.
  
• Send a message to an individual team member (or more) in order to emphasize, highlight or just bring topics to their attention.

Benefits:

• Team members receive an email on projects directly to their inbox.
• Collaboratively plan, update and create projects.
• As users get a direct link to the specific work item, it's easy to update information.
• Get ongoing, up-to-date information for timely decision-making.
• Increased participation of your project team.

How does it work?

All you need to do is select the work item (task, milestone or project) you wish to send, and click on the envelope icon (Alternatively, you can select the Send via Email option in the item's context menu).

The 'Send to...' form opens where you can edit the existing content and recipients:

You can even select recipient Groups, such as All Team or All Managers of the work item(s) you had selected or select recipients from your entire Organization or Project pools:

The selected Group gets added to the recipient list and you're ready to click the 'Send' button:

The recipients are notified immediately and once opening the email can click on the included link to access the selected work item:

Clarizen allows users to print the entire plan of the currently selected project (‘Current Project').

Project members may choose to print the Roadmap or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

How does it work?

On the top right side of the screen there's a Printer icon.

When printing the WBS, once you have expanded or collapsed the work items you need printed, click on the Print icon and select the WBS option.

If you are printing the Roadmap, select the Time Scale you want to view and print and then click on the Print icon followed by the Roadmap option.

Known Issues

Limited Firefox Support - Firefox will be fully supported in a future release.

Earlier Changes: For information about previous release notes, please see the Clarizen V1.02 Service Release Notes.

Something quite unusual happened yesterday - a customer walked into our offices! Read

It's not that we are located in a remote outpost in Timbuktu but as a SaaS company catering to SMBs, customer interactions are seldom conducted face-to-face. The web as a platform for marketing and selling has virtualized the entire sales cycle removing any need for in-person interactions and even voice communications, leaving it all in the hands of ecommerce. Meeting a customer in person was an exciting, refreshing and enlightening experience.

Jay Irvine, VP of Marketing for Monterey AgResources and a Clarizen customer for a few months now, was in the vicinity of our San Mateo, CA offices and thought he would pay us a visit to get to know the team behind his project collaboration solutions.

Jay with Clarizen CEO Avi, and Account Mgr. Eric

AgResources is not in a ‘simple' line of business and their products are far from being simple, however, being a medium-size business with multi-million dollar sales and 80 employees they had quite a simple problem, how can they improve their bottom line without taking on new employees or endeavors. For Jay there was a straightforward answer - increase efficiency as stated in his words:

"I am a small company (up against the big giants such as Monsanto) and can only increase my business by being more efficient. Clarizen allows this."

AgResources produces and markets agricultural chemicals and nutrients, each of which entails creating projects that take the product from the early phases of R&D, through field trials, compliance, registration, production of marketing materials, packaging and finally selling to resellers. Each phase may involve both internal and external stakeholders all of which are dependent on each other to reach the final goal of adding a new line of products to the company. Chemists, marketers, compliance specialists, suppliers and management are constantly moving projects through the value chain until a project is marked ‘complete'.

Before using Clarizen, as typical in many businesses of this size, Excel spreadsheets were used to capture and disseminate all project information coupled with endless emails and hard-copy reports. Errors and delays were taken for granted in a system that lacked any ability to truly track and collaborate, as had occurred just a week earlier when they mistakenly double-paid a supplier $6500!

Once a month project team members get together in the Fresno headquarters to review each and every one of the approximately 50 ongoing projects. Papers are handed out and over the course of the day all projects are reviewed one by one in a painstakingly process. Decisions are eventually taken but only after a very long day of sharing all the information as it relates to each project. Jay knew there was something wrong and even more so once getting back to his desk after one of his frequent business trips. Projects were behind schedule due to emails sitting in members' inboxes (and even papers sitting on desks), miscommunications and costly errors (as the one mentioned above) all of which impacted the company's bottom line.

Just to clarify, Jay did not walk into our offices with iPod earplugs hanging over his shoulders. Jay is a farmer in heart and soul and still carries around mounds of paperwork and has never used any Project Management solution. Jay knew he was in a bind and was fortunate (for us too!) to be at the right time and place when Clarizen's Inside Sales person, Eric Pangilinan, introduced him to Clarizen via email. Eric helped Jay get the ball rolling, quickly setting-up his Clarizen account and adding some project templates which are recurring in nature in this business.

After spending a few hours on the Clarizen application, Jay shared the application with other members at AgResources and soon enough they were all sold onto it. His main concern was not about securing certain data from being viewed by specific team members but about the overwhelming time and effort that members were spending on locating and digesting the unstructured out-of-context data that was piling on their desks, emails and spreadsheets.

"It's not about keeping secrets from one another but about keeping people focused on the tasks at hand."

No one had proposed to Jay to use a ‘Project Management' solution nor was he seeking one out. Jay knew the ‘system' was broken and was determined to spearhead a radical change and phase out dated processes, including those monthly project sessions. With Clarizen all team members now have access anytime, anywhere to project data. Members of his team, who are not very web-savvy, can complete their progress reports on assigned tasks directly from their inboxes using Clarizen's fully integrated email features. The monthly meetings focus more on strategic decision making than sharing project data. More than anything else, Jay is excited about the flexibility of the Clarizen system which allows him to start projects from R&D or anywhere else in the value chain as opposed to other solutions that require of him to comply with very rigid guidelines.

Hiding the power of the system from the end user while putting a simple façade and emphasis on the usability has allowed him to secure internal team adoption. He is confident that accelerated team adoption will, in turn, translate to an increase in efficiencies and eventually the bottom line.

AgResources is just one of millions of small businesses worldwide weighed down by multi-member and inter-dependent business processes that are still not leveraging the tremendous value that ‘Web 2.0' attributes have to offer.

Clarizen is Jay's foot in the door on this new journey and, speaking of feet in the door, please come by our offices next time you're in town!

What's New in Clarizen SR1.02

• ProjectMail^TM - Progress Reporting by Email
  • Extended collaboration features through email
  • Receive and update project tasks via email
  • Unsubscribe capabilities
• Improved User Interface Design
  • New toolbar icons in the main project view(WBS)
• New ‘Owner' filter (on tasks and projects)
• User Set Fields

Earlier Changes: For information about previous release notes, please see the Clarizen V1.01 Service Release Notes.

ProjectMail^TM - Progress Reporting by Email

With Clarizen's ProjectMail feature, project team members receive status reports, tasks and updates from the system directly to their Inbox.

ProjectMail Benefits:

• Team members can update their progress on projects directly from their inbox.
• You can edit, modify and mark items as completed on your project status in just one click.
• Get on going, up-to-date information for timely, on-target decision-making.
• Hassle Free - No Login Required!
• When project managers initiate a progress report by email they can expect participation from their project team members.
• Every update is automatically updated in the system.

How does it work?

• Progress Reports are automatically sent to users, but managers can also place a manual request from resources to update their progress.

• The email includes all the active and current tasks and the expected progress status. The user can accept all changes, meaning each task would be updated with the expected progress, or the user may choose to manually update his/her progress.
  
  
  
  
• When manually update is selected a web form opens with a list of his/her tasks, were he/she can insert the actual progress.
  
  
  
• These operations are done without having to log into the Clarizen system.

Improved Toolbar Design

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) menu has been modified with better icons that are more intuitive.

New ‘Owner' Filter (on tasks and projects)

This feature allows users to create more granular filters on their home page so that they can see work items (project, tasks) according to their role - e.g. only projects they manage, only tasks they are a resource in, etc.

A new ‘Owner' Filter was added on tasks and projects panels and subsystems.
You can now filter work items to view the ones assigned to you as manager or as a resource.

User Set Fields

This feature allows users to manually set various work item attributes such as Start Date, Due Date and Duration rather than have them be computed by the system. Users can easily instruct the system to re-compute a certain value. For example, if the system calculates the start date of a task to be November 1, the user can manually set it to another date, say November 10, and the system will indicate this field with a blue triangle at the top right corner of the field.

By hovering with the mouse over the blue triangle, a little window will open and provide the user with links to perform certain actions. These actions include restoring the system- calculated field on a field that was manually edited by the user, or opening the Clarizen online help in a specific relevant location.

If the user wishes to restore automatic calculated fields, he may do so easily from the project page.

Known Issues

Limited Firefox Support - Firefox will be fully supported in version 1.03.