The following document outlines the new features and limitations of Clarizen's version update.

We've taken great measures to ensure that this update includes significant performance enhancements in the application. In addition, new features were added to increase team collaboration and allow project participants the ability to exchange information and update on project progress. The enhanced toolbar and new looking icons and links were created to assist users by allowing them to add dependencies, documents, notes and posts.

You can truly maximize the benefits of Clarizen by taking advantage of all its features and functions.

Beyond being an on-demand project management application, Clarizen excels the challenges that project managers face in the project management environment.

Clarizen enables you to:

• Concurrently plan and execute at the same time by enabling you to keep portions of your project plan in Draft state while others are already in Active state.
• Working concurrently with several stakeholders - the automatic synchronous save enables you and other team members to immediately assess each other's plan updates.
• Plan and execute both top-down and bottom-up - Clarizen's Roadmap and WBS enables you to observe and understand the big picture of the project as your project continues to be updated.
• Define the roles of the different project's stakeholders at the level of the project and specific items in the project plan
• As each user is defined to a role in the hierarchy of the project plan, users can interactively participate and respond where other users from the team can view the results immediately.

Solution Highlights

High Level & Detailed Project Review

Users can view a high level summary of the organizations project plans or drill down to specifics based on a specific project or task.

Creating a new project

When adding a project, the new project and import from MS-Project wizard are simple step by step approaches to implementing a new or existing project plan to Clarizen's project management application. The wizard guides the user through the project framework implementation process. In addition to the fact that the user can continue working on their project in the Clarizen interface, they can use the default system templates to help identify the structure of a project plan of which they can use as the base of their project.

Building project plan

Once a project plan has a structure, the application enables users to easily build a hierarchical project plan based on sub-projects, milestones (the goals that you want to reach throughout your project) and tasks. As a result, a roadmap plan is created in order for you to graphically view the status of the project.

Adding schedule dependencies and progress impact enables users to create a consistent work plan where one task follows another. Within the WBS grid you can easily select the tasks of which you wish to create a dependency link between them.

Define and collaborate with the project's stakeholders

You can begin assigning roles and tasks to users for each of the objects in the grid. Each functioning role has different permissions. For example sponsor can read all object details in the WBS, but cannot modify anything.

Immediate up to date information enables teams from across buildings, cities, even continents to interactively participate in the organizations project plans.

Collaboration on content

Clarizen facilitates collaboration on content and exchange of information by allowing upload and download of documents, exchanging notes as well as discussing in context on a specific entity from a project.

Updating project progress and status

As your project is under way and the status is constantly in a different phase, it is important to update the progress of the project as well as the life cycle of the entities in your project plan. Each state in the project lifecycle represents a different maturity level of readiness. Every entity within the project is in a defined state. Take into account that moving from one state to another usually affects the entity's su-entities.

Clarizen Features

Progress Reporting by Email*

To encourage team collaboration and increase adoption rate, Clarizen developed the Progress Reporting feature.

Progress Reporting by Email ensures that project participants receive continuous and up to date emails of tasks status.

Each user in the system has defined properties:

• The Email Allowed field enables users to receive progress reporting by email. If no resources are assigned to a task or the Email Allowed field is not checked, the progress reports are sent to the managers.
  
  
• When a progress report is sent to a user, it contains two groups of tasks - current active tasks and upcoming tasks (tasks that are assigned to start between the current progress report and the next progress report).
  
  
• The user can interactively select to ‘Accept All' or to ‘Modify' the data in the Progress Report. If the user selects the Accept All button, all data reported in the progress report is updated in the system. If the user selects the Modify button, a new report page is opened so that the user can edit the required data. Once modified, data on the report page is updated to the system.

As the status of tasks change on a constant basis, when selecting the ‘Accept All' or ‘Modify' options, the user might receive an error due to:

• A new report being sent with updated % completeness status
• Task state change from active to another state
• The user no longer being manager or resource to the task
• The task being deleted

Another interactive way in which users can go directly to their tasks in the system is by clicking the tasks links in the Progress Report.

In addition, managers can manually send progress reports by selecting the task in the WBS and from the action list select the Request Completeness Report option. Participating resources will receive a progress report including details of the % completeness of the selected task.

*This feature will be available by mid-September.

Reachout Plan

The Reachout plan is a comprehensive method used to create better emphasis on building project team and adding strategic admin approval process for new users created in the system.

The following scenarios are supported in the system:

• New user awaiting assignment of license message sent to admin - when a new user is added to the system, admin will receive email stating the pending license assignment for new user. This will take place during trial and post-trial.
  
• Automatic check of external user - see section on external user.
  
• Notifications and reports - reports sent to user with license or during trial period; user continues to receive notification 28 days after trial version expiry; user continues to receive notification 7 days after license expiry.
  
• Invitations to Clarizen - when new user added to the system; after trial when user assigned license; when license is revoked from user; reassign license to user.
  
• Notification to Admin after new users imported from MS-Project import - Admin receives email including list of new users which are pending license assignment.

Performance

The main focus of this release was to improve the performance of the application on different web browsers:

• Over 300% improvement in performance in Internet Explorer 6
• Significant improvement in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox

Alerts and Highlights

The application Home Page provides a visual summary of the alerts and highlights under a single panel. The information specifies the number of total unresolved alerts and the number of new alerts that have been triggered since the last time the user logged into the system.

The links direct the user to the Alerts and Highlights section of the application.

Info card

In the Current Project page, the Info Card panel may be expanded by clicking the button or contracted by clicking the button. By default the Info Card is contracted.

The Info Card tabs are vertically aligned on the right side of the panel. A user can clearly indentify by the images the connotation of the icon.

The following image displays the icons of the Info card and a description of each:

Toolbar enhancements

From the toolbar of the WBS the following functions may be triggered:

External User

When an email of a new user is not part of the organization's domain, the external user checkbox is automatically marked in the ‘Create New User' wizard screen.

External users logging into Clarizen will only be able to view and modify the item (e.g. sub-project, task) to which they were assigned. If the external user was made manager of an object which has children, they will be able to view and modify items from the whole tree.

Note the admin can change external user to internal user or the other way around.

License Management

The License Management module can only be viewed by Admin users.

The License Management module enables Admin users to track the status of the licenses that were purchased for the organization. They can follow such details as renewal date and expiration date. They can also purchase new licenses.

Live Support Chat

To maintain ongoing communications with our customers, the Live Support Chat feature by ‘LIVEperson' has been added. LIVEperson enables you to receive online support as following:

• The button indicates that a Clarizen support representative is online. Customers are given instant access to textually converse with a Clarizen support representative
  
• The button indicates that Clarizen support is offline and an email message may be sent to support. A response will be sent by email.

The Live Support Chat button is located in several areas of Clarizen:

• Account Registration screen
• Login Screen
• Clarizen application - on the header
• License Purchase screen
• Billing systems screens

Limitations

Missing Option to View Resource Usage in Assign Resource Page

The Assign Resource page provides a view to resource properties. It currently does not have a direct link to the Resource Usage page. To view resources usage, navigate More -> Resources. Select the user/s your interested to view and click the Resource Usage button on the toolbar.

Conflicts and Status Columns

Tooltip limitations: Currently there is no option to navigate directly from the conflict icon ( for example) to the relevant entity to resolve the conflict. User has to navigate through the relevant task/milestone/project.

For more details see section on Managing Conflicts in the help file.

Undo is Currently Not Available

The system automatically saves changes to the database.

Auto save Duration

After making a change to a record in the grid, browser status bar indicates when data is being saved (sent to the server). Occasionally, an error may be displayed if user tries to perform an action before the save is completed.

MS-Project Import (Dates)

Dates of projects imported from MS-Project are calculated per business days. Elapsed time is currently not available in Clarizen's system.

Organization Calendar

Change of organization working days setting, will take effect after user logs out and logs in back to the system.

Templates

When creating a project from a global template, new project entities are created with the organization's account registering user as manager and you as the project manager.

Asynchronous Validation

Validation of potential loops, caused by scheduling dependencies or progress impact between entities in different projects is done asynchronous. If a loop is detected, an alert will be created and email notification will be sent.

Project Tree Structure

Tree hierarchy is currently restricted: milestone cannot be created under milestone or task.

Delay Reflection of User Permission Changes

When user permissions are changed, for example, a user is appointed manager of a milestone or parent task, it may take a few minutes for the system to reflect the change. During this time the user might not be able to perform actions permitted by the new role.

Sort and Filter

The following table is a summary of the issues that are related to Filter and Sorting in the application.