Clarizen 2.7 is all about supporting global organizations' (big and small) ability to manage a user base that is:

• dispersed across different countries, languages (now Spanish too!) and currencies
• frequently updating foreign exchange rates
• working with many external contractors and partners
• needs to be able to view instantly financial data (costs, billing, as it reflects in users reporting their hours over timesheets) as the project progresses

New features include support of foreign currencies, customizable exchange rates, Time Tracking Budget info in Current Project view, improved Gantt charts, Work Item unique ID, Import new users from file and more.

For a more detailed tutorial with additional screenshots, please visit: http://www.clarizen.com/NewFeaturesInClarizen2_7.aspx

Foreign Currency

By enabling the Currency module, organizations can now use different currencies within the same project so that costs and billing associated, for example, with a task completed in Germany can be captured in Euros, even though the overall default project currency is in US dollars.

 

Furthermore, organizations can manually set exchange rates between their default and other currencies as frequently as they need to, say every first of the month or when there is major fluctuation in the rate. Once a task is complete, its costs and billing reflect the exchange rate for the period when the task was completed. You can even set a fixed exchange rate for a given project or work item.

Time Tracking view in Current Project

Thus far, financial info in the Current Project screen only included the 'Budget' view which includes Planned Budget and Actual Costs, calculated based on user rates, planned duration and task completion (as users reported their completion percentage or effort). With the new 'Time Tracking' view in the Current Project screen, users (with Financial User permissions) are also able to see the financial information as it relates to the costs and billing rates incurred once users report hours in time sheets.

 

Early Reporting on Tasks

Now you can select to report hours on tasks that start in the future. Simply select the week you want to start reporting on the given work item, click the Early Reporting button and locate the item. The item will be added to the timesheet and be available for reporting until the task is completed.

Unique Work Item ID

All entities in Clarizen, such as Work Items (projects, tasks, milestones) and Documents have a system generated identifier ID that can be used to uniquely identify the various entities.
To show the work item ID, check "Show work item ID in the system grids" option in the System Settings / User Interface Settings.

Improved Gantt Viewing and Links

You are now able to navigate to work items (in the Current Project's Work Plan) directly from the Gantt and Resource Calendar views using the 'Go To' control.
In addition, if you are using Clarizen Shortcuts in your projects, they can now be seen in the Gantt view.
Also coming soon the ability to print the entire Gantt chart or sections of it.

Import Users from File

From now you can import multiple users at once from a spreadsheet or quickly enter several manually. To do so, visit the Admin>User settings page and select the 'Invite New Users' option.

Read more.....

I know I just posted release notes of 2.5G just a couple of weeks ago but start getting used to it - with the adoption of our frequent Sprint releases, Clarizen is now able to churn out fully loaded releases in very short intervals.

Clarizen 2.6 features a major uplift in Resource Management functionality with an overhaul of the Resource Load screen to make it an interactive, dynamic source for managing the resource allocation across all projects. Whereas before resource assignments would need to be updated on the Current Project view, now it can be handled also from the Resource Load view spanning across all projects.

In addition to the Resource Load overhaul, we are proud to unveil the all new Resource Calendar view, another work of art from our creative development team. Similar to the latest Gantt chart released in Clarizen 2.5G, the Resource Calendar view is also based on a Flash file and is loaded with features allowing you to see resources' daily task breakdown, dependencies, percent completed, overload indicator, and more.

See below a detailed description of the new and enhanced features made available with Clarizen 2.6.

1. Interactive Resource Load

Thus far, the Resource Load was a static indicator of the resources' tasks assignments across different projects and the percent allocated to each task. With the new interactive version the screen allows inline editing of the percent allocated, adding more resources to the view, assigning new tasks, un-assigning from tasks and other functions.

One example of how this will be useful is when you open the view and see a resource overloaded on a certain day (% is in red font). The manager can revise the % allocations to reduce the overload on this one resource and assign it to another, even if it requires of adding a new resource to the view that was not there originally.

The following scenario illustrates this example:

Step 1: Manager runs a resource load for a specific project and is alerted via the red font that Adam is over-allocated (200%) on a few days due to parallel assignments.

Step 2: The manager decides to add another resource to this view, Johnson, so that she can assign him one of Adam's tasks.

Step 3: Now that Johnson is in the same view, she highlights (using the mouse) the days (selecting the cells) she wants to assign Johnson to the task and clicks the assignment button.

Step 4: First she needs to find the task she wants to assign Johnson so she searches for the task.

Step 5: Once located, she assigns it to Johnson and then un-assigns Adam from that same task (alternatively, she could have modified the % allocation).

Step 6: Finally, resource overload has been removed and balanced out without needing to leave the Resource Load view.

To learn more about this feature visit the related Help page: https://app.clarizen.com/Clarizen/Help/en-us/Clarizen_Help.htm?#Resources_Subsystem/Resources.ResourceLoad.htm

To learn more in general about Resource Management visit the related Help page: https://app.clarizen.com/Clarizen/Help/en-us/Clarizen_Help.htm?#Resources_Subsystem/Resources.General.htm

2. Resource Calendar View

The all new Resource Calendar View graphically illustrates resource allocation over time. This view gives an intuitive and quick overview of resource usage in the organization, including color indicators for overloaded resources, percent completion of tasks, dependencies between tasks.

As you can seen in the screenshot below, the top panel breaks down for each resource the day by day view load, including the red bars where there is over allocation. Upon mouse-over, the tooltip gives a detailed list of items the resource is working on any given day.

Once clicking on any resource's horizontal bar in the above panel, opens the lower panel, which includes a breakdown of the tasks for the selected resource. The yellow filling indicates the percent completion of each task.

The legend gives you more info on the different components of the new view.

To learn more about this feature visit the related Help page: https://app.clarizen.com/Clarizen/Help/en-us/Clarizen_Help.htm?#Resources_Subsystem/ResourceCalendarView.htm

3. Entering Consecutive Dependencies

Users can now create multiple dependencies at a time by highlighting more than two work items and clicking on the Add Dependency icon in the tool bar. The dependency type chosen as well as the lag/lead time will be applied to all the dependencies created.

4. Keyboard Shortcut for Entering FTS Dependencies

In addition to allowing entering multiple dependencies at a time, when creating one or more Finish-to-Start (FTS) dependencies you can use the combined Ctrl+F2 keys as a shortcut.

5. Enhanced Notes, Discussions and Documents

Viewing and editing Notes is now much easier to do and when there is only one Document, Note or Post (Discussion), upon double-clicking the item will open in view mode. If there is more than one item, the right-side info-card panel will open where you can select from the list of items.

6. Run Time Fields in Reports

Thus far, if you wanted to create a report with certain filters, those filters would need to be defined in advance for each report before running them. From now on, you can select to have any of your filters parameters be determined at run time.

For example, if I am running one report "All Tasks Off-Track" and a separate report "All Tasks At-Risk", now I can just create one report called "All Tasks with a Certain Status" and decide at run time which Status I want to see. To enable this feature, all you need to do is check the run-time box near the filter you want to be determined at run time.

7. Highlight Changes in Current Project View

During the planning phase of projects often we want to test various scenarios of task allocations, durations, dates or dependencies and see how certain changes impact the overall project. With the all-new ‘Highlight Changes" feature once making a change to the project, if your change impacts other cells they will all be highlighted with the light blue background. If you're fine with the changes, simply click on ‘Clear highlight' and continue updating your project. If not, simply restore the cell value you had changed originally. To use this feature be sure to have the ‘Highlight Changes' option checked.

8. New Super User Filter on Home

Super users wanting to see projects where they have no role can now see them via the additional filter added to your dashboard/Home page. Only Super Users will have this option on their Home page. Other users will not have this option.

9. New Time Tracking & Billing Summary Reports

As part of our ongoing effort to provide a turn-key solution for professional services organizations or any other organizations needing to track resources' time and bill customers accordingly, we have enhanced the time tracking feature by adding several of the following reports (Due to space limitations, not all report fields are displayed in the screenshots below):

Resource Summary Report - Includes all work items and total hours reported by a specific user in the selected timeframe, including cost, billing and profitability information.

Customer Summary Report- Includes the Cost, Billing and Profitability summary for a customer across all projects. Includes resources and rates used to calculate totals.

Project Summary Report - Includes all hours reported by all users for a specific project, including cost, billing and profitability information.

To learn more about this feature visit the related Help page: https://app.clarizen.com/Clarizen/Help/en-us/Time_Tracking/Timesheet_Reports.htm

10. Personalized Language

From now on you can use different languages across your Clarizen organization. For example, even if the Organization setting is set to English, an individual user can set his/her language to Japanese or Chinese in the ‘My Profile' screen. Additional languages will be released soon, including German.

Still missing that one key feature you are anxious to see in Clarizen? Contact us via email!

Read more.....

Just two weeks after releasing Clarizen 2.5, a major release featuring time tracking, customer billing and other new features, the fully loaded version, Clarizen 2.5G, with the long awaited Clarizen Gantt Chart, is now live.

1. Gantt Chart View

To view the Gantt Chart, click on the Gantt icon on the top right corner in the Current Project view:

2. Alert Notifications on Dependant Work Items

Also included in 2.5G are instant Alert notifications to members who are awaiting for dependant work items to be completed so that they can start working on their succeeding work items. For example, if Task 3 is dependant on Task 1 and Task 2 (FTS- Finish to Start), only once both Task 1 and 2 are completed will the assigned team members (Resources, Reviewers and Managers) be notified via email that they can start working on Task 3. Keep in mind that this is only an email notification and does not trigger an activation of Task 3.

The Admin must enable this feature which by default is disabled. Enabling of the related setting is in Admin->System Settings->Alerts & Highlights

Sample email alert for item ready to be worked on:

3. Reporting Overtime Hours

Now you can also report overtime hours in timesheets. Simply click on the 'Duplicate' button and a duplicate task will be created for a task that has also overtime hours that need to be reported.

When entering hours, simply check the 'Overtime' box for the one that relates to overtime hours.

Overtime hours are illustrated via the blue exclamation mark just right of the hours. 

4. Managers in Templates

Clarizen templates have been further enhanced with the ability to also choose between using the Managers stored with the original template or update the current user to become the Manager on all of the new project's items.

5. Custom Session Timeout

In response to popular demand, we now allow the Admin to set the organization session timeout. This will apply to all users and the session will remain open for the set period so long as the browser is not closed. To change the default 1 hour session, goto: Admin->System Setting->Organizations, Users, Licenses->Session Timeout

6. Disable Resources from Creating Sub-tasks

Thus far, resources were able to break down their tasks to sub-tasks. Now you can block this by checking the related box in Admin->System Setting->Organizations, Users, Licenses->Allow resources to add work items

What's Next?

Even though the year is coming to the end very soon, we have in store many new usability enhancements, such as saved filters, new features, such as personalized calendars, and new reports for time tracking and reporting all included in releases scheduled to be available still in 2008!

Read more.....

Clarizen 2.5 augments our existing project management solution with a turn-key solution for services organizations needing to also track hourly resources and bill the respective customers.

From now on you can use Clarizen from the initial point of planning and budgeting through executing, collaborating, tracking and finally billing customers, paying hourly resources and creating customizable reports.

With a single point solution to manage all these fundamental aspects of projects for professional services organizations, users no longer need to look outside for third party vendors rather it's all in ONE place.

Beyond timesheets and customer billing, Clarizen 2.5 includes additional powerful features such as: Super User providing edit and view permissions to all projects; Financial User giving access to financial data in the Clarizen organization; ‘Shortcuts' where users can have a work item (task, milestone, project) from one project impact a completely separate project without needing to bring them under one project and ‘ALAP' (As Late As Possible) allowing you to plan your project backwards from the Due Date so that you can factor how late you can start working on a project that.

Continue reading for a more detailed description of the new features unveiled with Clarizen 2.5.

1. Time Tracking (Timesheets & Approvals)

Time Tracking is used to keep track of the effort spent on your projects. It enables each resource to report the effort (in hours) invested on a certain work item at a specific date.

Once reported this data can be used for multiple purposes, e.g. calculating the monthly working hours of employees, seeing who's overloaded and who's underutilized, or calculating the total effort invested on certain project. (See Time Tracking related reports for more information).

Clarizen uses the data collected (i.e. hours reported) to perform various useful reports, based on:

- Cost & Billing rates - if you set the rates you use to calculate your own costs or the rates you use to charge for your projects, Clarizen will produce reports such as calculating the amount due by customers.

- Customers associated with the projects- It is possible to associate one or more customers to a project. Doing so will enable you to produce reports showing the amounts due per customer.

2. Job Titles & Rates

The Job Titles page enables the Clarizen administrator to create classification of particular jobs performed in the company. Users with Financial or Super user permissions are also allowed to create new Job Titles. Users with Financial permissions can set rates for Job Titles.

Clarizen calculations incorporate two types of rates:

• Cost rate - defines how much 1 hour of working resource costs the company
• Billing rate - defines the price paid to the company (by the customer) for 1 hour of working resource regular (standard) and, if needed, overtime rates can be defined for each of the two rate types.

Billing rates are used for calculations of the project prices based on the timesheet reports.

It is also possible to set project-specific Job Title rates and even modify rates for a specific work item within a project.

With all the new information available in your Clarizen account, including hours reported, rates paid out or billed and customers assigned to any given project, you will now be able to create extremely informative reports. This includes reports for billing, paying resources and being able to keep track of info as it pertains for any given project, customer, resource or timeframe.

3. Customer Management

Clarizen allows users to associate projects with one or more customers so that customer-centric projects, such as service projects, build-to-order projects, build-to-customer and others are linked to their respective customer(s).
The Customers page is where the Clarizen administrator can manage the list of the organization’s customers.

4. Shortcuts

A shortcut is a method to connect unrelated projects (i.e. projects with no hierarchical relation).

A shortcut enables project managers to add a work items from other projects. Once added, it is possible to create dependencies to these work items. Shortcuts will affect the project’s progress as if they were an integral part of it.

5. ALAP

A new project scheduling option where if a project is set to be scheduled from the Due date, Clarizen schedules all work items added directly under the project to finish on the project Due date.  In the same manner, work items added under another work items will by default finish on the Due date of the parent item. The Start date of the work items will be calculated based on its Due date and Duration. The project Start date will be calculated based on the earliest task's Start date.

 

6. Super User & Financial Permissions

A Super User permission grants the user unlimited permissions in all projects within the organization without needing to assign this user to them.
Money related data such as, user rates, budget calculations and total amounts due by customers can be viewed by users with Financial Permissions. Read more.....

Clarizen 2.1 is out!

Highlights of this major release include:

• Full support of Firefox 2.X
• Email users can now also submit a Note with their progress update
• Fully loaded Reporting capabilities
• Advanced filtering across the different grids
• Budget calculations with hourly user rates
• Critical path indicator and Importance field
• Lead/Lag time enabled for dependencies

 

See below a detailed list of new and enhanced features along with related screenshots.

1. Firefox 2.x is now fully supported.
2. Reports
   • Now you can generate html-based reports directly within Clarizen via the Reports tab.
   • Pre-defined reports such as "My tasks this week" or "All tasks on a critical path managed by me" are provided by default along with many other commonly used reports.
   • You can create customized private or public reports and save them to your available reports.
   
   
   
   
    
3. Work Items View
   Users can now see all Tasks, Milestones and Projects (across all projects) in one centralized view and apply various filters to it.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Advanced Filtering
   On every page in the application (Apart from the Current Project page) you can filter every column according to its data type. For example, for Start Date, you can show ‘all tasks starting today', or for % Completed, show ‘all work items that are less than 50%'.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Advanced Budget Calculations with User Hourly Rates
   It is now possible to set an hourly rate per user/resource or use the default organization-wide hourly rate. Clarizen will automatically calculate the Planned Budget according to assigned resources' rates and re-quired work. For example, a user with a $100 hourly rate, assigned a 1 day task (8-hour work day), will set the Planned Budget to $800. Similarly, the Actual Budget will be calculated taking into account the re-ported % Completed.
   Organizations can select to enable/disable the rate-based budget calculations in the System Settings.
   
   
   
   
   
6. Progress Email with Notes
   When selecting to manually update completion from a Progress Report sent by mail, the user can add a note that would be added as a new Note in the respective task in Clarizen.
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. Actual & Remaining Effort Enhanced
   It is now possible to set Actual & Remaining efforts in hours, days, weeks and months.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Creating Sub-Project from Template
   Within the Current Project page, users can create a new child project from a template.
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. Critical Path Indicator
   A new view has been added to the system called ‘Scheduling' that includes an indicator if the work item is on the critical path.
   
   
   
   
   
10. Importance and Priority Fields
    Each task can be assigned a level of Importance (Critical, High, Normal and Low) and with a Priority value (numeric value) that is available via the Properties of the task.
    To assign a Priority, select the Properties option from the context menu of the task.
    
    
    
    
    
    
11. Personalized Welcome Page
    When first signing into Clarizen new users are greeted with a welcome page that is tailored to the role of the user accessing the solution for the first time, including:
    1. A page for Administrators with useful information on adding users, modifying the organization settings, turning on the budget functionality and more.
    2. A page for a Regular User with no assignments.
    3. A page for a Regular User who is already assigned some work items.
    4. A page for External Users (with or without assignments) with an explanation of the External User permissions.
    The welcome page is also accessible under the ‘More' tab should one want to revisit it after signing up.
    
    
12. External User Indicator on Resource Page
    A Boolean column (i.e. True/False) was added to the Resources page and to the User Management tab in the Admin page to indicate if a user is External.
    
    
13. Multi-Select Enhanced
    New functionality was added to support multi-select actions: Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Mark as Read/Unread and Change Type.
    
    
    
    
    
14. Lead/Lag Time added to Dependencies
    You can now add a lag or lead time (set a slack) to a dependency. Use a negative value to determine an overlap or a positive value to set a gap.
    
    
    
    
    
15. 'Updating' Message Revamped
    The auto save message was modified to an "Updating..." message at the bottom of the screen and optimized to take advantage of user's idle moments to run the updated calculations rather than require the user to wait.
    
    
    
    
    
16. Unique Display Name
    A user's Display Name has to be unique in the organization. By default the Display Name is set as the user's first name.
    
    
17. Hyperlinks Enabled in Non-editable Grids
    In non-editable grids, such as Search and Report results, work items are clickable so that when you click a work item it will open it in the Current Project page.

Stay tuned for our next major release scheduled for end of Q3 this year that will include plug-ins to MS Outlook and various web-based solutions using Clarizen's SOA platform.

Still missing something? Have feedback for us? We want to know. Contact us via email.

Read more.....

As we close in on the final stretch of the release of Clarizen 2.1 next month (mid June), I am now able to share with you some more details as well as screenshots of some of the exciting new features and enhancements to be unveiled (...partial list).

1. Note Submission with Email Reporting
   Thus far, users submitting their progress via email were limited to sending only their progress. With 2.1 users will be able to include text which will appear as a new Note in the respective task and project.  
   
   
   
2. Advanced HTML-based Reporting
   On top of the reporting that can be accomplished now by exporting your data to Excel files, Clarizen 2.1 will include an all new html-based reporting tool. From now on you can simply access popular reports or customize your own reports.
   
   
   
3. Importance and Critical Path Indicators
   You asked, and we delivered! Users have been asking us to allow them to highlight which fields are more important than others and to easily identify which work items are on the critical paths of their projects. With Clarizen 2.1 you will be able to mark an item's Importance and see if it is on the Critical Path throughout the different views.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Resource Rate and Advanced Budget Calculations
   Just as popular, you have been asking to be able to calculate in more advanced budget data. With Clarizen 2.1 you can add resource hourly rates and view the overall caculation of rates and hours worked so that your budget will reflect a more comprehensive view. You can assign rates per each resource or apply an org-wide rate. Calculations will be reflected in the Budget columns and configured in the System Settings.
   
   
   

Stay tuned for more to come with Clarizen 2.1 and keep providing us with your feedback as we listen AND respond.

Click to read Part l, Clarizen 2.1.

Read more.....

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

Read more.....

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.

By the way, notice the term 'Work Plan' that has been introduced with this release, replacing 'WBS' or 'Work Breakdown Structure" as part of Clarizen's ongoing effort to appeal to all Project Team members not only professional project managers.

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.

Read more.....