Posted by andrew on 31 August, 2008 09:18

Ready to review the newest File Storage? Check these new cool features: improved tree-view of your file storage, ability to  move files  or folders by drag-and-drop, track files versions, upload many files at once by easy-to-use drag-and-drop upload. Read more at Files, Multiple Drag & Drop Upload, Versioning.

Here is how it looks like now. Your comments and suggestions are welcomed as usual! Advanced permissions for files are now in beta-test - be ready to see this feature released soon!

  Posted by andrew on 01 July, 2008 07:36

Per numerous requests we are now making user interface more customizable.

On this screenshot you can see that any widget in the system can be collapsed or its heading-color can be changed. Just mouse over widget's heading and choose desired action. This option is available on global dashboard, project-dashboards and right-side panel with widgets.

The upcoming features include dragging widgets around dashboards, add new or own widgets, create separate dashboards.

Your comments and suggestions are highly appreciated!

  Posted by andrew on 01 July, 2008 07:15

Finally! We got brand-new super fast advanced search! Do you remember that typical knowledge worker actually looks for information in various storages 80% of work time? We hope your time expense on this will decrease dramatically.

You can now search for specific entities and only in selected project workspaces. The screenshots below represent typical search by keyword with further possibility to decide what to search and where. You can also mark to search only for the entities you created or specify a timeframe to search in.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

1. Ordinary Search

2. Expand to see Advanced Search options

  Posted by andrew on 09 June, 2008 16:11

Today we launched integration with Google Translate (beta) to automatically translate Comindwork user interface to 23 languages. You may switch to another language simply by selecting your native language in the right-top corner.

We started German, French, Italian and Spanish versions improvements per user-suggestions (yes, unfortunately automatic-translation is yet far from perfection). Please send your suggestions about translation of certain terms, tabs and sections for these languages. We really appreciate your contribution!

And here is the list of languages enabled:

1. Arabic
2. Bulgarian
3. Chinese
4. Czech
5. Croatian
6. Danish
7. Dutch
8. English
9. Finnish
10. French
11. German
12. Greek
13. Hindi
14. Italian
15. Japanese
16. Korean
17. Norwegian
18. Polish
19. Portuguese
20. Romanian
21. Russian
22. Spanish
23. Swedish

  Posted by andrew on 23 April, 2008 08:47

It is time to enjoy new features!

1. History of all activities in your project from the very project beginning. You may now easily review who did what, when, how much. The history visualizes creation of accounts and projects, invitations to project team, creation and modifying pages, cases, milestones. A history widget is placed onto your global dashboard and every project dashboard. Separate "history" tab is used for filtering activities, seeing what was done in the very past (even 1 year ago!)
2. Search is improved to become even faster and it provides more relevant search results. System utilizes famous Lucene algorithms to boost search relevancy and accurately index every content item created or edited by you. Thus it scans wiki pages, blogs, cases, milestones, accounts and projects to deliver the best match.
3. User Interface is now much faster and more user-friendly. Each item in the system now has toolbox buttons at the top and "more-actions" with list of other important actions which you can do with content.
4. New widgets are created: standard widgets for blog authors and monthly archive - just like in all the blogging software we all got used to.
5. From other features requested by you: it is now possible to just "disable" account without deleting it; user and company profiles now accept more personal information like web-site, instant messenger, fax; lists with cases and pages now show icons for restricted items; additional information is now visible in pop-overs; files UI is improved with extra features and mass-operations.

As usual we appreciate your feedback on Comindwork features to make it better and more useful for you. Thanks for your contributions.

History of Activities

Faster and More Relevant Search

User Interface

  Posted by andrew on 04 February, 2008 10:00

I'm proud to announce the newest updates very much requested by existing users. They are released on Feb1 and are now available in all paid and free accounts:

1. Time tracking features are improved. You can now associate time logs with your project cases; people can fill-in time-tracking reports in one page for all projects at once; time tracking reports per day or per person are refined.
2. Guiding tips and status messages are implemented to make Comindwork software more polite and comprehensive.
3. Special "paste from Word" feature is enabled in the Rich Editor for easier content copying from MS Word documents.
4. Open projects and blogs features are now more usable to involve public (e.g. people outside your team) into discussions about your projects and monitoring their progress.
5. Calendar widget is developed to have a quick access to all milestones in the past in the future just on one Milestones page.
6. Navigation breadcrumb is improved, time zones support is enhanced for easier collaboration of distributed teams across different continents.

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to improve Comindwork - please post them here or send a feedback with your thoughts.

Time Tracking

Guiding Tips and Status

Paste from Word

  Posted by andrew on 26 January, 2008 00:13

Last month we got huge amount of user feedback from you and now actively process and implement that. We released the following features and improvements today:

1. Features to delete cases and projects were voted by majority of users. These features are now available according to the user permissions and will demand annoying explicit confirmation for deletion from you.
2. Charts for weekly cases and pages progress are added in response to numerous requests to have that for project analysis.
3. Global navigation is made even simpler so you can browse your projects even faster. Global breadcrumbs are improved for easier project navigation.
4. Project goal widget is added to the project dashboard to enable the need #1 - keep entire team always aware about the project goal and have the ability to discuss the goal in blog.
5. Milestones UI is polished and refined per your feedback, you may plan your projects even better.
6. Various minor UI improvements are done as well.

Thank you for your interest, we are happy to get your feedback and suggestions!

Project Goal Widget

Project Deletion is Back!

  Posted by andrew on 18 December, 2007 17:58

Today when I reviewed the newest release of Comindwork with tons of features and widgets I suddenly recollected the times when we didn't have anything for knowledge work collaboration.

Well, I really can not imagine how we would work without any project management system today. I perfectly remember the times (although it was 5 years agooo) when the main tool was just Outlook and its folders with mess of unsorted emails, issues, suggestions, lost decisions and missed milestones.

I think the core needs of the project team didn't change over last 5 years, although most of today's project management systems provide much more than really desired. Here is my list of TOP-5 most demanding features for online project management:

• #5: Project blog - without this power of informal communication your project is just dead. This is excellent source for inspiration and place for sharing opinions and news in distributed team.
• #4: Email notifications, RSS - you should ensure that every team member is aware about the latest project changes and events. The information should be shared immediately and target people should have 100% guarantee not to miss any critical comments to their tasks or project requirements and schedule.
• #3: Bird view dashboard - "1-minute-dashboard to jump into the project context" - ability to review project state and progress during just 1 minute. This is critical for making immediate project decisions or making scheduled project audit.
• #2: Project wiki and tagging - the powerful "knowledge shaping". When we write requirements - we use wiki. We like co-editing wiki-documents as that is simple and powerful way to prepare really mature documentation, help-topics or tips for beginners.
• #1: And the 1st prize is... Case (issue) tracking - our biggest challenge was to handle hundreds of small issues which must be tracked until closure and 100% never ignored. In such a situation we create a new case and give the flag to the person who is responsible to resolve the issue. In 2007 year every team player resolved over 200-300 of such cases.

This was the 1st wave of features for Comindwork and we managed to establish basic management discipline and culture in our team. After that the main task was to make our knowledge work truly effective. I'll post my "TOP-5 knowledge work features" shortly!

Take care and have a great collaboration!
Sign up for Comindwork and let me know your opinion!

  Posted by andrew on 05 December, 2007 03:35

This is the first public post on our Comindwork vision. We cultivated this vision from 1999 year. In December 1999 (yes, 8 years ago!) we first made a commercial web site for client. BTW this site is still online - I invite you to check this :-)

Since that time we went through dot-com era, were the best on eLance, developed hundreds of dot-coms for clients, participated in dozens outsourcing initiatives. All 8 years we were building our own way to make knowledge products and provide knowledge services. I think we used all the possible alternatives for knowledge work during these years. We started from MS Outlook and MS Project in 2000 year, used ClearQuest, custom systems, then Basecamp, Salesforce, Kayako, Jira, various wikis, ticketing etc. We customized many products, tried to integrate those to work together, were frustrated from copy-pasting information, duplicating task lists, reports, loosing time on searching info somewhere...

We are now proud to open Comindwork to the public. Right now it is "just" a web system able to integrate different systems in one place. You may use wiki, blogs, ticketing, tasks, search, file storage, milestones, project budgets in one system and under one roof.

However our ambitions go much further and we are now working to make Rich UI to access all that variety of features, make them easy to learn and easy to use every day. Another goal is to implement our best practices in the shape of Comindwork tools and templates.

We want your feedback on how you see the ideal tool for knowledge workers team. More specifically - what you think is the most important for such sort of systems (and what is missing in other).

Thank you!