Enterprise Software Blog

Overview:

Project management software aims to help organize teamwork. Web-based project management services are inexpensive and easy to set up. They are well-suited for coordinating a mobile or geographically dispersed team. Each team member just needs access to the Internet to participate in project planning.

Wrike offers a more full-featured Web-based project management service. It bridges the gap between email, project management tools and collaboration tools. The service moved out of beta test and into public release in June. The latest update features a TimeLine view, which displays Gantt charts.

Features:

• Email Integration: Wrike allows you to create tasks and track their progress via e-mail. Simply add wrike@wrike.com to the e-mail recipients, and the system creates a task in your personal workspace on the Web. Add the due date into the subject of these e-mails, and wrike.com will build a Gantt chart for you.
• Wrike is very flexible software. It allows you to build multi-level folder/subfolder hierarchies. A folder in Wrike unites tasks that revolve around a common topic or activity. A folder may represent a project, product, department, branch, office, feature, person, event, etc. Each folder can consist of a hierarchy of subfolders and tasks, so your plan is organized logically. You can overlap your hierarchies and include an item or a folder in many folders. So you can slice a project by departments, steps or vendors and still keep it as one interconnected plan for people who have full visibility into the project.
• No installation is required because Wrike is a Software as a Serice(Saas) based agile tool for Project Management. You can use it 30 days free trial version. Then it starts from $3.99 per user per month. Wrike’s 15-user account ($49 per month) is the most popular paid plan. It supports an unlimited number of tasks, provides up to 3GB of storage, and adds SSL encryption for data security. Larger plans for up to 100 users are also available
• Timeline: A timeline (simplified Gantt Chart) gives managers the big picture of parallel projects, helps track the work load of team members and allows managers to create an elegantly designed outline of plans and projects. All these management tasks are a huge challenge when using other online project management and collaboration tools.
• Reports: In Wrike, you can quickly build reports and see who is doing what. You do this by combining your own categories like “Product launch” with standard ones like “Overdue” or “Assigned to John.” You can also visualize your reports with a timeline.
• Interface: User interface is clean and intuitive. Most of key features are described in welcome video screen just after first sign in.
• Universal membership only need one login no matter how many client accounts.

Disadvantages:

• You must work with information online: There is no PC client to let you synchronize and work with data offline. Offline use is currently limited to reviewing printouts that you created while logged in to the service.
• No way to easily define the order of tasks and groups.
• Odd naming conventions and little documentation are confusing
• Wrike doesn’t have color&logo customization as far as I am aware.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think Wrike is a really great web 2.0 based tool in online project management space. Take advantage of useful collaboration feature of Wrike and discover the new level of management and planning of your business and personal life. It’s got a really great foundation but may have some flaws. It is definitely worth checking out.

Source: PC World

Filed under Enterprise Services, Software As A Service | Tags: Agile Method, Gnatt Chart, Project Management Tool, Project management tools, Report, SaaS, Timeline, UI, Web 2.0, Wrike | 4 Comments