Plan your projects in a couple of minutes: project schedule views updated!

We've improved our project schedule page to make it more flexible. In our new release, you can easily expand and collapse project timeline activities to display/hide their sub-activities. The timeline also has two new view options: Show workload and Show dates.

The previous Planzone version showed only the workload view with allocated hours and percent of activity completion. The new date view shows start and finish dates. Project managers can edit these activity dates directly in the timeline grid: a good time-saving feature especially during the project creation process. The view option can be quickly changed using a link at the top of the timeline, so you can switch from one view mode to the other with just one click.

Other improvements include the ability to create sub-activities from activity detail pages. Users can also view more details about allocations, as allocations for sub-activities are now calculated independently of the parent activity.

More efficient communication with your team (coming up with the Planzone update, 13th Nov 2008)

We want to let you know about what's new in the latest Planzone release scheduled for this week. The biggest news concerns improvements in project communication and collaboration.  The previous Note feature has been renamed "Discussions", and has been made more interactive to accommodate your collaboration needs. 
A discussion is attached to a specific Planzone element such as a to-do, activity, milestone, document or entire project. Team members can create a new discussion subject around one of these elements or reply to an existing discussion subject. This gives the whole team a tool for more relevant and faster decision-making as team members can quickly communicate on specific issues or topics related to a project element.  Discussion comments have the option of being sent via email to extend communication outside of Planzone. 

A new tab which aggregates all your Planzone discussions is now available in your personal workspace under Home. Here you can read and reply to all on-going discussions on projects where you are a team member. In the discussion list you'll see the discussion subject, how many comments there are in it and who replied last.  Clicking on a discussion subject will open it to display all comments and give you the option to add a new one. 

You'll also find a new "Comment" shortcut at the bottom of the Planzone navigator.  Clicking on the icon will allow you to quickly create a new discussion subject on the projects where you are a team member.

Planzone.com updated: A new design for features overview

We upgraded the website www.planzone.com with a new homepage for two weeks now. The main purpose is to introduce Planzone features faster than before, thanks to a large animated banner. We redesigned side blocks and also implemented a RSS feed importing latest articles from the blog.

Techcrunch FR: Planzone review

"Planzone: the ultimate business collaboration platform?" This is the question asked by Techcrunch FR today, following the release of the Web Worker Daily article. Read this article by clicking here.

Web Worker Daily: Planzone test

Planzone was introduced yesterday by the blog Web Worker Daily (GigaOM). The author dedicated to us a globally positive article. Find her opinion about Planzone here.

Do you want to jump start new project planning? Start using project templates!

Wouldn’t you rather save time by using a project model someone else has already set up for you?
When you’re managing your projects in Planzone, you don’t have to worry about spending time designing and planning your projects from scratch. A wealth of project experience from the whole Planzone community is there to take you instantly several steps forward. With Planzone, you can benefit from using the Planzone community template database to quickly create and configure your specific project plans.

Project templates can be used in three different ways:

> Create your projects using a public project template

> Import project templates from the public templates database and modify them to create your own project template database

> Share your project templates with others in the Planzone community

Project templates can be kept private and be used exclusively by your team members on your Planzone. They can also be copied to a public database where the whole Planzone community can access and use them.

You should keep in mind some of the advantages it can provide to your company:

• Advertise your brand name on an expanding web 2.0 tool

• Publicize your company’s capabilities  by clearly defining your fields of expertise and project management methods

• Promote your company by inserting a link to your website or company information in your publically available project templates

We recently implemented some great new enhancements around project templates that allow you to:

• Create a project template from an existing project

• Include project documents as part of a template

These new features allow you to immediately reapply your best practices by re-using project documents, without having to re-enter task lists, milestones or activities.

Finally, we also revised our “get started with Planzone” template to be easier to use and we added 4 other new general public templates: sales event planning, email campaign, website launch, new product launch plan.

New Planzone version: User Interface improvements

Besides the major evolvement of the document page, we have designed some new features to make the user experience smoother, and the use comfort better for first-time users.

> Get started help

We now provide you some simple steps at the top of every page to make using features on that page as easy and efficient as possible. The “Get Started Help” section shows you all of these essential Planzone usage tips. And, as soon as you get more skilled with Planzone navigation and usage you can hide the Getting Started Help section to give you more workspace.

       > A redesigned home page

The new Planzone home page provides you an instant overview about what’s important in your projects. This displays your 5 upcoming to-dos, your 7 day calendar, and your 5 latest alerts. The alert list now has links directly pointing to items or events that triggered the alert, including projects, to-dos, documents, notes etc.
The overall layout was also improved to help you quickly read what you need to know in one glance.

       > Shortcuts

As Planzone is designed as a time-saving tool, we added shortcuts icons to create to-dos and send email by selecting that icon from the Planzone navigator.  This allows you to  now create a project to-do and assign it to a team member or send email from any page in your workspace . Additional shortcut icons will be added over the coming weeks.

Planzone new version: A smarter document sharing space

With this new release, you will see some major changes on your document sharing space. These changes were designed by our development staff to make it easier for your project team to collaborate and exchange essential documents.

There are three key feature enhancements :

• Versioning

You can easily upload the latest version of a document. Once this version is uploaded, it is designated the “current version”. Any previous versions are automatically given a version number and stored in document history.  Previous document versions can still be accessed if needed.  Should you need storage space or wish to simplify list of previous versions, older document versions can be deleted. 

• Access rights management by folder

When you manage a large number of documents, retrieving the right one with a click is always a major advantage. Just like on any standard PC, you can now archive your documents into folders in Planzone. You can limit access to a folder to a specific sub-group of users from your project team.  For instance, a “client” folder may contain documents that are visible by everybody on the project team.  The “internal staff” folder will only be visible by Planzoners within your own company.

• Multi-criteria sorting using tags

By assigning tags (or keywords) to documents, you can easily find and classify them into multiple categories. For example, when uploading a logo file, you can link it to keywords like logo, picture or brand name. In a document list, clicking on a tag will display only the documents with this tag.

Planzone new version: groups

   
Your feedback is highly valuable to us.  One of the requests we got from Planzone customers was to create groups of users.  With this new release, we’ve done just that. ! Simply create groups that will appear in your team member list. You can create groups named “partner”, “customer” and “colleagues” and then use these groups to quickly assign to-dos activities, send email or grant access rights to a document folder.  Assigning a to-do or an activity to multiple users is now the matter of a single click.
Definitely an efficient time-saving feature!

New features for tomorrow's release

Here is the exhaustive improvements list for the new Planzone version:

• Home page (personal dashboard: up to 5 late/upcoming to-dos, 7-day calendar, up to 5 most recent alerts)
• Shortcuts (send an e-mail and create a to-do without interrupting the current work)
• Quick start advices on each page (explain the most important features to first-time users)
• Document versioning (to be able to upload new versions of a document and keep a history of the previous versions)
• Document folders (to organize project documents and restrict user access rights on documents)
• Document tags (to be able to search documents by tags)
• Create a template from a project
• Groups in project team (to be able to assign multiple users to a to-do or activity in one click)
• Batch alert e-mails (to receive only 1 e-mail grouping several alerts, with configurable frequency)
• Many UI enhancements (user selector, dialog boxes, links in My Alerts...)

These major changes are completed with other fixes, and minor changes:

• Personalized invitation e-mails (the sender is now the inviting user)
• Personalized alert/summary e-mails (the name of the Planzone is now in the sender’s field)
• Manage documents in templates
• Sorting ability in My To-dos
• Ability to create a new Planzone via the PZ navigator
• Fixed issues in wiki page formatting
• Fixed portability issues (better compatibility with Firefox 3, Safari and even Google Chrome beta)
• A new weekly calendars for arab and middle-east countries (week-ends on Thursday-Friday, or Friday-Saturday)