Quick Tip – update your Look’n’Feel settings

It’s always nice to brand your account to represent your own organization, if you pop along to ADMINISTRATION > Look’nFeel Settings let’s make some changes…

We’re going to start with our basic orange ProWorkflow theme and transform it into my chosen theme of The Maw.   So this is our starting point here:

My first step is to change my Heading Settings, I’ll upload my new logo, change the URL that it links to and my Heading Title – don’t forget to hit UPDATE

Then I’ll change the color scheme, there’s a range of default color schemes that you can chose from but let’s go a step further and work this through

It’s a good idea to open the Knowledge Base here and use the info in here for guidance. In the Look’n’Feel Settings page there’s a handy image that explains which color each field relates to so I recommend using this as a guide. All you need to do is enter the hex number in the relevant fields, I like to use a tool to get a good match (I’m no designer type so I’ve grabbed an app called Color Detector that does the job with no fuss).

If I’m not sure how this is working out then I just UPDATE as I go along, I can always reset back to the default if it looks wonky!

Anyway check out the results, 5 minutes later I’ve a completely rebranded account and while The Maw may not be your cup of tea you can certainly see how effective this can be:

Whadyreckon?

We’ve finished development and testing on a change to Invoices we’ll be rolling out to all customer accounts shortly.

Previously when you created an invoice it then linked to that company and let you set a contact you could then change the company name that displays on the invoice, this was fine in the past, but now that we link things like the advanced invoice search to specific companies, whenever you changed the company name on the invoice it broke the link with the company (because of course it was called something different).

There was also an issue where if you created an invoice for a specific company and wanted to duplicate it for another company you couldn’t, because there was no way to assign an invoice to a different company once it had been created.

The new change means when creating or editing an invoice or quote you have four options

• An existing Company Only – Assign the invoice/quote to a company that already exists in your contacts
• An existing Company & Contact – Assign the invoice/quote to a contact and a company that already exists in your contacts
• A New Contact for an existing Company – You select a company that already exists in your contacts, and you can enter information to create a contact
• A New Company & Contact – You can enter in the information to create a new contact at a new company

So now you can edit an invoice and assign it to another company/contact and have the address information update on the invoice for you for example.

While we’ve talked about downloading the tracker including the updates we have been making on it, we have never specifically posted the process you would use to actually install and use the application so I’m going to do it now.

Get Adobe Air

The Time Tracker is built in Adobe AIR so you’ll need to install that on your computer before you can install the Time Tracker.

You can grab Adobe AIR from the Adobe website here - http://get.adobe.com/air/ – Just click the big “Download now” button, it should automatically detect your operating system, if it hasn’t correctly then just click the “Different operating system?” link.

The Adobe Air Download Link

Double click the downloaded file file then agree to the terms of use and it will install.

Get the Time Tracker

You can download our time tracker on the time tracker page of our website here - http://www.proworkflow.com/PWF_PLUG_time_tracker.cfm – simply download the time tracker file in “Step 2″ on the right-hand side of the page, once you’ve downloaded the file double-click it to install.

Open and configure the Time Tracker

After installing the time tracker it will place a shortcut on your desktop, double-click the shortcut to open it, if this is the first time you’ve installed the time tracker it will automatically switch over to the settings page, you can access settings using the “i” link top right of the time tracker if it doesn’t open for you.

Configure the Time Tracker

On the settings page enter your proworkflow account url and the username/password you use to log in, optionally you can change the sort order of the projects drop-down list in addition to the start view and whether you want to round time to 15 minute increments.

Configure the Time Tracker

When you click “Done” if you’ve change the username/password/url you will need to close the time tracker and then re-open it, click the X icon to close the time tracker.

Using the Time Tracker

When you first open the time tracker it will load your projects, once you select a project using the drop-down list it will load in the tasks for that project, you start tracking time by clicking the big play button. Once you stop the time tracker the tray will slide down and you can enter a note or change any of the time record details before submitting it to the server.

You can also manually submit time this way by expanding the tray, selecting a project and then task and manually entering an amount of time (instead of having the time tracker work out the time for you).

Auto-Updating

Whenever we release a new version you’ll see an “update” icon appear that you can click to have the time tracker automatically update for you.

Online-Only

You’ll need to be online so the time tracker can load in your projects & tasks as well as submit time records, the time tracker won’t work if you don’t have internet access.

Project Tasks Only

Currently the time tracker lets you select a project and then task, this means you can only track time on Project Tasks, not general tasks (because they aren’t in a project), this is a change we will make in the future.

There are a few places to change your alert settings within ProWorkflow; the header, the Project Details and in the Email Alerts Settings page.

• The header controls your own alert settings
• The Project Details page controls the alerts for that specific project
• The Email Alerts Settings are system wide

In the header:

Projects Manager > Project Details:

ADMINISTRATION > Email Alerts Settings:

Once you’ve got your head around this you’re usually away laughing – any worries drop a line to support and they’ll be happy to help

We decided recently that our homepage needed a facelift, so our trusty CEO/Designer Julian Stone got to work and iterated over the past couple of days to come up with what you see live now on our homepage.

Old Homepage

New Homepage

When we say to people “we’re the orange one” we certainly mean it!

Any thoughts or comments are much appreciated.

ProActive Software’s (ProWorkflow) CTO, Alan Barlow, has been hiding in a dark room for the past 5-6 years slogging it out on the ProWorkflow solution to keep the CEO happy!

Here’s a few random facts you’d never have known about Alan…

1. I’m a dedicated family bloke… partner of 15 years to Kim… dad to my two boys Kahn (16) and Jai (13) and daughter Kaya (9)
2. I’ve always had a close affinity with the sea… my father was navigating the seven seas at the tender age of 23 as a captain for Blue Star Line so it’s in the blood.
3. I started my love affair with surfing in 1984 and treasure every moment I get riding waves! I’m really enjoying seeing the joy and excitement my kids are getting from the beach and surfing too! See some of my surf trips on my surfing blog taranakisurfdaze.blogspot.com
4. I uprooted Kim and the kids and moved us all to New Plymouth at the start of 2008. After spending the previous 15 years in New Zealand’s “Big Smoke” – Auckland it was a huge change of pace. So far a good move, especially since New Plymouth is smack-bang in the middle of Surf Highway 45
5. You could say I’m “animal friendly” as I currently feed two teenagers, one pre-teen, two quarter-horses, a cat named Otis, a dog named Scooter (part-time) and last but not least, Dan our 3-legged goat.
6. My best mate is teaching me to play golf and after playing 26 holes I can boast… a straight 220m drive, a par, a couple of boogies and 2 lost balls… as well as some really wild swings!
7. My favourite advice to my kids is “What goes around comes around“
8. The night I met Kim, my partner of 15 years, she was walking into a nightclub and tripped on the doorstep breaking the high heel off one of her shoes. Luckily for Kim I was walking out at that precise moment and she fell into my arms! No bull!
9. Today my daughter and I mountain biked up the Te Henui Walkway and back… twice… first time was at 7am and second was after dinner at 6.30pm. After each ride we went surfing at Fitzroy beach
10. I used to drink WAAAAY too many coffees but I gave up…. now I drink WAAAAY too many cans of Red Bull

The ProWorkflow brand is based on a few different design concepts. Firstly, understand that yes we do actually love the color orange, however there’s a little more depth to our thinking than just color alone. The ProWorkflow brand consists of a few core elements:

• The Color Orange!
• The Logo Cogs
• The Term “Workflow”

Just as an orange is healthy for your body, the ProWorkflow solution is healthy for your business. The more you use it, the healthier your business will be. Think of ProWorkflow as ‘Vitamin C’ for your business.
The healthier you are, the more you can handle the world. The healthier your business is, the more load you can take on with your current resources, and the more profitable you will become!

Cogs are a universally accepted icon of productivity. The cogs logo was designed in the shape of New Zealand as this is the home country of the two founders, Julian Stone and Alan Barlow.

One of the more interesting points to the business is that whilst there is a great team, and all servers in the USA, the founders have worked remotely since the beginning and have met face to face no more than 10 days in 6 years. Julian is in the South Island of New Zealand and Alan is in the North Island.

The two grey cogs represent the founders two locations (North and South Island, New Zealand) and the orange cog represents the ProWorkflow software holding our team together and keeping us all running smooth!

Project Management Software and Workflow software come in all shapes and sizes. This isn’t a ‘One Size Fits All’ industry so every day we experience challenges and successes working with companies over the Internet to smooth their processes through our ProWorkflow software.
The name ‘ProWorkflow’ came from a very basic premise. From our own past and current businesses we learnt that ‘Professionals need Work to Flow‘ and that ‘Projects need Workflow‘. We developed ProWorkflow to meet these needs.