Out of curiosity I took a look at the account statistics for some ProWorkflow accounts and was amazed at the level of work being put through our project management software!
The anonymous accounts below (one per line) were screen grabs from just a page or two of the accounts list and show some really heavy use.
We’re really happy that people are adopting the software and using it well. We’re often told about the improvement ProWorkflow makes to businesses and love to hear stories of how it’s going. Check out the testimonials!
Interesting to compare the stats anyway!
As a new employee to ProWorkflow(Project management software), one of my first jobs has been to go through the Help Center and follow all the articles and ‘Getting Started Guides’ to check that they did indeed get me started and to see how user friendly it was to a new user.
It’s been a really great exercise and has already helped us make some improvements including making articles a little clearer and easier to find as well as tweaking the structure to mirror the main app.
The key thing I discovered is how very important it is to use the ‘Setup Assistant’ and follow the ‘Make it yours’ and ‘Let’s get started’ steps.
I think many people bypass these because they want to get stuck in straight away but I found that just following those simple few steps really helped ease me into ProWorkflow and gave me a good basic insight into the layout and functions.
The benefit of using the Setup Assistant is that it quickly covers a lot of the key settings in ProWorkflow, like adjusting Currency, Time and Date and using the Look ‘N’ Feel settings to customise the interface for your company, after all not everyone likes orange as much as we do!
After completing the Setup Assistant I suggest heading to the Help Center to check out the Admin Guide which walks through creating your first project and has links to some great articles on Tracking Time, adding Files & Messages and exploring some of the most useful features in ProWorkflow.
Once you’ve done that, you should have a pretty good grasp of ProWorkflow and your next step is probably to get some of your team using the solution.
The two best tips I can give here are to get them to watch the Introduction video and to make sure you check their permissions and remove any features they don’t need so they get a streamlined view of the system.
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So, in short, my top tips:
Don’t skip over the Setup Assistant and Videos! – they may take a few minutes, but they will save you time later!
Add the Help Center to your favourites; it’s a great resource for you and your team.
If you get stuck then get in touch, we’re always happy to help and the support team here are fantastic.
If you’re reading this after signing up and have lost the Setup Assistant then you can find it in the Administration section.
- Aimee
Our recent customer survey had a great response and we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to take part -we had some really thoughtful and interesting replies.
If you didn’t get time to reply then I do encourage you to make your suggestions known via our feedback page because we use this to gauge interest in a particular feature or functionality. With so many diverse customers we love to get your suggestions, ideas, wishes and dreams (as well as the occasional gripe). Every day we receive the ‘what about’ and ‘why not’ questions and it’s important to us that you know we do read, listen and respond to your ideas, even if we can’t act on all of them.
We were really pleased to see that the most common feature and improvement suggestions are for areas that we are already working on. We won’t ruin all of the surprises we have in store for you but the next few months will bring enhanced usability, improved scheduling and easier timesheet entry as well as huge speed improvements due to a big investment in new infrastructure.
One of the questions we asked related to the use of mobile devices and for the time being, Apple dominates our customer base. We were a bit surprised that Android numbers were so low because we have many more requests for Android rather than Blackberry compatibility. Again, it would be great to hear from people on both sides as well our iPhone/iPad devotees.
As a direct result of these figures we’re looking into creating a cross-platform mobile version of ProWorkflow that will work on nearly any mobile device, we’ve had terrific feedback on our iPhone app and we want to build on that even further so that ProWorkflow really is a platform you can use anywhere, anytime on anything!
Another result we found was that where we’re focusing our next round of development is where our customers are pointing us also – it’s great to know that what we’re hearing is what you’re after! Kudos to the classic comment that was full of great ideas:
“Anyway, great product! I guess i’m just being a brat and I want more things under one roof
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So expect lots of love for the speed and usability and there are some exciting developments on the scheduling front…
– not too far past the horizon!
Our recent iCal update has been immensely popular and we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive response!
There are two features that we’ve had several requests for:
1) Google Calendar compatibility – Google uses the same ‘bot’ to fetch ics files as it uses for trawling the internet. This is causing an issue because we prevent Google from indexing our account servers (so your subscription doesn’t appear in Google search results). However, this prevents Google Calendar from downloading the ics files. We are awaiting a response from Google to try to find a fix for this issue.
2) Syncing multiple projects using one ics file – Currently we generate one ics file for each project, we’re monitoring load closely before we decide whether to allow a single ics file per client or for all projects.
Now for an awesome tip!
For any customers who need either of these features immediately, you can use Yahoo Pipes to create an ics feed that can consolidate multiple ics files and will also work with Google Calendar.
We have recorded a short video below that explains the process for using Yahoo pipes to generate an ics file that combines two project feeds.
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iCal Integration Guide!
http://www.screencast.com/t/MmQ3ZWUwMjk
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iCal Integration Guide!
http://www.screencast.com/t/NGFiMWU2ZWU
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Check out the above video to learn how to setup and use the iCal integration. It’s fairly easy, but we’re here to help if needed!
We have just released ProWorkflow’s long awaited iCal integration! This means you will be able to view your projects, tasks and events from ProWorkflow on your calendar in Outlook, iCal, iPhone and more Actually, you can use pretty much any calendar that uses the .ics calendar format!
How does it work?
Step 1. Enable the iCal integration
All you do is go to your ‘HOME > Personal Settings’ popup (accessed from the dashboard when you login) and in the popup, scroll down to the ‘DEFAULT CALENDAR SETTINGS’ section.
As shown below, you can enable the iCal integration for Project Tasks, General Tasks or Events (or all). Just tick what you need!
Note: If choosing ‘Events’, you can subscribe to the calendar from the link that will appear below when you tick the ‘Events’ option.
Step 2. Subscribe to a Project
Click the ‘Subscribe’ link on a project to subscribe to the project’s calendar items. This will make the project calendar’s address (URL to .ics file) appear. Click this to finish subscribing to the project.
The image below shows the project calendar address. click this and the
Step 3. Select the calendar application
You should see a popup window showing a list of your available calendar applications (iCal, Outlook etc). Select your preferred calendar app and the items should be added to the calendar. As an example, below I used my Outlook calendar.
And here’s the Project’s items in the calendar!
Note: Adding Events
Another place you can subscribe to the Events calendar is from the Calendar page in ProWorkflow. All you nee to do is click the link and a green section will appear showing the calendar address. Click this and follow the same process as above.
And here are the events showing in the Outlook calendar.
If you have any questions, please feel welcome to contact us.
Update: We aware of an issue affecting Google Calendar users relating to robots.txt file. We are waiting on a response from Google on this issue which stems from the fact that they use the same search bot for ics files as for their main search algorithm. This means that working with Google Calendar currently would mean having all of your projects and tasks potentially indexed on Google (obviously not a good thing!).
The team managed to push out another update over the weekend. Here’s the quick list of the main items in the update 
- PRO/ADV: iCal Integration!!! (Will be explained in separate post)
- PRO: End dates and times on events.
- PRO: ‘Add File’ issue in task popup in IE resolved.
- ADV: New setting allowing Staff to view ‘ALL messages’ on a project.
- ADV: Project Archive has extended search fields and filters.
- QuickBooks: now showing an error on page where there is a sync issue. This is to assist with troubleshooting various QB versions.
- Misc other bugs and tweaks
File Space Manager
You can now manage and set file space per team. We’ve improved this process so it’s easier to keep your file usage under control.
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Roles
We have allowed you to set default Start Page and View for each ‘Role’. This means that all users with a particular role, (ie: Designers) can be easily made to all have the same Start page, (ie: Projects Page)
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My Project Requests
The ‘My Active Projects’ and ‘My Pending Project Requests’ sections now have their own section on the new ‘PROJECTS Manager > My Projects’ page. These are all the projects you have requested internally that you are essentially the ‘Client’ of.
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Auto-Numbering for Projects
- We’ve added a new variable {team} for simple Auto-Numbering.
({team} = the team that is doing the Project) - We’ve added an advanced Auto-Numbering option that lets you set different auto-number prefixes and individual numbering (for each team). Currently used by some of our custom customers, we have brought this through into ADV as the larger groups may find this useful for reporting and identifying different Project types.
