I’ve collected some great stories from customers telling me how WizeHive helps them collaborate and manage their workflow.  Read the Success Stories – they may give you ideas about how online collaboration and project management can help you become more efficient and more productive.

The Haas Foundation has staff and volunteers all over the world. Using 31 workspaces, the executive director can facilitate collaboration amongst departments and all hands, and keep her hand on the pulse of all activities going on across the board.  Zig Marketing collaborates internally with different departments creating various campaigns and then communicates with their clients via dedicated, secure workspaces. The president of Tech9, an IT consulting firm, monitors his customers using dedicated workspaces and then tracks internal tickets with another workspace. At a glance, he can see everything going on both internally and with his clients. A copywriter collaborates with his graphic designer in one workspace and communicates with his own personal clients in another, while he’s working on launching a collaborative website for Jazz lovers in yet another. The Engineering and Manufacturing team at Novitá Technologies was able to shorten the production cycle for automotive original equipment from a year to an impressive ten days, thanks to WizeHive, which  allowed them to put together a fully comprehensive plan and execute it without losing a detail.

TechCrunch50 and DreamIt Ventures are using WizeHive in another way. Using the Applicant Manager version of WizeHive, they streamlined and organized their entire application process from acceptance to collaborative ranking to scheduling candidate interviews, saving a huge amount of time in reviewing and organizing their applications.

I hope this gives you some ideas for your projects and groups… please continue reaching out (fernATwizehive dot com) and letting me know how WizeHive helps you, or maybe how we CAN help you if you haven’t tried it out for yourself yet.

We have a handful of very useful upgradings coming tonight.

First and foremost is one that I’ve wanted for a long time…which is the ability to turn emails on or off on a workspace by workspace basis. So if you have 10 workspaces and you want to get emails for 7 of them but not for 3 of them you can do that now.

You still determine what emails you get on an account by account basis from the “Manage Accounts” link…but now you can determine whether you want them for one or more workspaces in two places.  First, you can set it from “Manage Workspace” as you can see below:

Alternatively from inside “Manage Accounts” you can click on “Personal Profile” and then to “list all” by the email address field to manage notifications on/off for individual workspaces.

Another very highly useful upgrade is the ability to now add files to existing messages and tasks. In the past you were able to upload or add a file to a new message only.   Now, if you have an existing message and you edit it, you can add files or images after the fact.    This also works for tasks… So if you have an existing task and want to add a file after the fact you can do so.

In addition, last release we added the calendar to the “ALL” workspace for those of you that have more than one workspace so you can see all calendar entries in one place.     As you can imagine, for accounts with multiple busy workspaces (like mine) there are a ton of items on the calendar and previously you had to click on the item and bring up a box to view information about what that item was.   Now a tool tip comes up when you hover over that item:

We still have a ton of new features coming soon.  Keep watching for updates!

I’ve been talking to some of our customers lately. Wanting to get a feel for who is using WizeHive, what industries you’re in, and how WizeHive helps you solve a problem, I’ve started reaching out to some of you and have received great feedback from great people.

Talking to copywriters, engineers, marketers, CEOs, students, foundation directors, musicians, designers  and more, I’ve been learning firsthand why people need project management software, what makes them tick, and how WizeHive can make their lives easier and their workflow more productive. From simply assigning tasks to members of a team, to enabling file sharing and group collaboration amongst foundation volunteers around the globe, to tracking the status of open issues, I’m thrilled that WizeHive is providing a much-needed and efficient solution to communities and networks of colleagues, associates and friends worldwide.

One of my favorite stories was from a VP of Operations who actually projects his WizeHive workspace up on the wall of the conference room during his weekly production team meetings so everyone can review the project plan and task list together and provide feedback to keep the project on track successfully.  Talk about efficient collaboration!

I think I’ll share some of these stories with you over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned and find out how WizeHive is helping people Work Smarter and Work Faster.  And I’d love to hear from you too! Please drop me a line (fern@wizehive.com) and let me know how WizeHive helps you. Looking forward to chatting with you soon… thanks again!

The flow up updates has been slower this past fall as we spent time catching up and laying the foundation for our future growth.    That is about to change.  We have a slew of new features ready to go and hope to put updates out every week or two.   We have a number of small features that we plan on releasing or upgrading for the next few weeks and then we will focus on different areas – tasks, files, calendars, and so on.

This week we are pleased to release a few new features and upgrades.

1. Page List: The page list has undergone changes behind the scenes.  We found that our prior version worked well with certain browsers but got very slow when people had large lists of pages in Internet Explorer.  This version should work the same but generally be a bit faster.   Please let us know if you see any problems with it.

2. Desktop Client:  We have fixed some bugs and made some enhancements to our Adobe Air based desktop client.   If you use the Desktop Client and want to upgrade or are interested you can download it from our home page.

3. Task List: When you group tasks by person, list, priority or any other method, you can now “collapse” or “expand” the group by clicking on the + or – sign in front of the group name.   You can also see a count of tasks for each group in the yellow bar.   This should make navigating and working on longer lists easier.

4.  Calendar Control: We have added a calendar control to the “ALL” workspace tab (for those of you that have more than one workspace).   You can now see all calendar entries across all workspaces on this tab.     After implementing we realized that this may cause you to see a large number of tasks on a calendar without knowing at a glance which workspace they belong to.  So for our next release we will implement a few features to make this more obvioius.

5. File Check-in / Check -out: This is almost ready (we hoped to have for this release) but may get released tomorrow (Monday) or Tuesday.   The idea is that when someone downloads a file for editing they can set a flag indicating they have “Checked out” the file.   This will put a small red lock icon by the file so someone else will know that the file has been checked out.    It won’t stop a 2nd person from downloading the file but if  they choose to download it anyway, they will have to bypass a message sharing this information in another way.    When the file has be re-uploaded it can then be “checked in” again.

6. Workspace Tab font:  We made the workspace tab fonts a little smaller so that you can use a few more characters in the name of your workspace.    (Although the change to display more characters still needs to be uploaded).    Therefore you should be able to see about 12 characters displayed instead of 10 from before.

We have about 50 items planned for the next 3 or 4 weeks.  If you have a favorite request please send it in to MikeL@WizeHive.com and I’ll try to make sure it gets on this list or a subsequent release.

WizeHive Learning Center

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new Learning Center, where you can watch eight Demonstration Videos to find out more about how to use WizeHive’s powerful project management and collaboration tools. Yes, these videos have all been available before, but now they are more easily accessed and shelved together for a comprehensive tutorial of WizeHive’s capabilities. Keep coming back for more updates and enhancements as they become available.

The Overview is the best place to start, whether you are new to WizeHive or a well-seasoned beta-tester who has been with us since the beginning (and thanks, if you are!) Learn how WizeHive allows you to easily share notes, ideas, messages, files, and to-do lists with team members, partners and clients you’ve invited to your own secure, private workspaces. You’ll see how information can be entered directly into your WizeHive workspace or via email, Twitter, or mobile devices. You’ll also see how your data can be viewed for each project individually or collectively on the ALL tab for a comprehensive look at all of your workspaces.

Wondering how to post notes? Check out the Recent Activity video to learn how, and see how this feature keeps you abreast of all activity in your workspaces, including newly created tasks, uploaded files, and added links. Did you know you can drag and drop your tasks on your task list to help you prioritize and manage your assignments? Or that you can integrate your WizeHive calendar with your favorite iCal-compatible calendaring system? Managing and sharing your files is paramount. Learn how to email files directly to your workspace and manage multiple versions of the same document. And many people don’t realize it, but now you can use your Twitter account to interact directly with WizeHive. Learn how to set up your workspaces to receive notes and tasks sent directly through Twitter. If you want quick desktop access to your WizeHive database, and do not want to load up your browser, you can get much of the same functionality using our free desktop client for PCs, Macs, Linux and other operating systems.

We hope these Demos help you become better acquainted with WizeHive’s features so you can increase productivity and  streamline project management. Go check out the Learning Center… good luck!

Congratulations to @NicolasWarren, the winner of our $250 Amazon Gift Certificate giveaway! We also want to thank everyone who voted and tweeted about our Crunchies nomination for Best BootStrapped Startup of 2009. Voting has closed and now we wait to find out who won. The Crunchies Awards start at 7:30 pm PST this Friday night (1/8/10) and will be streamed live at http://crunchies2009.techcrunch.com/. Good luck to all the finalists!

How to Enter:

1. Follow @wizehive on twitter (www.twitter.com/wizehive). You will need to follow us to be notified if you win.
2. Send one or more public Twitter messages between now and 1/6/2010 telling people WizeHive has been nominated for a Crunchie or telling people you have voted for us in the Crunchies (you don’t need to vote for us but we’d sure appreciate it!).      Make sure to include #crunchies and WizeHive in your message. An easy way to do this is to vote for us at  http://crunchies2009.techcrunch.com/vote/ and then use the Twitter share option when it comes up.    It will create a Twitter message that is properly formatted for you.

Each time you create a Twitter entry mentioning WizeHive’s nomination for a Crunchie you will get another entry in our contest (up to 3 per person per day).

How will you know if you’ve won?

At 9am PST on 1/7/10 we will randomly select a winner from our entrees.    The winner will be contacted via direct message on Twitter.

Good luck and good tweeting!

We just found out last night that we were nominated (not by us, interestingly) and are a finalist in one of the “Crunchies Award” categories. The Crunchies recognizes the best technology companies for each year.

Please go to http://crunchies2009.techcrunch.com/vote/ and vote for us! We are in the sixth category – Best Bootstrapped Startup.

2009 was an amazing year for us here at WizeHive.

After working for most of 2008 on the technology, we launched our beta version of WizeHive  in late December 2008.    From there things came at us fast and faster.

As you can see by scanning the earlier blog entries we worked hard to release new versions of WizeHive  about every month.  We made significant upgrades to the task management portion of WizeHive in the spring of this year and the file management system in the fall.

Our beta program attracted a lot of attention and we were written up and rated in numerous technology publications including TechCrunch, LifeHacker, Killer Startups,  and others.   We  rolled out a special version of WizeHive that was used by both DreamIt Ventures and TechCrunch to manage their application processes.     From these successes we have started to build WizeHive templates that can be preconfigured for specific business solutions.    We will share  more information about these in early 2010.

But mostly this year has been about getting to know you, our customers, partners and prospects.   You have given us great feedback and have helped us improve WizeHive in many ways    We greatly appreciate your support and hope to continue building our relationship with you.

We continue to gather your feedback to focus on improvements and are pleased to share some of the key features we plan to release in 2010.    We plan on releasing our iphone app early in the year and most likely an Android app toward the end of Q1 or early Q2.    We have improvements planned for our project/task management system including the ability to build dependencies and a basic gantt chart functionality.     We plan on continuing to improve our file management area, online document collaboration and document searching.

We also plan on further emphasizing development in areas where we can add significant value to those of you managing multiple projects, clients, processing applications, and resumes.

As always, please let us know how we can help and what we could do better.    Until then, have a great holiday season and hoping you have a wonderful 2010!

WizeHive just completed an amazing project where our platform was picked to allow the folks at TechCrunch to manage, rate and review the thousands of TechCrunch applications they received for the TechCrunch50 conference.

While the majority of the activity revolved around our standard product, we did create and refine a ratings applet and a scheduling applet for them that allowed them to easily rate and review applications.   We had originally created them for managing applications for DreamIt but added considerable functionality for TechCrunch.   I found out during the process that this application would generally be known as an Applicant Tracking Process (ATS).

We are in the process of putting together a nice case study but bottom line it worked great for them and saved them a ton of time.    A link to the press release is here.