Creating simple workspaces - ‘Single Project Redirect’ explained

In this blog post I’m going to discuss a feature of project-extranet called Single Project Redirect. I’ll explain how it works and how you can use it to make accessing your extranet easier.

This article assumes you have already setup your own extranet, so if you haven’t done so, get yourself over to www.project-extranet.com/try and sign up for a free extranet demo account.

Why and how
As someone who has the need for an extranet facility - a project manager, business owner or administrator - you are probably responsible for more than one project. So when you access your extranet you will see, by default, the main summary home page. This contains an aggregated view of your system: all your project calendars combined into one; your top contacts; recently viewed and updated projects list. This will allow you to quickly access the information you need.

As a person responsible for a range of tasks, you should find this aggregated launch portal very useful. But for users who are only a member of one project within your extranet, the home page summary view is potentially confusing; all they really need to be able to do is to get to their single project.

This is where the Single Project Redirect switch comes in. If enabled, which in project-extranet it is by default, then users who have just the one project assigned to them get taken straight to that project, by-passing the home page summary and saving the user a click.

So, Single Project Redirect makes the interaction for users who only have one project much easier - especially when combined with the default starting app feature that allows you to set the default starting page users see when accessing a project.

For example, if you are setting up a file sharing project, by setting the default project app to ‘documents’ and ensuring Single Project Redirect is switched on, a user logging in to your extranet can be taken straight to the documents file structure.

You can use these two features together to create a range of project spaces for your customers depending on their individual needs.

So just to recap, the features for Single Project Redirect are:

• Single Project Redirect can be enabled/disabled via the ‘Extranet Settings > System Settings’ option.
• Single Project Redirect only applies to standard user accounts, not system administrators.
• If a user has access to only one project, they get taken straight to that project upon login.
• The Home, Projects and Contacts buttons are hidden when the redirect is enabled, the rationale being that there is no point giving users access to the projects list when they only have access to one project. The home button will take them back to their project and the contacts are all available via the projects contacts app, if you have chosen to use it.
• As soon as a user is given permission to view a second project upon logging in they view the standard home summary page and the Home, Projects and Contacts main options reappear.

I hope that explains this feature and demonstrates some of the powerful ways you can use project-extranet to achieve your perfect extranet solution. As always though, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch using the details on our contact pages.

And don’t forget to keep up-to-date with extranet news, hints and tips, details of updates, and also find us on twitter for the very latest from the world of online collaboration.

Gerry

Extranet Update: Sub Folders, Hidden Folders and Templates now live

It seems like it was only yesterday we were buried knee deep in snow but it already feels like spring is just around the corner. Looking at the number of updates and new features we’ve added to project-extranet since the turn of the new year it feels like we’re on a bit of a roll.

And here we are with another, bringing in new features based directly on extranet customers feedback.

This update, (which if you are interested takes us to v3.1.0) contains the usual little usability enhancements and tweaks as well as some slight layout modifications aimed at making the extranet work better for those iPad wielding amongst you. The main feature of this update however, is reworked file sharing.

Up to now, when setting up projects it has not been possible to create a folder hierarchy. As customers have expanded the use of their extranets and have started to load up literally hundreds of files to make available to project members, this flat folder structure has, well lacked a little. You’ve told us and we've noticed.

So as of now, this is no longer the case and from this update onwards you can create a full, no restrictions folder tree.

Before: Flat folder structure

After: Build a full folder tree for better organisation

Hidden Folders
A number of you have also asked for ‘hidden folders’ within a project and I’m please to announce that this is now possible as well. You can now mark a folder, or a whole folder branch as hidden. This makes it viewable only by project owners and users with full modify access. For everyone else in the project, it is completely hidden.

As can be seen in these screen shots, hidden folders are differentiated from standard folders by using using grey folders icons.

Administrators and Project Managers can 

view full tree including hidden folders

Other users can only see normal folders. Hidden folders

are not visible.

Templates
Project Extranet has long had the the ability to create templates from which you can base your projects on. The idea behind project templates is simple; it allows you to create templates that contain settings for your common project types, meaning you don't have to set them up each time. Template include which project apps to use, folder structure, default starting app etc.

To compliment this, we have introduced a number of standard built in templates which are setup for common uses for Project-Extranet. These are:

• Customer Accounts
• Document Sharing
• Meeting Workspace
• Photo Sharing
• Project Collaboration
• Shared Calendar
• Shared Contact List
• Task Management

The names are pretty self-explanatory. Hopefully these new built in project templates will give you (and new project-extranet users) a quick and simple way to get the most out of your extranet. They are of course only suggestions, and you can edit/delete these templates and create your own to suite your needs. Simply go to Extranet Settings > Templates.

That’s pretty much it for this release, we’re not out of ideas just yet and have some other interesting developments just around the corner. In the meantime, please keep the feedback coming, we’d love to hear from you and how your business is using your Extranet.

If you are not already a customer of Project-Extranet you can sign up for a free, no obligation trial at www.project-extranet.com.

The latest extranet updates and news can be found at www.project-extranet.com/news or join us on twitter, facebook and blogspot.

Gerry

Sub folders on their way to project-extranet

Just a quick posting today; the latest update to project-extranet has just completed go-live testing and will be rolled out to our production servers over the next couple of days.

This update brings a number of enhancements, the main one being to document management where nested sub-folders as well as secure folder branches are now possible.

We should be up and running by the start of work on morning of Monday 14th Feb if not before.

I will post more information here when we go-live, so keep checking back, or, if you tweet, join me on twitter http://twitter.com/#!/gerrymcnicol/

Gerry