Extranet Update: The New Document Workspace

Happy new-year everybody! One week back after the winter festivities and I hope you are all managing to keep up with your new year's resolutions and are now fully back into the swing of things, full of the anticipation for an exciting 2012! Well, at least until February anyway.


We have a lot planned for project-extranet in 2012; it’s going to be a busy year. We start off by introducing the new document workspace feature.

The aim of the document workspace is to enhance your extranets document collaboration capabilities, simplifying the interface around document management, and introducing a greater visibility of who has downloaded each document version.

As you can see from the screenshot above each version of your document now gets its own tab. Your project members can discuss each specific version by posting comments and you can review all document versions in one view by using the ‘All Versions’ tab.

You can also see who has (and who hasn’t) downloaded the document in the handy downloaded report. Very useful for making sure you and team members have the most up-to-date version.

I know some of you have documents that have documents with over 300 versions; this is designed to be of help in these scenarios as well as for those who only have a few.

Related to the document workspace, the newsfeed has also been enhanced so that when a post related to a document appears there is a direct link to that documents workspace.

Our help article for the document workspace can be found in our extranet help and guides section.

As always we hope you find the new extranet document features useful, and if you have any feedback for us please do let us know via your usual channel or via the contact section of the website.

To finish things of, I said at the start of this post that we have a lot planned for project-extranet in 2012 and this is true. I can’t say anything just yet, but stay tuned to www.project-extranet.com/news/ as we will be announcing something exciting very soon!

Until then…
Gerry

Extranet Update: Post your comments into the project newsfeed

A small update published to project-extranet today. This adds a ‘Post Comment’ box to the project summary page. This allows users who have can access a project with the ‘contribute’, ‘modify’ or ‘owner’ permission level to post comments directly into the project newsfeed.





We have also been doing some work optimising the newsfeed so that news items that are similar to each other and occur at a similar time are only shown once. So for example if a project member views a document, then quickly views it again, this will now only generate one entry in the project newsfeed.

As always this update is automatically applied to all Extranets and is available to all accounts.

project-extranet launches recruitment specific extranet apps

We know that the project-extranet platform allows businesses of all types to operate more efficiently internally and improve the service offered to customers externally and with our ability to create bespoke Apps we have created some truly unique offerings for customers.

Now we have brought that thinking to the recruitment sector with project-extranet for recruitment agents. We have long believed that recruitment agents could seriously improve the service they offer by making use of project-extranet shared workspaces. For each position being filled, create a project and populate it with the candidates being put forwards. Use all the collaboration tools to arrange interviews, stimulate discussion about candidates and manage candidate databases.

So by working closely with a number of recruitment agencies we have developed a series of Extranet Apps designed specifically for the recruitment business. These both improve internal operational efficiency and significantly enhance the service you offer your customer.

• Candidate Wall: Post your candidates to a shared workspace to allow your clients in to access, rate, review, download cv’s, request interviews, short list and reject, all at the click on a button.
  
  
• Candidate Database: Manage your candidates in one central location. Capture their history, store documents, keep track of their status.
  
• Task management: Process driven interview, rejection, shortlisting and follow-up tasks help your staff stay on top of their job and help you get more done with less.

More information about project-extranet for recruitment agents as well as a 30-day free trial can be found at www.project-extranet.com/recruitmentagency/

project-extranet upgrade live

The latest update to project-extranet has now been applied and normal service has been resumed.

If you find that your extranet is exhibiting funny behaviour, calendars, folder lists not showing their contents, etc please try refreshing the page using your browsers refresh function. It maybe that you are using an old copy of some of the files required to run project-extranet correctly.

Over the next few days we will be publishing guides and how-to’s explaining each of the new extranet features in detail and how you get the best out of them.

Meanwhile, the first couple of guides are already up. These explain how to set-up your User Groups (Getting Started with User Groups) and Calendar synchronisation, which allows you to sync your project calendars with Microsoft Outlook, Apple iPhone/iPad, gmail calendar and more. Setting up Extranet Calendar Sync.


Need help
If you have any problems or have any questions about the extranet we now have an online chat facility that is available to your extranets administrator users. Scroll to the bottom of the extranet and click the chat button.

Planned maintenance

We are currently applying an upgrade to project-extranet.com. There maybe some service disruption during the next few hours.

We will post again here when normal service has been resumed. This should be around midday.

project-extranet update coming this weekend

The BETA testing phase for our latest and greatest update to project-extranet was completed today meaning that our scheduled rollout will occur this weekend. 

As usual all extranets will receive this upgrade, free, as part of the service. We plan to start this work from 9am Saturday and are aiming to have every extranet upgrades by the end of the day. There will be periods during this upgrade where your Extranet will be unavailable. We will keep this disruption to a minimum, but we’re sure it will be worth it!

Quick a reminder of some of the new features coming:

Calendar Synchronisation - Outlook, iPhone, iPad, Android, Gmail

RSS News feeds. See your project news feed on your desktop or mobile phones.

User Groups - enhanced/improved user management.

Search as you type - and many other user interface improvements. 

project-extranet v3.5 upgrade complete

The next upgrade to our extranet platform was today marked feature complete and handed over to our test team.

V3.5 brings some great new features and a whole host of refinements that we’re really excited and pleased to be bringing to the Extranet platform. Calendar Sync, RSS feeds, improved user management, refinements to our App Model as well as usability enhancements such as search while you type, to name a few, are all built, baked in and ready to go.

So now we enter our BETA and testing phase, which typically will last around three weeks. This gives us a go live time of around the 1st November, and as always this update will automatically be applied to your Extranet, free, as part of the service.

In the run up we will publish blogs and how guides for the new features, but if you would like to get your hands on a BETA account, either to help us out with testing, or just to get a preview of the new features please just get in touch.