November News

November 14, 2008 by Alex G.

We’ve got a lot to tell you in this post!  So grab another cuppa and spend a few minutes with us.

iPod Touch Winners

Let us start off by congratulating our two iPod Touch winners, Mr. Noel Mills and Mr. Brian Goldfinch!  Brian is the Queensland Regional Manager of The WorkPac Group in Queensland, Australia.  He uses Projjex for any projects that require more than a couple of steps.  Noel is a management consultant who works in Indooroopilly, Australia.  He uses Projjex to prepare marketing plans, procedure manuals and for planning community-based events.

Thank you to all who participated - this was a very popular contest that we’ll have to do again!

New Features and Lower Prices!

We’ve added three significant new features today.  Central Admin allows any user (even a free user) to manage a group of people and their projects.  It allows one payment to cover everybody.  And it protects corporate data because projects managed by Central Admin “belong” to the Central Admin account.  Central Admin is optional, it’s free, and it’s described in greater detail below.

We’ve added a great new report called “Project Status Report”.  When you start a project you can use this report to help with your project budgeting and to help you prepare proposals.  Once the project is underway, use the report to monitor elapsed time and due dates of the project.  The Project Status Report is a great management tool.  Read on to learn more about it.

You can now instantly send email alerts when adding or changing tasks, milestones and notes!  See below for the details.

By the way, ProjjexMobile and ProjjexTime have now been thoroughly beta tested and are rock solid.  We’ve moved them into full production.  Go ahead and try them out - they’re both very useful.

Finally, we’ve lowered our pricing and simplified it.  And for all of our current customers (and anyone else who signs up by November 30) we’re offering an amazing pricing special that will save you $60 per person!  Get the details (and the valuable coupon code) below.

NEW!  Central Admin

Central Admin brings the key administrative functions into one place.  With Central Admin you can:

- manage all of your users’ payments in a single place (and get discounts as the number of users grows)
- invite new users to Central Admin so you can manage their accounts
- pay for people even if they don’t belong to your Central Admin
- remove users
- create, modify and archive projects
- share all users’ available disk space (for example, if you have three users, each of whom has 500 MB of disk space, they would now jointly share 1,500 MB of disk space)

With Central Admin:

- assign one or two people who will set up and manage all of the Projjex staff accounts and all Projjex projects.

- invite clients to collaborate on projects at no cost (ie. by setting them up with a free account).  If they are collaborating on more than 3 projects with you, you can offer to pay for their Projjex account as part of your service to them.

- ask sub-contractors to join Projjex so they can collaborate with you.  Ask them to use Projjex to record their time so your project budgets will always be up-to-date - and so you’ll never be surprised by late invoices again!

To start using Central Admin, sign in to Projjex and then click on “settings” at the top right of any screen.  Then:

- click on the “Central Admin” tab.

- Projjex will determine if you’re set up with Central Admin and, if not, click where it tells you.

- enter the name of the Central Admin account (normally your company/organization name).

- if you want to use your logo on Projjex screens and reports, you can add it here.

- click the button that says “Setup Central Administration”.

- based on projects that you already belong to, Projjex then provides you with a list of people that you may wish to add into your Central Admin account.  Only choose people that are part of your organization or who you are sure wish to be part of your Central Admin account.  These people will be sent an invitation and must accept the invitation in order to become part of your Central Admin account.

You’ve now created your Central Admin account.  We hope this makes your life easier!

NEW! Project Status Report

Part of the Project Status Report

Part of the Project Status Report

Projjex takes the budgeted hours from each task and milestone and compares them with the actual hours recorded with ProjjexTime.  It shows you the variance in hours and % for each item and for the entire project.

The Project Status Report is a great way to help you prepare proposals.  Set up the project’s tasks along with the budgeted hours and the report will help you fine-tune your budgets.

Then use the report regularly to ensure that you’re keeping on track.

To run the Project Status Report, sign in to Projjex and click on the “dashboard” tab.  Open the “Project Status Summary” section which will list all of your projects.  If you are the owner or administrator of a project you will see a printer icon at the right side of the screen on the same row as the project.  Click the icon to see the report’s options.

NEW! Instant Email Alerts

Another much requested feature:  now, when you add or change a task, milestone or note you can have Projjex instantly send out an email notification of this change.  To do this, simply select the people you wish to have alerted using the “Email alert” field at the bottom of the window, and click either the “Close” or the “Add New…” button.  The alert will be sent immediately!

The Email Alert field

The Email Alert field

New Pricing

In order to make things easier for all of our customers, we’ve decided to simplify and lower our pricing.  So, effective immediately our new pricing will look like this:

Paid User: paid users get full use of Projjex (except ProjjexTime) on a per person per month basis.  Also: unlimited number of projects, 500 MB of disk space, branding on screen and reports, no ads, API access, ProjjexMobile, Central Admin.  Only $14.95 per person per month for the first three people.  The price per person drops if your group has more than three people.

ProjjexTime: we now charge $5.95 per person per month for unlimited use of ProjjexTime.  The price per person drops if your group has more than three people using ProjjexTime.

Free: Free accounts will be able to view up to 3 active projects, will not have branding or API access, will have 250 MB of disk space, will see rotating ads, and will have access to ProjjexMobile and Central Admin.

Our current users will have until the end of November to make any desired changes to their accounts.  Therefore, please review your Projjex account between now and November 30 to see how this new pricing will affect you.  And here’s something to make it even easier for you:  use coupon code “SPX1108″ and save $5 per person per month for the next 12 months.  That’s a $60 per person saving.  And you can save an additional 10% by choosing to pay annually.  Full access to Projjex for less than 9 bucks a month!

While the coupon code is supposed to be for current Projjex users :-) we don’t mind if you share it with your business friends.  But they must act quickly if they want to take advantage of it.

To review your pricing options and to use the pricing calculator, sign in to Projjex, click on “settings” and then click on the “Account” tab.  Any questions?  Send an email to accounting@projjex.com or call us, toll free, at 1.888.776.5539, extension 1.  We’re happy to help.

Well, that’s it for today.  We’re going to take the weekend off and then start working on our New Year release - lots more cool stuff coming up!

As always, keep your comments and suggestions coming.  Best way:  send your emails to feedback@projjex.com.

All the best,

The Projjex Team

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New! ProjjexMobile puts Projjex in your pocket

September 8, 2008 by Alex G.

Have I told you that I love my iPhone?  And now I love my iPhone even more because I can run Projjex on it!

That’s right: today we’re releasing ProjjexMobile for the iPhone in a free beta version for all Projjex users.

Here’s a quick 45 second video that shows ProjjexTime on your iPhone:

And here’s a slightly longer (3:23) video that covers everything about ProjjexMobile:

As you can see, we’ve taken the core components of Projjex and re-designed them for the iPhone’s smaller format.  With ProjjexMobile you can view the Dashboard and update the status of tasks and milestones, add time for yourself and your team, review time for yourself and your team, and add notes.

You can even let ProjjexTime act as a stop-watch to calculate your task’s elapsed time!

ProjjexMobile runs in the iPhone’s browser.  It’s secure because it uses SSL to encrypt the transmission and it doesn’t store any data on the phone itself.  All updates are immediately saved onto the secure Projjex servers.

We’ve been using it internally for a couple of months now and it has made a huge difference in how we use Projjex.  Try it - you’re going to love it!

By the way, ProjjexMobile also runs on an iPod Touch over a Wifi connection.  So grab that iPod from your kid - it’s a business tool, not a toy!  :-)

To Run ProjjexMobile When You Already Have A Projjex Account:

1. On your iPhone, start the Safari browser.
2. Touch the URL line and enter “m.projjex.com”.
3. Sign in as you normally would with Projjex.

That’s it!

To Run ProjjexMobile When You DON’T Have A Projjex Account:

First, create a Projjex account:
1. From a browser on your desktop computer, go to www.projjex.com.
2. Click the “Sign Up” button and follow the instructions to get your free account.
3. Go to your email, wait for the confirmation email from Projjex, and follow its instructions.
4. Sign in to Projjex, create a project, and create some time categories by adding tasks.

Now go to your iPhone:
5. Start the Safari browser.
6. Touch the URL line and enter “m.projjex.com”.
7. Sign in with the email address and password you used to create your Projjex account.

One contractor who’s been using ProjjexMobile in Chicago says that he now doesn’t have to travel to his office.  Instead, he spends more time managing his building sites.  With email and ProjjexMobile on his iPhone, he’s constantly up-to-date on everything in his business.  Nice.

Keep in touch!

As always, we love to hear from you:

- Send suggestions to feedback@projjex.com.

- Need help?  Email us at support@projjex.com.

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New! ProjjexTime

August 12, 2008 by Alex G.

We are very proud to announce that ProjjexTime is available today to everyone in a free extended beta version!

ProjjexTime is intended for any organization, small or large, that records time against tasks and projects.  You can now record unbillable time against internal projects and record billable time against client-focused projects.

ProjjexTime makes it very easy to add time records for yourself or somebody else and then print a variety of time-related reports including a professional looking Billing Advice report.  ProjjexTime exports time records to an .xls format so you can analyze them in a spreadsheet or integrate them with another software application.

ProjjexTime, like Projjex itself, runs in a browser and is very quick.

To see a short overview video of ProjjexTime, click here.  It takes just under six minutes to play

We have a longer (27 minute) tutorial video here;  it’s a complete training session on how to use ProjjexTime.

ProjjexTime has just completed an internal beta process.  Here’s what one of our customers said about it:  “I use Projjex to manage all of my client work.  ProjjexTime is a fantastic addition and saves me about three hours a month of administration time.  With the addition of ProjjexTime, Projjex has become the only tool I need to manage my entire professional services business.”

To use ProjjexTime, simply sign in to Projjex and click on the “time” tab.

The free extended beta will be available for at least 30 days after which it will become a paid service.  Pricing will be announced mid-September.

An Update to Meetings
ProjjexMeetings makes it easy to:

- schedule meetings with your team;
- use Projjex to record all project updates and notes that are normally made during a meeting; and
- automatically create meeting minutes and circulate them to team members.

By creating minutes automatically, ProjjexMeetings will save you countless hours in the coming year.

We’ve got a short video here which shows you how to use ProjjexMeetings - enjoy!

Keep in touch…
We love to hear from people who use Projjex - you’re the reason we do this and your comments and suggestions are what we use to make Projjex even better.  Email us anytime - here’s how:

- Send suggestions to feedback@projjex.com.

- Need help?  Email us at support@projjex.com.

Coming soon…
We’ve been particularly creative this summer and are getting set to release more great features in the next few weeks.  Stay tuned!

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How people use Projjex

July 11, 2008 by Alex G.

It’s been interesting to hear how people use Projjex.  Here are several recent examples we’ve been told about.  How about you?  Tell us how you’re using Projjex and we’ll share it with the world.  Drop us a note at feedback@projjex.com.

- Create a personal project: Because you can now create at least 5 projects, why not create a project to keep track of your personal to-do list?  This can be handy especially when you get your daily reminder email that includes those important personal items!

- Track outstanding proposals / estimates: Create a project specifically to record each outstanding proposal you’re working on.  You can even store the actual proposal documents.  Use the due date to remind you of up-coming decision dates.  Use notes to keep track of client contacts.  Share it with your team so that everybody’s on the same page.

- Store policy and procedure documents: By storing key documents in Projjex they become easy to access and easy to retrieve.  And because Projjex indexes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF documents, they can be quickly searched.  This may be more useful than simply having them sit on a server somewhere.

- And if you haven’t tried it yet, Projjex is a great way to keep in touch with a client: Projjex is simple to use, easy to access, and helps bring organizations closer together.  Want to forge stronger relationships with your clients?  Use Projjex to share plans, documents and ideas.  Your clients will love it!

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What’s new on June 18?

June 18, 2008 by Alex G.

We want to make Projjex a better place for you and your team so we listen closely to your comments and suggestions. Please let us know what you need and we’ll do our best to make it happen for you.

Here’s what’s new today:

Pricing Change

We really enjoy seeing people use Projjex. And to make it as useful as possible, we’ve tried to make it as inexpensive as possible. Today, we’re significantly expanding the limits of the three most commonly used editions - especially the Free edition!

The Personal (or Free) edition has now been expanded to support up to 5 active projects, 250 MB of disk, free time tracking, logo customization, and enhanced searching. We couldn’t quite manage the kitchen sink but we have to keep SOMEthing for a future release. Enjoy!

Personal Edition

  • renamed to “Team Edition”
  • number of active projects increased from 1 to 5
  • available disk space increased from 100 megabytes (MB) to 250 MB
  • enhanced search (ability to search within documents): now available at no extra charge
  • time tracking: now available at no extra charge (see more below)
  • ability to customize screen and reports by adding your own logo: now available at no extra charge (see more below)

Team Edition

  • renamed to “TeamPlus Edition”
  • number of active projects increased from 5 to 10
  • available disk space increased from 250 MB to 500 MB
  • enhanced search (ability to search within documents): now available at no extra charge
  • time tracking: now available at no extra charge (see more below)

Professional Edition

  • number of active projects increased from 20 to 25

New Features

Upload file size limit has increased from 10 megabytes (MB) to 50 MB.

All icons are now colored to match the appropriate tab. We think this will help make navigation easier.

New copy and paste feature! A much requested item. You can now copy any Task, Milestone or Note, including its sub-items, to anywhere in a Projjex project that you have access to. Here’s how:

  • go to the item you want to copy
  • click on the menu down arrow and select “Copy”
  • go to the project or item where you want to place the copy. Click on the menu down arrow and select “Paste”. The item and its sub-items will be added below and will be properly indented. You can, of course, re-position this item by “dragging and dropping” the icon.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

- Copy will respect the filter settings that are currently active. For example, if you’ve got the menus at the top set to “My Items” and “Uncompleted” then Copy will ignore other people’s items and any completed items that may be attached to the item you’re trying to copy.

- Copy will grab all sub-items even if the parent item isn’t expanded. So you don’t need to expand an item in order for Copy to include everything below that item.

- you can’t copy and paste meetings and time items. This also means that when copying and pasting an item, all of its sub-items will be copied EXCEPT for meetings, time, and documents, and anything attached to meeting and time items. In the example below these three items would not be copied: the document attached to “Miscellaneous task”, the time entry “Prepare blog” and “Another miscellaneous sub-sub-sub-task”.

By the way, you can use the new copy and paste feature to create templates. Here’s one suggestion:

- create a new project and call it something like “Company Templates”
- share it with everyone on your team who creates new projects
- build your templates in this project: all the tasks and milestones for a template would typically be created underneath a single master task which you could give the template’s name
- of course you could always create a template by copying and pasting from an existing successful project
- then, when you want to use a template, simply open “Company Templates”, copy the template, then move to the new project and paste it in. You can then drag and drop items to rearrange them as necessary.

New Memo field for Tasks, Milestones, Time and Notes. Another much requested item. Tasks, Milestones and Time items now have a new field called Memo. Notes items have had their “Notes” field upgraded to the new Memo field.

Memo fields allow you to record text, as much text as you like. And the text also supports the standard formatting functions such as bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colour, bullets and alignment.

Memo fields will now print on all reports along with their formatting.

You can now add any single character currency symbol you wish (such as £, € or ¥). In fact, you can have a different currency setting for each project.

To set a default currency setting which will be used to set the currency whenever you create a new project:

- click on “settings”
- make sure you’re on the “Profile” tab
- type in (or paste) the one character currency symbol in “Default currency:”
- click the “Save” button and then “Continue”

To change a currency setting in an existing project:

- click on the “projects” tab
- click “edit” in the menu beside the desired project
- type in (or paste) the one character currency symbol in “Currency:”
- click the “Close” button

Overdue items now show as red text. You can toggle this feature on and off:

- go to “settings”
- make sure you’re on the “Profiles” tab
- toggle “Show overdue items in red text”
- click the “Save” button and then “Continue”

Completed items now show as strikethrough text. You can toggle this feature on and off:

- go to “settings”
- make sure you’re on the “Profiles” tab
- toggle “Show completed items with strikethrough”
- click the “Save” button and then “Continue”

You can now enter dates without the year. Simply enter them as mm/dd (ie. June 15th would be 6/15) and Projjex will assume the year from your computer’s clock.

In the “dashboard” tab, Recent Activity and Activity Log now include a “Resp.” column (that shows the person responsible for that item).

Also in the “dashboard”, Recent Activity now shows verbs at the beginning of the line. We think this helps make things easier to read. Here are three examples:

- COMPLETED: June 11, 2008 status meeting
- REASSIGNED: from Bob Smith to Mary Jones
- REMOVED DUE DATE: Install new projection system

Well, that’s it for this release. Keep your comments and suggestions coming - we love to get ‘em. By the way, the next release is almost done - check back here in July to see what’s new in Projjex.

Until then, best wishes,

The Projjex Team
June 18, 2008

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Just how important is SSL?

May 7, 2008 by Alex G.

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, protects your data when you’re working in a web browser by encrypting all the information that is sent to or from your computer.  SSL is important because unencrypted information can be seen by other people when it is in transit.  You’ll know when your data is being encrypted because the browser will display a small picture of a lock.

Projjex takes the security of your data very seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that we subscribe to the highest possible level of encryption (1024 bit) and we automatically use this encryption with every single one of our customers.  As soon as you land on the Projjex sign in screen, you’re encrypted, and your entire session with Projjex is encrypted until you sign off or close the browser window.  This is equivalent to the security of the best on-line banking systems.

The reason we wanted to discuss this is that almost all of our competitors provide SSL encryption (a good thing) but almost all of them DON’T provide SSL encryption to their free or non-enterprise level customers.  In our view, this is unconscionable and unacceptable.

Hosting other people’s information is an extraordinary responsibility.  In our opinion, we must protect our customers’ information not only while it is on our servers but also while it’s in transit.  Anything less is to breach an expectation of security that many customers have.

Providing SSL encryption to some customers but not others seems to say that some people’s information is more valuable than others.  Is your information less valuable because you choose to use a free edition?

What do you think?

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Useful new things, April 22

April 21, 2008 by Alex G.

Early this morning (when you were likely sleeping) we added a couple of new items to Projjex that we think you’ll find useful: daily email notifications and data imports/exports. We also increased the disk limit for Personal (ie. free) users from 10MB to 100MB.

By the way, all of today’s changes came from suggestions from our customers: thank you for letting us know what you need - we’re listening!

Daily Email Notification
Projjex will now email you a summary of your Dashboard items every day. It sends this email at 3:00 a.m. (your local time) so that you will have it first thing in the morning.

You can customize this email to get only the things you want. To do this, simply:

- sign in to Projjex
- click on “settings” at the top right of any screen
- click on the “Email Notification” tab
- check the items you wish to receive in your morning email
- click the “Save” button at the bottom of the screen.

By the way, if you don’t receive these emails, it may be because your email program or internet service provider (ISP) blocks Projjex emails as spam. Please change your email settings or contact your ISP to allow emails from Projjex to get through.

Data Imports / Export
Projjex now allows you to import data from Microsoft Project, BaseCamp or a generic comma-separated-value (CSV) file.

Projjex also allows you to export your Projjex data to a CSV file.

For a Microsoft Project file, you’ll first need to export this file to XML. This is easily done and will only take a minute or two.

Projjex imports BaseCamp project information directly from BaseCamp without requiring you to perform an export.

To read more about them and to try them out, simply sign in to Projjex and then click on the new “tools” button that appears at the top right of the screen, between “settings” and “sign out”.

Thanks again for all your great feedback - and please keep it coming!

Alex Glassey and
The Projjex Team

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Response to some survey questions

April 21, 2008 by Alex G.

We sent out a survey to our customers last week and got some great feedback. Thank you to everyone who contributed.

Here are answers to some of the questions we received. And check out the next blog entry for some great new features!

How can I see the breadcrumb trail of the parent items?
To see the breadcrumb trail of any item, hover over the ellipsis (three periods that look like this “…”) that appears to the immediate left of an item’s icon. After a very brief delay, a yellow box will pop up to show you where that item belongs.

In the Dashboard, what’s the difference between “Recent Activity” and “Activity Log”
The Activity Log allows you to find (and print) activity for any date range, any project (or all projects), any person (or all people), and any item type (or all item types). The Activity Log will also show your own activity as well as your team members’ activity. For example, you could find and print all of the tasks and notes for the Acme Project between March 1, 2008 and March 31, 2008.

Recent Activity is designed to show you only the activity that has taken place since the last time you looked here. It won’t show you your activity because Projjex assumes that you know what you’ve done :-) Remember to mark each item as “Read” once you’ve looked at it. That’ll remove it from Recent Activity and keep this section fresh for you.

By the way, if you don’t want to see certain items types show up in Recent Activity, you can adjust this in your “Settings” area; just click on “settings” at the top right corner of Projjex and then click on the “Recent Activity” tab. Select the items you want to see and then click “Save”.

Is there a better way to be reminded when we’re waiting on a team member to do something?
As of today there is! See the next blog which announces our new email reminders. In short, you can get a daily email reminder of overdue items (and other items as well). This will help you understand who’s a little behind. It also helps remind the person who’s a little late.

Can you speed up the “documents” tab? And can you help us sort documents?
We’ve spent a ton of time speeding up the “documents” tab. You should see an extraordinary improvement here!

And you can sort in the “documents” tab as well: simply click on any of the five column headers that you wish to sort by: click once to sort in ascending order; click again to sort in descending order.

Can documents be associated with a task or project or meeting or milestone?
Yes. In order to do this, documents need to be uploaded in the “projects” tab:

- click on the “projects” tab
- move to the item you want to attach a document to
- click on the menu’s down arrow and select “Documents”
- the item’s edit window will open and you will be on the Documents tab. Use this tab to upload one or more documents
- click “Close” when you’re done. Projjex will pause briefly while it stores your documents

You can access the documents here by hovering over the Paperclip icon that now appears next to this item. Click on a document to view it. And you can also see all your documents in the “documents” tab as well. Note that you can tell which item they’re attached to by hovering over the ellipsis (three periods “…”) that appears just to the left of the document icon.

Can I import data from MS Project files?
A very common request indeed! Today the answer is “yes”. Check out our next blog entry to learn how!

Thanks again for participating in the survey. Even though that survey is now closed, we’d love to hear your comments. Send email to feedback@projjex.com. We’re listening!

Alex Glassey and
The Projjex Team

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Welcome to the Projjex Blog

January 30, 2008 by Alex G.

So the question is: “Why create new project management software for small teams?”

Good question! There are lots of project management software applications out there, believe me. We’ve looked at hundreds. However, they all suffer from one or more of these problems:

- they take too long to set up
- they’re too complicated to use
- they’re too expensive
- they’re not collaborative

In short, we didn’t find a single example of an intuitive, collaborative, inexpensive tool designed for small teams.

So how is Projjex different?

Projjex takes only 30 seconds to set up. Type in your email address and a password and you’re set. Nothing to download. Nothing to install. Everything works within your browser.

Projjex is easy to use. It does only what small teams want to do. It doesn’t do all the complicated things that big teams need. It’s logically laid out. And even though it runs in a browser you’ll think you’re using a desktop application because it’s really fast.

Projjex is inexpensive. Create your first project for free. Invite your entire team to work with you. Still free. Work with your project for a year. Yup, still free. Need to create another five projects? Okay, now it’s going to cost you twenty bucks a month. But your colleagues and clients can work in these projects for - you guessed it - free! And you can upgrade or downgrade or even cancel at any time without penalty or additional cost.

Projjex is truly collaborative. Like Myspace, Facebook and YouTube, Projjex is a great place to work together, to share stuff, to get things done. It’s like a great big to-do list in the sky that keeps you and your team organized, focused and productive.

In short, Projjex is the intuitive, collaborative, inexpensive tool designed for small teams that we’ve been searching for. We think you’ll love it too!

The Projjex Team

P.S. Try it here for free!

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