Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 01, 2010
As I was sitting down at my laptop this morning, it occurred to me that I pretty much follow the same routine every morning to get my day started. While it's a bit of a mundane thing to write about, I felt like it might be somewhat interesting if you are a OnePlace user or are thinking about giving OnePlace a try.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on August 25, 2010
We upgraded OnePlace last night (8/24/2010 at 10pm CST). This upgrade contains one new feature we call 'Favorites', which allows users to designate things they use frequently as favorites. Once something has been added to your favorites list, it can be quickly and efficiently accessed via the "Favorites & Recent Items" button in the toolbar at the top of every page in OnePlace.
You can read about the full details on this upgrade in the Recent Changes section of the online help.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on June 23, 2010
Welcome to the inaugural "Did You Know", a series we plan to do from time to time about various things in OnePlace that you may not know about. Today's article focuses on your personal account within OnePlace.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on June 16, 2010
Much like the Burger King slogan "Have it Your Way", which allows you to build a hamburger to your precise liking, OnePlace lets you configure your Home page to fit the exact way you want to manage your work and collaborate with your teammates. Here's a quick run down of the various things you can do to get your Home page set up to work best for you:
Posted by Denis Ahearn on June 11, 2010
We rolled a new feature into production last night - the ability to import tasks from a CSV file. This is something that combined with the "Export Tasks" feature can provide a powerful way to quickly and easily edit multiple tasks at one time.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on June 02, 2010
Not only am I a member of the team that created OnePlace for business team collaboration and organization, but I'm also a regular user of OnePlace. It runs in my browser from the moment the day begins until I close my laptop cover at the end of the day. Needless to say, I use OnePlace a lot, both in my professional and personal lives. So, I figured I would share with you today the top five things I really like about OnePlace.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on May 26, 2010
Anyone reading this blog knows that you can use email to communicate with other people who are online. But did you know that you can also use email to communicate with OnePlace? It's true, and it's easy to do. You can send email to OnePlace to create things like tasks, notes, inbasket messages and team pulses. You can also send email to OnePlace to post messages in a discussion, and to reply to a comment made by someone else about a particular project, file or task. Here's the skinny on what you need to do to take advantage of this cool feature of OnePlace:
Posted by Denis Ahearn on May 19, 2010
OnePlace has always had something that's been labeled as a "Calendar", however it was strictly a view for scheduling your work. You couldn't put events on this calendar, nor could you view things a month at a time. Well, with last night's upgrade of OnePlace, I'm happy to report that these limitations no longer exist! OnePlace has a brand spanking new calendar that gives you the familiar looking monthly view, and the ability to view events, tasks and projects for when they are scheduled to occur.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on May 12, 2010
One of the things we've known for a long time is that the power and value of OnePlace increases exponentially when you use it to collaborate with other people. It works fine as a personal task management app, however once you add others to the mix, the fun really begins.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on May 05, 2010
Something that we get asked for from time-to-time is to make the OnePlace Help searchable. This is a very reasonable request - we just hadn't gotten around to doing that yet. Well, yesterday we added that capability, and took it one step further by also allowing our users to search the contents of this blog, as well as the contents of the OnePlace User Forum.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 28, 2010
We slipped a new feature into OnePlace last night that makes it easier to find things when you know the person who created what you're looking for. The Search dialog has a new "Created by" option, which allows you to limit the search to only things created by a specific user.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 21, 2010
One of the gems in the OnePlace "toolbox" is the OnePlace Dashboard, a separate application that you install on your computer, which provides you with all functionality of the Team Pulse feature that's built into OnePlace. The OnePlace Dashboard is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 14, 2010
One of the things we occasionally hear from users is that they can't find something that they or another teammate squirreled away somewhere deep inside OnePlace. OnePlace allows you to attach things to workplaces, projects and tasks, which is great from an organizational standpoint, however it also means there are lots of places where you can stash things. Finding something isn't always easy if you don't remember exactly where in your hierarchy you put it.
We're currently in the process of evaluating this and investigating ways to eliminate this issue or at least reduce it. In the meantime, here are some tips from my personal usage of OnePlace that hopefully will help you find things more quickly/efficiently.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 07, 2010
Our CEO Steve Kickert recently posted a tip on the OnePlace forum for quickly entering dates using a relative offset from today (see Steve's tip). Since then I've found myself using this bit of magic quite often when scheduling my work. So often in fact that I felt it was worth repeating this technique here in case you missed it over on the forum.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on March 31, 2010
In case you hadn't noticed yet, our mission at OnePlace is to make your business successful, by making the people within your business successful. Hence our mantra "Successful People, Successful Business". Last week we rolled out a new feature that supports this mission, by helping people connect and share with one another in OnePlace. Dubbed the "People" mode, this feature provides a place where someone can go to see the other people that he/she is connected to, and to interact with these people in different ways.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on March 24, 2010
If you are familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel, then you might recall that Hansel laid a trail of breadcrumbs for him and his sister to follow in order that they could find their way back home. Unfortunately, the breadcrumbs were eaten by hungry birds, and the two children ended up getting lost in the woods and eventually bumped into a rather nasty witch. The fact that they had no history of where they'd been, and subsequently no way to back track nearly led to their undoing.
One of the lessons learned from this fable, is that it's a good idea to have a permanent history that you can follow to see where you've been and what you've done. Online organization and collaboration solutions like OnePlace do this for you automatically. Like a dutiful scribe, they sit silently in the background recording your every move. And when you need to go back in time to see what was done and by whom, these solutions provide the time machine to follow the trail of edits exactly as they occurred.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on March 18, 2010
At OnePlace, we understand that when life and work get busy, the best advice is often to work smarter, not harder. To that end, we've put together a list of ten ways for getting more from OnePlace, so that you can work smarter, not harder.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on December 17, 2009
We released a new version of OnePlace tonight (12/16/09) that was a little over a month in the making. This upgrade contains some pretty cool stuff that we're proud to announce.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on July 23, 2009
After going the entire month of June without an upgrade, we just performed our fifth upgrade in July tonight (7/23/09)! We've had some customer requests recently that prompted this quick upgrade (we just upgraded 3 days ago). Highlights of the upgrade are listed below:
Posted by Denis Ahearn on July 20, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace tonight (7/20/09). This upgrade contains a number of smaller enhancements, changes and bug fixes. The highlights of this upgrade are listed below.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on July 08, 2009
A couple of bugs crept into last night's upgrade (7/7/09), so we decided to do a quick upgrade to take care of them. Details about these bugs can be found at:
http://help.oneplacehome.com/recentchanges#latestupgrade
We've had a few customers ask recently about what draft projects are. We wrote a blog entry about draft projects on this blog back in December of '08, so in case you missed that, here it is again:
http://blog.oneplacehome.com/archives/2008/12/22/featurespotlightdraftprojectsagain/
Finally, we're very interested to hear from our customers about what you would like to see added/changed in OnePlace to help people whose primary role is overseeing projects and reporting project progress. If you've got specific ideas in this area, we want to hear from you! Just use the "Contact Us" link in the upper right corner of OnePlace to send us your feedback.
The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on July 08, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace tonight (7/7/09). We ran into an unexpected issue during the upgrade that caused the maintenance window to be about 2 hours longer than we planned. Everything is back up and running, and no data was lost. We sincerely apologize to anyone who was affected by the outage.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on May 15, 2009
It's hard to believe it's been one whole year already, but today (May 15th, 2009) marks the one year anniversary that we pushed OnePlace out of the nest and let it fly away into cyberspace.
A year ago at this time, we had just completed a big push to get OnePlace ready for beta users. Although the official "Release" launch of OnePlace was in September of 2008, 5/15/08 marks a significant milestone for OnePlace and Riverock Technologies, because it really meant the start of accepting new users via self-service signup, and providing support for them. We also moved OnePlace off our internal servers and onto our present hosting provider at that time.
So for those reasons, we say "Happy 1st Birthday" to OnePlace today!
Posted by Denis Ahearn on May 03, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace on 5/3/09. This upgrade contains some small enhancements requested by customers:
Added the ability to enter up to three custom fields on a task. These fields are useful if you have extra information you'd like to associate with a task. The custom fields are included when exporting tasks, and when generating a Task report.
Added a "project_manager" field to the task export file.
Added the ability for team account administrators to re-send activation emails to people they added to the team account.
For full details of the upgrade, please visit: http://help.oneplacehome.com/recentchanges#latestupgrade
The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 25, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace once again on 4/25/09 to slip in one more sweet feature that didn't make the 4/23 upgrade:
Interact with Discussions via Email - This feature has been asked for by a number of people. You can now configure OnePlace to email you whenever another user posts a message in any of the discussions you are participating in. You can reply to the email, and your new message is added to the discussion! This makes it even easier to participate in your discussions. To learn more about this new feature, please view the Email & Discussions section in the online help.
Email Integration Update - As part of the discussion email addition, we shortened the length of the incoming email addresses. The first part of the email address that identifies the user was 64 characters, which was quite long. We changed this to be just 6 characters long. If you are already using this feature, the longer email addresses still work, and if you're ok with the existing email addresses, there's nothing you need to do. However, if you would like to have the shorter email addresses (we don't blame you), you can get them by performing the following steps:
- Edit your preferences.
- Disable incoming email.
- Save your preferences.
- Edit your preferences again.
- Re-enable incoming email.
- Save your preferences again.
For full details of what's included in this upgrade, please view the Recent Changes in the online help.
The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 24, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace on 4/23/09, and the upgrade includes a couple of nice enhancements that we hope everyone likes:
Workplace Report - If you've ever wanted to get a report for an entire workplace, then you will be happy with this new feature. You can now create a report, similar to the project report, for an entire workplace. One of the cool things with this report, is that it tells you what % complete each of your projects are in that workplace. You can access this report from the Workplace tab on the home page or from the Workplace Dashboard. To learn more about this new feature, please view the Reports section in the online help.
Global Discussions - Team accounts can now create discussions that anyone in the account can participate in. These discussions don't belong to a workplace, and are visible to all account members. It's a great way to hold topical discussions without having to add everyone to a workplace. To learn more about this new feature, please view the Discussions section in the online help.
As usual, there are several other smaller enhancements, changes and bug fixes in this upgrade. For full details of what's included in this upgrade, please view the Recent Changes in the online help.
We also made some changes to the packages and pricing for OnePlace. The good news is that we are not changing the price for existing users at this time.
We enjoy hearing from our users about how we're doing. Feel free to use the "Contact Us" link in the upper right hand corner of OnePlace to send us your feedback. Also, don't forget about the forum (link right next to the Contact Us). It's another great resource for getting help with using OnePlace.
The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 09, 2009
We did a quick upgrade of OnePlace tonight (4/9/09) to take care of a couple of issues that came out of yesterday's upgrade. We managed to slip one small enhancement into this upgrade - when creating a new project, the "Project Manager" field now defaults to the person creating the project. Details about the changes in this upgrade are available in the help at: http://help.oneplacehome.com/recentchanges#latestupgrade
Hopefully many of you have had a chance to watch some or all of the new videos that went live yesterday. We plan to create some "How To" videos next, so if you have any specific topics you'd like to see covered, please let us know.
Thanks, The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 08, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace on 4/8/09, and this upgrade contains some exciting stuff that we can't wait for everyone to start using:
Task Comments - Your team can now hold a focused discussion around a task using the new Task Comments feature. Anyone on your team can post comments, and you can even subscribe to automatically be notified when new comments are posted. To learn more about how task comments work, go to the online help at: http://help.oneplacehome.com/gettingto_know/workmanagement#task_comments
File Versioning - This was something requested often by our users, and now it's here. OnePlace now allows you to upload and track multiple versions of a file. You can check a file in/out to ensure you're the only one who can modify and upload a new version. And just like with tasks, you can now post comments to on a file. To learn more about this cool new feature, go to the online help at: http://help.oneplacehome.com/gettingto_know/files#fileversioning
More Videos! We've produced several more feature-level videos, and even taken things a step further by making them available within different areas of OnePlace. This should really help the on-boarding process for new users, and hopefully existing users will learn a thing or two from them as well. All videos are also available in the online help at: http://help.oneplacehome.com/videos
There are several other smaller enhancements and bug fixes in this upgrade. For full details of what's included in this upgrade, please visit: http://help.oneplacehome.com/videos
We always like to hear from our users about how we're doing, so if you want to give us a pat on the back or pick a bone with us, you can do so using the "Contact Us" link in the upper right hand corner of OnePlace. We welcome any and all feedback!
Posted by Denis Ahearn on March 09, 2009
We upgraded OnePlace tonight (3/9/09) to squash a couple of bugs that snuck past our testers during the previous upgrade. The bugs are listed below:
- Fixed a crash on the Received tab of the inbasket when the page automatically refreshes, and there are no received inbasket notes.
- Fixed a crash on the 'All Tasks' tab of the Home page when you set the filter to 'Scheduled for' and the group by to 'Updated on'.
Neither bug resulted in loss of data. Our apologies if you experienced these issues.
Thanks, The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on February 03, 2009
If you are a project manager looking to get information out of OnePlace, one good way to do this is by generating a Project Details report. This report provides high-level statistical information about how work in the project is progressing, as well as information about things inside the project (i.e. discussions, sub-projects, tasks, files, etc.) A handy use for this report is for quickly checking the health of a project. Another good use is for facilitating status meetings.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on January 27, 2009
One of our users suggested a fantastic idea today for making it easier to navigate a hierarchy of projects, and we'd like to pass along kudos to this person for helping make OnePlace better.
The Projects tab, which displays a hierarchy of projects for a workplace, shows the number of sub-projects that any given project in the hierarchy has (see screenshot below). When you click on the sub-project count, the current behavior is to drill into the project and place you on the Project Dashboard. The new behavior will be to go directly to the Sub-projects tab for that project, eliminating the stop on the Project Dashboard.
We'll be rolling out this enhancement in the next upgrade. This will definitely be a click saver for folks with any kind of complexity in their project plans!
Posted by Denis Ahearn on January 21, 2009
We rolled an upgrade to OnePlace into production tonight (1/21/09). This upgrade contains a few small enhancements to existing features as well as some bug fixes. For full details on what's new in this upgrade, please visit our online Help.
The OnePlace Team
Posted by Denis Ahearn on January 20, 2009
Once in a while someone will ask us why we decided to create OnePlace, especially when you consider the number of other online tools that are available today for helping manage your projects and tasks and for collaborating with others. We have a pretty standard response to that question that I thought would be fun to share in this blog.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on January 14, 2009
Launching a startup was never considered easy. As if developing a business plan, getting funding, and focusing hard on product development wasn't enough, the entrepreneur has to worry about attracting key employees, taxes and benefits, creating a pleasant working environment, and building a culture of teamwork and collaboration.
But today's startups face an even more difficult challenge: working effectively as virtual teams. Almost every startup these days, certainly in my experience, is at least partially made up of dispersed employees—oftentimes in different cities or states, and sometimes even spread across country boundaries. Many startups, at least in the technology field, are made up entirely of individuals in separate locations. How then do they function? How can the entrepreneur possibly succeed with his or her venture if there's no single "place" where employees can regularly meet and work? Email and instant messaging are not the answer—teams become quickly overwhelmed trying to manage their collective work that way.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on December 31, 2008
2008 was a very busy year at Riverock Technologies. Our sole mission during this entire year was to prepare for successfully launching OnePlace into the market. Every day was spent focusing on this goal, which we achieved back in September when we released OnePlace for general use, and officially opened the proverbial doors for business.
So, before we close the books on 2008 and turn our attention towards the year to come, we thought it would be fun to take one last look in the rear view mirror to see what happened to OnePlace during this past year.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on December 22, 2008
OnePlace has a great project management feature that is easy to overlook unless you go looking for it or just happen to stumble across it — the ability to create draft projects. A draft project is a project that is only visible to the person creating it. No other members of the team that this person belongs to will see this project or have access to it or any of its sub-projects and tasks within OnePlace. It's like the project simply doesn't exist to those team members.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on December 12, 2008
One of the keys of effective team collaboration is what we like to call staying in-the-know. Knowing what your teammates have done, are doing, and plan to do is crucial for making sure that your efforts align properly with those of your team.
Unfortunately, keeping informed is not easy. Think about the team you're on right now. How many members does it have? How many initiatives is your team tackling right now? How much new information does your team receive on a daily basis? How much of what you knew yesterday will change today? Did you lose a team member yesterday? Did you gain a new one today? I could go on, but you get the point. Keeping track of all those things is difficult, and you need help.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on December 02, 2008
In a recent upgrade, we introduced the ability to perform a "Save As" on a project or list, which provides an easy way to make a complete copy of an original project or list. Since the way we added this feature to OnePlace is a tad bit on the subtle side, we thought it would be a good idea to highlight the this cool new feature here on our OnePlace blog.
So why the need to copy a project or a list? Well, here's just one of the many possible uses.
Suppose your team uses OnePlace to collaborate and share information related to your customers, and you've decided you want a project for each of your existing customers, as well as any new customers that come along in the future. And, each time you bring on a new customer, you don't want all the overhead associated with spinning up a project for that customer . Here's where project "Save As" comes to the rescue. Simply create a "New Customer" project in a workplace that makes sense for your team, and then use it as a template for all new customer projects.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on November 24, 2008
In the two years that we've been focusing on providing a solution to the problems that teams face when collaborating on complex projects, it never ceases to amaze me how often we bump into people who tell us they basically use nothing more than email and instant messaging to collaborate on projects. When we meet new people related to what we do here at Riverock Technologies, we like to ask them about the tools they are currently using on their team to help them manage projects and collaborate on doing those projects. Time and time again the answer we hear, delivered with a somewhat sheepish expression, is email. Of course, we also hear of tools such as Microsoft Project and Sharepoint being used, but clearly it's in the minority. When we ask follow up questions on the usage of those tools, we usually find out they're not really being used by the people doing the actual work. Most if not all collaboration happens using email.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on November 07, 2008
One of the big benefits of using OnePlace on my iPhone, is how it allows me to quickly get up to speed in the morning on my commute to work, so that when I walk into the office, I'm already current with what's happened since the day before. This has been a huge time saver for me, because I don't need to spend any more time going through my email, unread discussions, inbasket items or team pulses before starting my work for the day. I'm up-to-date and ready to get things done.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on October 31, 2008
Much of the attention on OnePlace centers around all the great collaborative features that enable members of a team to plan out projects and execute on them. However, another cool feature within OnePlace is the Lists feature, which allows teams and individuals to keep track of things using a structured list. Lists are one of the things in OnePlace that work equally well for solo users as they do for teams.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on October 08, 2008
In an earlier article on this blog, we discussed how using the scheduling capabilities within OnePlace to determine what you should work on today is a powerful way to help you focus and gain increased productivity. Another way to focus within OnePlace, which ties in nicely with scheduling your work, are contexts.
Contexts is a concept that has been popularized by the "Getting Things Done" philosophy from David Allen. The main idea behind them is to identify the things you can do now, given your current location and situation, and filter out the things you can't do now. Maximizing your productivity relies on your ability to focus.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 25, 2008
The office water cooler is the traditional place within a company where co-workers mingle informally and talk about things like "Did you hear Joe was promoted?", or, "Wow, what an ending to the game last night, huh?". It's an integral part of the social aspect of working in an office environment, and a great way to share ideas, ask questions, or just connect up with others.
But what if you don't work in the same office as most of your colleagues? Suppose you work from home, work from a remote office, or travel for business the majority of your time? You tend to miss out on a lot of informal discussion that occurs naturally within the four walls of the office.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 23, 2008
If you have been using OnePlace in a team environment, hopefully you have been enjoying its collaborative features to cut down on the number of face-to-face meetings required to talk about status and to find out where everyone is at with their assignments. In an earlier article on this blog, we talked about the power of the Discussions feature and how it helps your team stay out of the conference room, and stay on track.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 17, 2008
If you've been using OnePlace for some time, or have really gotten into using workplaces to help your team get organized, you may have built up large number of workplaces in the workplace navigator on your Home page. Here are some tips for helping you manage a large number of worklplaces, so you can quickly find the workplace you are interested in.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 11, 2008
Discussions are one of my favorite features in OnePlace. We use them in our daily work here at Riverock to discuss anything from development issues, to marketing strategies, to what everyone likes for snacks in the office. They have become an indispensable tool in the office.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 09, 2008
If you are a power user of a desktop application like Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, a text editor, etc., then you have probably mastered some if not all of the keyboard shortcuts/hot-keys offered by that application for performing routine actions without the aide of your mouse. Undoubtedly if you use keyboard shortcuts in your favorite desktop applications, you are more productive as a result.
And if you've used many web applications, most likely you've gotten used to not having keyboard shortcuts to do anything beyond simple navigation of form controls and using the ENTER key to submit a form. Web applications have traditionally ignored this extremely valuable user productivity feature, instead forcing you to click all over the place and wear out the batteries in your wireless mouse.