The OnePlace team is dedicated to using OnePlace to help organize our professional and personal lives. And if we weren’t, what kind of advocates would we be for our small business solution?

Since joining the team, I have become increasingly aware of the intricacies of OnePlace and all the cool features that make this solution great. I want to take this time to point out some of these great features in OnePlace to aid some of our current customers in using OnePlace to its fullest extent.

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Do you ever have those days where you were really busy, but didn’t end up getting anything accomplished? Or when you can’t overlook the amount of work you have to complete, so you just don’t do anything?

The team at OnePlace knows how important it is to keep on top of your goals to get work accomplished. Heck, that is why OnePlace was created! We believe that task management and team collaboration can improve the efficiency of any small business team and make them more productive.

Here are some easy to follow tips for improving your business productivity:

1. Schedule Your Work - Outlining exactly what you have to accomplish each day and managing your tasks gives you a nice visual of all your work, and allows you to choose which to work on next. And nothing beats the feeling of checking things off your to do list! (read a blog post on scheduling here)
2. Take Notes - Have you ever left a meeting and forgotten your next steps? Take notes when in meetings, on the phone or anytime they pop into your mind. This saves time by not having to revisit the conversations later.
3. Organize Your Workspace - A chaotic workspace can distract you from the work at hand. Make sure your desk and computer desktop are neat and organized prior to beginning your work.
4. Open the Doors of Collaboration - Brainstorming with team members is a powerful tool. So is the opportunity to run an idea by a coworker to see if you’re on the right track. Team collaboration tools help to open the doors and keep team members connected all day.
5. Love Your Job - If you don’t like your job, you are automatically going to suck at it. Make sure that you are doing the best for your boss and yourself by finding the right job for you. If it helps, take a career assessment to find out what skills match your personality best.
6. Know When to Procrastinate - Procrastination is one of the worst time-sucks in the workplace - but there is a time and place to procrastinate. By managing your tasks, you can complete what you feel like completing, and move the other items out to another time.
7. Attack the Big Rocks - There are some tasks, however, that need to be worked on right away. Start working on those “big rocks” first thing in the morning. Once you get them done, you’ll feel more accomplished for the day.
8. Delegate to Team Members - If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the work in front of you, ask a coworker for a bit of help. Taking 5 minutes to reassign a task and explain it to someone else will free up a lot of task time for you to accomplish everything else.
9. Exercise - A mid-day heart rate boost can increase productivity for the afternoon. If you can’t do jumping jacks in your office, a lunchtime walk works just as well.
10. Keep Team Members in the Loop - By sharing your to do list with coworkers, you are instantly held accountable for completing that work. Ensure you are using a team collaboration solution that offers transparency and allows team members to see other’s work easily to manage that accountability.
11. Eliminate Distractions - Get rid of email, Twitter, Facebook, and other distractions on your computer and get to work. Without the distractions of questions, tweets and status updates, you will find yourself working harder on your task list.
12. Work When You’re Productive - There are always going to be times in the day when you are more productive than others. For me, it’s first thing in the morning. Identify these times for yourself, and plan your work accordingly.
13. Just Do It - Sometimes the best way to get stuff done is to start working. Get to work and see how much you can do :-)

Being aware of what you have to accomplish can help push you get more done. Learn what tools help you work more efficiently and continue to use them to wow your boss and feel good about your work.

What other tools do you use to keep productive?

With business expanding and OnePlace continuing to grow, we are pleased to bring on Dana Larson as the new Marketing Manager on the Riverock team!

Originally from Wisconsin (Go Packers!) Dana attended college at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and graduated with a degree in Strategic Communications and a love for marketing.

For nearly 3 years after graduation, Dana worked at the Twin Cities internet marketing firm TopRank Online Marketing as their Search Marketing Supervisor. Her role at TopRank included everything from executing keyword research to social media marketing to developing and implementing client marketing strategies and back again.

When not marketing and promoting OnePlace, Dana loves to take naps, eat pizza dipped in ranch dressing, travel and spend time with her family.

We are excited to have Dana as a part of our team and look forward to the business growing even more!

OnePlace is growing and we cannot keep up with all the work. So, we are looking for a rock star Marketing Assistant to join the team.

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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.

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The maintenance window will start at 9:30 PM CST and go until 11:30 PM CST.

Stay tuned for the details.

As you may already know, OnePlace had a short outage yesterday. The outage lasted for about 15 minutes.
The good news was that the issue was not related to the OnePlace software. It turns out that an automated configuration took place on an upstream hardware device and that configuration did not go as planned. We are still investigating what actually broke but it did knock OnePlace and several other websites off the air for a short period of time. Our hosting provider, Engine Yard, is reviewing the root cause of the issue and will make whatever changes are necessary to ensure that this issue does not occur again.
Please accept our apologizes for any inconvenience this has caused you or your team.

The OnePlace Team

OnePlace is currently offline. Our hosting provider is having an issue with a router. We are in contact with them and they are working on the issue.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We will keep you posted here and in the forum and/or the

We upgraded OnePlace again tonight. One of the benefits of web software is that we can improve the software as often as necessary with little to no impact to our customers. We took advantage of this benefit again tonight.
This release was almost entirely bug fixes. If you would like to see exactly what was fixed please see the release notes here.

After three solid months of work, the NEW and MUCH improved version of OnePlace shipped today.

I would like to thank all our customers for helping us make OnePlace a success and for giving us your valuable feedback. Hopefully, you will see some of your great ideas implemented in this new version.

Click here to check out the new OnePlace.
Click here to see the complete release notes

Regards,
The OnePlace Team

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A maintenance window has been scheduled for the OnePlace on Sunday, October 25th from 8:00 AM CDT until 12:00 PM CDT.

During the maintenance, we will be upgrading OnePlace and making some adjustments to the host environment.

We are getting close. We have been working on a major upgrade for OnePlace for over two months now, and we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are hoping it is not a train. :-)

Back in July, we met with many of you to get your feedback on how OnePlace was working for your team, and to hear what you would like to change about OnePlace. Thanks again for taking the time to do that. We listened carefully, and have made some big changes and a mountain of little ones to OnePlace as a result. We can hardly wait to let you move into your new OnePlace. We are excited to use it ourselves.

Here is an abbreviated list of the changes that are coming:

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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:

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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.

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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

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.

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I just read an article that was published on the Sandhill.com blog that I thought was so close to our view of SaaS that I thought I would share it with you.

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We upgraded OnePlace tonight (5/18/09) at 9:30pm CDT. This upgrade contains two enhancements requested recently by users:

• If you are a member of a team account, you can now view and change your current status from any page within OnePlace. Your status is now displayed in the upper left hand corner of the page, right below the OnePlace logo. Please note that the "Sign Out" link has moved into the navigation menu in the upper right hand corner of the page.

• We added the "Due Next Week" filter to all views that display tasks, including the Calendar, My Schedule tab of the Home page, and Tasks tab within a workplace. This filter was previously only available on the Deadlines tab of the Home page.

Please keep the great suggestions coming!

The OnePlace Team

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!

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Hello,

We upgraded OnePlace on 5/05/09. We discovered an issue with the 'Project Save As' feature that crept in with a previous upgrade that we wanted to correct. We also added a couple of smaller enhancements requested recently by users.

For complete details of the upgrade, please go to http://help.oneplacehome.com/recentchanges#latestupgrade

Regards, The OnePlace Team

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

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:

For full details of what's included in this upgrade, please view the Recent Changes in the online help.

The OnePlace Team

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

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

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!

We have some exciting news! We have started adding instructional videos to the Help section. This has been long overdue and requested by just about everyone that we have talked to. There are two types of videos: 1) Overviews that walk through PowerPoint presentations to provide overall context of OnePlace design in terms of how to navigate, structure, and communicate within OnePlace; and 2) Feature-specific demonstrations of OnePlace usage.

You can watch them here:

You can see from the Video page in Help that we have plans for many more videos. We are busy creating them right now. So please check back often for new videos. We will send updates as we publish them.

The OnePlace Team

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

Hello,

We upgraded OnePlace on 3/8/09 at 9:00pm CDT.

This upgrade is comprised of just about 100% customer-requested features and enhancements. The highlights include:

• Project Enhancements - We added a start date, project manager and priority for projects.

• Daily Update Email - You can now configure OnePlace to send you an email with your scheduled tasks for the day, and also the Projects and Tasks that have a deadline in the next seven days.

• Configurable System Notifications - You can now configure which system notifications you will receive. An example of a system notification is the inbasket note/email you receive when someone assigns you to a task.

• Inbasket Enhancements - We spent quite a bit of time improving the inbasket. OnePlace now allows you to see what inbasket notes you have sent to others. We also added additional actions that you can perform on the inbasket, such as marking all the inbasket notes as read, or emptying your inbasket with a single click.

The list goes on and on, so please check out the rest of the enhancements and bug fixes in the Recent Changes section of the Online Help.

Don't forget to check out the OnePlace forum. It is a great place to interact with other OnePlace users. Feel free to ask questions or just share a tip or idea for OnePlace. It is a resource for you.

Please keep the suggestions coming!

Thanks, The OnePlace Team

Hello,

We upgraded OnePlace on 2/15/09 at 9:00pm CST.

We are excited to announce the OnePlace Dashboard. This is a desktop client that allows you to use Team Pulse without having to open up your browser. It has a very useful notification feature that informs you of a new Pulses via a popup notification window. You may have already seen the advertisement for it in Team Central. You can read more about it in the online Help.

One other change that we want to make you aware of is how we updated Time Tracking for Tasks. When you are tracking time for a task and set the status to In Progress, OnePlace will automatically start a timer. Then when you complete the task you will be prompted to apply the elapsed time to the task. There's no need to manually keep track of time for tasks. You can read more about it in the online Help.

Check out the rest of the enhancements and bug fixes in the Recent changes section of the online Help.

Don't forget to check out the

We rolled an upgrade to OnePlace into production today (2/1/09). This upgrade contains numerous 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

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!

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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TAH-DAH! We completed another upgrade to OnePlace™ over the weekend! To be precise, it happened on 12/21/08 at 7:30am CST. As you know, we push updates to OnePlace™ approximately once a week—and, in some recent weeks, we've done it even more often that that. We love listening to our customers!

What's the major addition this time? A OnePlace™ "Customer Forum"! It gives you a convenient way to communicate not only with the OnePlace team, but with other OnePlace™ customers as well! Check out this new feature today by simply clicking on the 'Forum' link in the upper righthand corner of your OnePlace™ screen. Or, you can visit the forum directly by going to the following url: http://forum.oneplacehome.com.

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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.

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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.

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When we say the OnePlace™ team is ever-vigilant, folks, we're not just a whistlin' Dixie. The dedicated development team here at OnePlace's worldwide headquarters (half buried in snow here in suburban Minneapolis), never rests—constantly stretching their minds for new ways they can make your favorite software better. They never let up in their quest to help you take maximum advantage of OnePlace to boost your team's productivity. Not only did they push an update on December 8, but dog-gone if they didn't follow that with yet another one on December 10! Here's what these two updates included...

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In real life, we all squirrel away stuff that we don't use regularly in closets and throw stuff that we don't need away in the trash (except children and college students, who just seem to keep everything on the floor).

In our Internet lives, we need to do the same thing, store some information and throw other information away. OnePlace supports these needs through Archive and Trash (for you children and college students, we're still working on a Floor).

The OnePlace archive is accessed via the 'safe' icon in the OnePlace toolbar and can be thought of as your OnePlace closet. You can put items in the archive that you only need occasionally and/or information that you may want to review again at a later date. Stuff that you put in the archive stays there forever unless you take it out again or move it into the trash.

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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.

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One thing we can say about our crack development team, they are ever-vigilant. They upgraded OnePlace™ again on 11/23/08 at 7:30am CST—even though it's been less than a week since the last upgrade! The OnePlace™ team added several enhancements that have been requested by nearly everyone. Here are the highlights of this latest upgrade:

• Project "Save As" - Now you can make a copy of a project!
• List "Save As" - Make as many copies of a list as you want.
• New Bookmarks List type - Share your bookmarks with your teammates, or just keep all your favorite bookmarks in one place.
• Export Tasks preview - If you're using the Export Tasks capability, then you will love this new capability.
• TeamPulse filter update - There are now separate settings for determining: 1) who you're pulsing to, and 2) which pulses do you want to see?

That last feature will strike a chord with Twitter users! (It's part of our recently announced TeamCentral capability.) First, you can actually select who you want following you (something you can't do in Twitter). Secondly, you can select which of your team members you want to follow (same as in Twitter)—so that you're sure to see all their ongoing updates, or "pulses" as we say in OnePlace™ lingo. Best of all, it's easy for you to adjust either of these selections anytime via this TeamPulse "filter."

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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.

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Over the weekend, we were honored to be included in an article in the PioneerPress, one of two major dailies in these parts (and one whose circulation is actually growing). It appeared in Sunday's business section: "Private Twitter-like microblogging services can facilitate communication, cooperation among employees working on the same team or project." The writer was longtime local technology reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata, who also happens to be one of the most plugged-in reporters in the country in the ways of social media, including Twitter (he's even written a book, just being released: "Twitter Means Business").

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When working with your data in OnePlace, you may have noticed a piece of data labelled 'id' in many places and wondered “What the heck is that?” Well, maybe not, but while ID's might be boring, they can make using OnePlace a whole lot quicker and easier.

All of the main data objects (projects, lists, tasks, notes, etc.) in OnePlace have a numeric ID associated with them. This ID is unique for the type of object it is associated with. So, for example, both a discussion and a note can have the ID 49, but two discussions cannot both have the ID 49.

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This past Wednesday evening, Riverock Technologies' fearless cofounders, Steve Kickert and Denis Ahearn, took to the stage at Minnesota's own quarterly Barcamp event to demo the OnePlace™ app in the strictly proscribed time of seven minutes. And deliver it well they did—one of ten presentations to a standing-room-only, information-hungry crowd of developers, founders, VCs and other investors, marketing folks, local media, and tech bloggers, all jam-packed into the theater at Intermedia Arts in Uptown Minneapolis. It was one high-energy event focused on technology innovation in MInnesota, in the form of ten hand-picked, highly promising startups. (In the photo, Steve does the talking, while Denis mans the controls in the foreground. Photo credit: Manish Shrestha.)

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In case you haven't noticed yet, we upgraded OnePlace™ yesterday (11/16/08) at 10:45pm CST. It's been nearly two weeks since our last upgrade, but we're sure that, once you see what's in this upgrade, you'll agree the wait was worth it! Here are some highlights:

• The recently announced "TeamCentral" feature just got B-I-G-G-E-R and better! We added two more functions we call TeamSchedule and TeamActivities. (If you're keeping count, that's three functions with TeamPulse!) TeamSchedule is a view into the upcoming work for your team, letting you know what things your teammates have planned. It supports lots of different timeframes, so you can see work that's scheduled for yesterday, today, tomorrow, this week, next week, etc. TeamActivities allows you to see the trail of work that your teammates leave as they work throughout the day. That means you no longer have to guess at what work has been completed. We also enhanced TeamPulse to allow you to direct your pulses. You can pulse to everyone you collaborate with, to a select team (i.e., a Workplace), or to just a single individual. You pulse, and we keep track of it all! (If you're a Twitter fan, remember that pulse=tweet (or update)... but one big difference is that OnePlace™ does automatic, system-generated pulses/updates as well!)

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New to OnePlace™? Ready to dive in and get get going? Well, do we have a great place for you to start! It's our new "Quick Reference" page—which is instantly accessible via a link in the upper right of your OnePlace™ user interface. (Of course, first you must start a free trial to see it!) We designed it to help you get a good feel for what OnePlace™ is all about, and how you can get the most from it. No other online collaboration software has such a feature! Just another way we show our love for our users... :-)

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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.

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In this day and age, many of us spend at least part of our mental bandwidth worrying about global warming, recycling, carbon footprints, carbon debts, and greenhouse gases. It's amazing to think that, only a few short years ago, most of these terms weren't even part of our vernacular and now they're part of our daily lives.

When thinking of ways to make ourselves more eco-friendly, software isn't usually the first thing that springs to mind. However, using the right software as part of your work and personal routine can indeed reduce your carbon footprint. How so? Mainly by reducing your need to travel.

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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.

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We've blogged before about private workplaces, one of the key features of OnePlace. (See “Just give me a little privacy” by Steve Kickert) We here at Riverock use our private workplaces to manage our personal lives every day, so I thought I'd share some of our favorite uses of this powerful tool for managing your private life.

The OnePlace private workplace lets you unleash the full power of a top of the line project management tool on your private life. You can build projects and tasks for managing your personal todo's and you can store files, lists, and notes to track information that is valuable to you. All the information stored in your private workplace is visible only to you.

I, personally, get a lot of use out of the lists feature of my private workplace. For example, I have running lists for items I need at the home improvement store and static lists of items that I'll need at the next boy scout camp. The information in your private workplace is available on your mobile device, so I maintain my lists on my Mac and use my iPhone to check off the items as I shop.

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We're excited to announce that the Riverock team will be one of a handful of startups presenting at the next quarterly gathering of developers, investors, and other movers-and-shakers in our state's technology community. Steve Kickert and Denis Ahearn will be demoing our OnePlace™ collaboration app in the strict time limit imposed on all presenters—only seven minutes! (Yes, with a full-featured app like ours, this will be a challenge!) All presenters must show real, working software—and the only other rule is no Powerpoint! It all takes place the evening of November 12 at Intermedia Arts, Uptown’s coolest art gallery/performance space...

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Joel Dreyfuss has a long history as a journalist; he's a well respected voice in the industry. In his current position as editor-in-chief of Red Herring, he's carrying on the mission of a very famous brand name in technology journalism, which traces back to 1993 and is now in its second coming as a source of news about innovation, technology, financing, and entrepreneurial activity.

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Can project management, or even simply writing a task list, make you an innovator?

That really depends.

In your career, or in your home life, how are you managing your projects and creating your task lists?

Are you writing garbled notes on a calendar or post-it note? Are you creating mental checklists in your already overloaded brain?

Or, like we did at online marketing firm Misukanis & Odden, are you building massive Excel documents designed to contain every last detail, of every last project of every last task - yet invariably - always seem to neglect one or two crucial nuggets?

In the video below, Susan, Thomas & I introduce you to the new level of project management innovation we have discovered in implementing the OnePlace Chaos Management Solution, as we continue to take you through A Day in The Life of our agency.

Minnov8.com is a news and information site about Minnesota innovation in Internet and web technology. Its About page tells the story: "Borne out of a frustration that there wasn’t a showcase for the talent, brainpower, creativity, and innovation that exists in this Land of 10,000 Lakes, several geeks set forth on a quest to deliver a destination site for just such a purpose." Steve Borsch is the lead geek, and the most frequent writer on the site. Some weeks ago, he met with Riverock's CEO Steve Kickert to learn more about the OnePlace™ online team collaboration and work management system, and later wrote an excellent piece about it.

Perhaps the best excerpt from the Minnov8 article is this one: "What did I like about OnePlace?" Borsch asked. "It’s easy to use and, within 15 minutes, I’d used most of the key features that enabled project/task management; time tracking; reporting; calendar; discussions; file sharing; notes; lists and more. I loved the iPhone interface. Connecting what we do on our desktop computers or laptops to internet/web server functionality 'in the cloud' isn’t enough when we carry around devices like an iPhone..."

Borsch concluded his article this way: "I’d encourage you to go to OnePlace and sign up for the free trial. You’ll undoubtedly see that it already has hit the sweet spot of what’s needed to collaborate with others. If you’re waiting until risk-becomes-reality and you or your company can’t go into the office and you need to collaborate virtually — or even if you figure you’ll just keep emailing around .doc’s and spreadsheets to those with whom you’re collaborating — OnePlace is an offering that is perfect for today’s increasingly mobile and always-on, always-connected workforce collaborating with one another online."

Our local business weekly here in Minneapolis/St. Paul, The Business Journal, regularly reports on promising new startups. Recently, tech reporter Kathy Grayson, in her weekly column, interviewed Steve Kickert about Riverock's OnePlace™ online team collaboration and work management system. An excerpt: "The product offers a Web portal where employees working on group projects can find files, schedules and other information, as well as communicate. It also allows workers to collaborate across different organizations, and access data via mobile phones."

The article goes on to note that OnePlace™ users also get a private personal workplace online "where they can track their outside-of-work schedules. That’s a feature Riverock hopes will make the tool more appealing to workers, who sometimes view mandated collaboration tools as a hassle, said CEO Steve Kickert, who served as chief technology officer at HighJump for 16 years." Our local edition of The Business Journal has a paid circulation of about 12,000 for the print version, and its web site gets more than 137,000 unique visitors monthly, according to recent reports.

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.

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I have been invited to be on a panel at this years Defrag Conference. The title of the panel is "Re-imagining the metaphors behind collaborative tools". I am looking forward to it.

"Defrag is focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the "aha" moment, and is a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, and thinkers that are building the next wave of software innovation."

If you are going let me know and we can connect.

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.

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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.

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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.

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An exchange between two OnePlace users via IM. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

I thought you would get a kick out of reading it.

[15:03] Peter Gibbons: Am I really going to "enjoy using OnePlace in all facets of my life"? that sounds promising and scary at the same time
[15:06] Joanna: Yes, yes you will.
[15:06] Joanna: And you'll drink the Kool-Aid.
[15:06] Peter Gibbons: Not enjoying it so far... just created my account and it's telling me I already have 3 projects due in the next week and 2 overdue...great, more work!!!
[15:06] Joanna: It's BlackBerry friendly.
[15:06] Peter Gibbons: nice
[15:07] Joanna: suggestion: modify the deadlines at will... see if Bill even notices.
[15:07] Peter Gibbons: will try that

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.

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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.

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Scheduling your work is something that seems so obvious to me now that I am surprised that every productivity application does not do this. The concept is so simple that it is often overlooked. This feature is crucial in helping me manage the chaos in my entire life.
Most people already use a calendar to schedule all their appointments. Some even go so far as to schedule blocks of time for getting their own work done. However, I have yet to meet anyone (other than other OnePlace users of course) who actually plans "when" they are going to do each task on their list. There are countless side effects of not scheduling your work. Here are just a few:

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Our firm, Misukanis & Odden, is certainly no stranger to the chaos that can ensue if just one team member misses one small (yet critical) piece of a conversation involving a project. Hence marketing's "butterfly effect."

In our video below, Thomas McMahon and I walk through OnePlace's discussion feature, and illustrate how this team collaboration will help to minimize the 30-second heart attacks we can all feel when we realize a team member has not been included in a critical conversation.

One of the features that was on our MUST HAVE list since the very beginning of OnePlace was that it had to work in our personal life as well as at work.

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Greetings,

OnePlace was recently upgraded with some new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug fixes. Listed below are some of the highlights of this upgrade. For a complete listing of all changes in this upgrade, please visit the Recent Changes section of the OnePlace Help

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Hello,
I am Steve Kickert the CEO of Riverock Technologies. I would like to personally welcome you to this blog.

The OnePlace team is super excited about OnePlace and are anxious to start sharing with you what we are up to. We are going to be posting to this blog in several categories. Some categories will be more lively than others due to their nature.
For example, we are planning on posts regarding OnePlace product news, best practices, Chaos Management, tips and tricks and Customer stories. I am sure there will be a few more but that gives you a flavor for what this blog is about.

The first post is going to be from our marketing firm Misukanis and Odden. They were doing a Project Management selection when we first met them and they decided to add OnePlace to their list of candidates. We are excited that they selected us. I will let them explain their reasons for choosing OnePlace.
Enjoy.