Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 16, 2010
How you feel about a software application has as much to do with how the software looks as it does with how the software acts. I've used desktop and web applications in the past that functionally got the job done, but using the user interface of those applications was like nails on a chalkboard for me. Because I didn't care for how the application looked, it tainted my overall user experience and satisfaction of the app.
Posted by Denis Ahearn on September 09, 2010
Today's "Did You Know" highlights the capability within OnePlace for interacting with your discussions using email. If you're like me, then you have OnePlace running all day long on your computer, and you check it regularly for new messages and updates. You see new messages almost as soon as they are posted.
Well, not everyone works this way. Some people prefer to start up OnePlace, check for updates, and then shut it down, and they do this a few times a day when it's convenient for them. Perhaps this is how you like to work. Well, what happens when someone posts a message in a discussion that you belong to, but you don't notice it for a few hours or worse, a few days? Probably not the best thing.
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 Steve Kickert on September 29, 2009
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:
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 Steve Kickert on March 08, 2009
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
Posted by Mark Peterson on December 10, 2008
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.
Posted by Steve Kickert on September 06, 2008
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:
Posted by Steve Kickert on August 25, 2008
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