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 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 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 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 Dana Larson on January 25, 2010
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.
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 Mark Peterson on November 21, 2008
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.
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 Mark Peterson on October 29, 2008
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.
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.
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 28, 2008
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.
Posted by Steve Kickert on August 26, 2008
There is a fine line between checking for new messages too little and too often. If you check for them too little you run the risk of missing out on an important discussion and note. If you were critical to the discussion then you run the risk of interrupting the communication flow of the team.
Check them too often and you will get nothing else done. This is nothing new to you if you already use email.