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You may have seen the ad for Wrike go into the sidebar a while back, as they have become a sponsor of HD BizBlog, in providing me with a Pro user account. I have been using the service for some of my distributed tasks and I like it very much.

Here is a brief [and edited] overview of the features and benefits of this e-mail based project manager, from their website, followed my my own actual observations.

If you send an e-mail with a task, you risk that it might be forgotten. Not with Wrike. Simply add wrike@wrike.com to the recipients of your e-mail, and Wrike will keep track of the task for you.

Wrike is a Web application, so you do not need to download or install anything.

So you start with one e-mail, then you add more tasks, and the time comes to organize them. [….] You need a tool that adapts to the way you think about your tasks. This is why we have to innovate and combine two powerful approaches to fit your needs.

In Wrike, groups combine the power of tags and hierarchies. So you can organize tasks hierarchically, just like you organize files on the hard drive. You can build as many hierarchies as you want, and they may overlap. […]

You add new groups along the way when you feel they are needed. You can always change, delete or reorganize them. So the system adapts to you over time. This whole concept of “emerging structures” is very powerful. […] Wrike lets you collaborate.

Collaboration

Team-based planning and organization is what Wrike is all about.

This past fall I got the opportunity to work on a big, long-distance project with my wife - that is, moving from North Carolina to Maine. She left on the 5th of October to start her new job, and I followed on the 21st.

During that time, she began a hunt for a new place to live, and kept me up to date via the “Apartment Hunt” group (Wrike uses the label “Group” for what I would call a Project, more on this below) we started on Wrike. I was also able to spend some time online, searching various apartment listings and adding information to the Task list. When my wife would visit an apartment, she would then update that particular Task with her impressions and any other pertinent information.

There is an excellent post on the Wrike Blog about how to set up these Groups, provide access to different team members, and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. “Groups” becomes a much more flexible and powerful term that just “Project” and will help you think in a larger way about your activities. As I have expanded my use of Wrike, and included more team members, I have found a tremendous amount of value in being able to tag Tasks to more than one Group.

…you can create the “Decoration,” “Design,” “Furnituring” and “Lighting” groups. If the client Brown&Co places a new order for decoration and furnituring, you can create an appropriate task and include it in both “Brown&Co,” “Decoration” and “Furnituring” groups. The task will be automatically shared with the representatives of the Brown company, your decoration and furnituring teams. The same rule applies to other orders.

What is great, when the responsible party updates the task, marking it as completed, adding comments or updating the due date, your client is instantly informed about the order process. You don’t need to spend time on creating special reports for your clients.

Automatic Updates

How does this work in reality? When I added an apartment for my wife to look at, or scheduled an appointment, Wrike would automatically send an e-mail to my wife with the complete update information. Likewise, when she would visit the potential site, and log her comments, I would get an e-mail with the new content. This made it very easy to keep each other updated as to the status of the search, and keep all of the information about each apartment in a handy summary, yet separate from the other locations.We were even able to upload photos of the various properties into the Tasks, so that I could see what these places looked like inside.

The Power of E-mail

Some of the more powerful features of Wrike include:

• E-mail access to your projects and tasks.
• Even though I only have the one account, I can allow access to an unlimited number of people to access and work on Groups and Tasks that they have been assigned to. Varying levels of Pro accounts provide up to 100 power users.
• Security is maintained, because these other users do not have access to any Tasks that they are not assigned to.
• Each user has one universal login, no matter how many Tasks or Groups that person in involved in. This allows for sharing of tasks between different accounts, even in different organizations.
• Every Task for each Group can be listed together in one column (sortable by who is assigned, due date, or status of completion) or in a “timeline” that shows start, due date, and duration.
• Documents can be attached to each Task, and there is room for a directive on each Task and Group that will notify the users involved if changes have been made.

Highlights

The unlimited users feature is definitely one of Wrike’s strongest. As a person who does not have a lot of group-interactive work to manage, I tend to have more of the one-off projects that require a short period of collaboration between users in different parts of the world. You can create a Project (Group) and a task by email.

I also like the automatic updates and the feature of uploading and attaching a document as part of a task. Each time this document is downloaded and changed, the user can upload the new version and a record is created that retains each successive version. Each Group can have all of the data needed for the project’s completion right at hand, whether it is a text file, a spreadsheet, or even images.

Drawbacks and Suggestions

There are some weaknesses, real and perceived, that I have encountered in this system. First, the term Group is used where I thought that Project or Folder would be more appropriate. Continued use, and a few conversations with the Wrike team gave me a larger perspective on the term. I will likely begin to apply this approach to my analog filing system!

A real weakness is in the definition of Tasks, as there is no differentiation between types of tasks (i.e. Meeting, Action, Appointment, etc). This could be resolved with color-coding or an icon that would indicate what kind of Task you were looking at.

What Wrike is Not

Wrike is not an online version of your organizer. It will not replace Outlook or your calendar for everyday appointments or lists of Next Actions (although a calendar-view is coming). It is not a wiki that is wide-open for groups of people to access and edit.

What Wrike is - a non-linear filing system for helping teams of people get projects done together by increasing communication and cross-referencing the “to-do” lists.

Overall Wrike is a Powerful Tool

Wrike is fun to use, quick-loading, and easy to input your data. I know that the development team is working hard on some new updates,like adding Priorities, Task Dependency and Custom Status fields, so it will be interesting to see how they address the above opportunities for increasing your abilities.

I am not going to stop using my pencil-and-paper organizer for my day-to-day work, but Wrike makes getting projects done much easier, multi-step and multi-participant projects especially. I will be using Wrike for a couple of big, long-term projects that I have in the works (state secret for now). I love the “timeline” view that lets me see the tasks and what order they need to be addressed. Check it out, I do not think that you will be disappointed.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6ltos8. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen