One of my dreams (and I believe, of many) is to somehow get time recording to be done easily from where I like to leave traces of my woring activity. Being a developer and a marketing man, my activity is recorded in Subversion commits and Twitter twits. Now from these there cannot be an automated filling of time sheets (it's not that simple), but it would be nice when filingl time to be somehow "surrounded" by your traces; well, now teamwork 4 does exactly that. Try it yourself here, using for example worklog day, or the worklog imports.

P.S. Teamwork does much more than that: you can link projects to SVN folders, export your worlogs to Twitter, ... .

This is our roadmap for Teamwork for 2009, after a splendid 2008 of constant growth:

1. Release teamwork 4 (really close); you can already try the beta here.

2. Build a personal productivity application that will use Teamwork as a backoffice (yes, this is a new idea - we'll blog more on this in coming weeks).

3. Teamwork online service - make it better.

Do you want to use your project management software online or in an internal server? We, up to a few years ago, nobody would dream of using such an intimate service online. But things have changed,

99% of customers currently use Teamwork on a local installation. or on their host For the moment, Teamwork 4 beta can be used only in a local installation. A local installation gives you more control, but also more maintenance burden.

In fact, we currently openly discourage to use Teamwork online service other than for testing, and we redirect customers to their hosting services to get a "closer" installation; that because we are aware that our online service is not great; its about ok to give a try to Teamwork 3, but a local installation is better, faster, richer in features, and last but not least lets you play with integration with services.

We are aware that the software as a service model is getting really very popular; we'll revamp our online service after release of version 4. We are now (January 2009) totally focused in releasing version 4, mainly for your local installations.

So our suggestion is for the moment is try Teamwork will a local installation: the installation process now is really simple. But in 2009, you will also get a concrete, fast and reliable option to use it online on our servers: it is one of our targets.



We have more in mind, but already meeting these three targets won't be easy. So life keeps being interesting here!

Everybody is different; and everybody wants to work differently. One of the problems when trying to organize work, maybe also by introducing a management tool, is that you have to find a way to meet different needs.

The low access level and absence of security checks of social tools is one of the reasons why they are easy to accept in a working team, but of course they have limitations which will emerge even after a short time.

An answer may seem be to adopt an application with a minimal set of features, so that everybody will agree on using those; but actually this is a way of temporarily hiding the problem, because work management involves a lot of kinds of different actions, and different people (production director, expense manager, those that get things done, ..) find different actions the essential ones, so everybody agrees that few features are essential, only everybody points to different ones.

So if you want to go towards a minimal agreed set of features, the best thing is not to use a specialized tool at all. Use just Excel and paper, you'll be fine.

Our approach with Teamwork is that if the software has to be useful at all, it has to be compatible with different ways of working. And in this, it is uniquely powerful: you can model projects as trees, as flat lists, as just a bunch of issues, as a business process or flow, ... . You can assign the same task to many people, or pick one task one person, or associate one task to many many issues, or just use to-dos and record all worklog on a single project, or whatever crazy way of working you prefer. You can record worklog on week time sheets, or by issue, or on a counter, of from Subversion commits, or from Twitter twits...
You can manage meetings from Teamwork's agenda, or from Outlook, or from Google calendar, or from any iCal client, and so on...

In the picture you see the world’s first working Difference Engine; it has nothing to do with the topic, but looks nice :-)

From now on we will be giving out a free, non expiring 3-user Teamwork 4 license (worth 285 Euro) to any journalist/blogger who writes a public review of Teamwork 4 (typically a blog entry) regardless whether it is positive or not. In fact we'll give you the license before you write the review: just send us a short blurb and we'll send you the license.

Same if you are willing to do a demo of Teamwork 4 to an audience at a public event.

To get to try Teamwork 4, just see the post above.