ProjectLoad Blog

Project Status reports provide a way to view detailed information for projects in a simple format. Most ProjectLoad reports are designed to cross project boundaries and show the information at summary levels. The Project Status report gets down to the details of an individual project and allows you to select how much information you wish to include. You can choose any combination of the following sections in the report:

1. Summary page
2. Phase details
3. Team members
4. Alerts
5. Project notes
6. Gantt chart

The system allows you to generate multiple Project Status reports simultaneously so it is simple to generate reports for all projects you manage, or your team is working on, or that you are assigned to.

The administrator has always had the ability to specify default phases for new projects by type. When someone is adding a new project, they can choose to generate the default phases and the system will create phases automatically based on whatever the administrator specified for this type of project. Those default phases may now include dates and hours. The administrator simply specifies what percentage of the project dates should be used before the default phase starts and/or stops. For example, specifying zero percent in the default phase start date will cause the generated phase to inherit the start date of the project. Specifying 25% will cause the phase to have a default date 25% of the way between the project’s start date and target date. This same principle applies to the target date and to the estimated hours for each phase. Note that as before these are simply defaults the project manager can generate on new projects and thus can be overridden as needed on a project by project basis.

If you go to the Settings page, a new option called “Start Page” is now present. It contains a list of pages that you can have displayed immediately after logging on instead of the default daily timesheet page. This list includes the monthly and daily timesheets, the home page, the projects, activities and alert listing pages and the reports page. You can also select “Timer” to have the timer automatically startup when you logon.

For people who prefer to use the keyboard for navigating, access keys have been added to ProjectLoad. Most of the buttons are now displayed with one of the letters on the button underlined. To “click” this button using the keyboard instead of the mouse, Windows users can simply press the Alt key along with that letter and Mac users can press Control and the letter. This will allow you to save changes, perform searches and traverse the site using the keyboard for most of the navigation.

Along with the buttons, access keys may be used to switch the page you are viewing. Access key “1″ switches to the first tab, Home page, access key “2″ will take you to the second tab, the Projects listing, etc.

One of the major underlying assumptions in ProjectLoad is that those people who are responsible for performing assignments are the ones that should provide and maintain the estimates for those assignments. Each person is assigned work from project managers but it is ultimately up to the person doing the work to provide feedback to the project manager on when the assignment will be completed and how many hours of effort will be required. As long as staff provides accurate estimates, the system can provide information on projected workloads, project schedules, overtime requirements, and scheduling problems for people, teams, and projects.

Up until now the system has assumed that once the regular work hours of an individual were exhausted, overtime would be assigned evenly to all days in the timeframe an assignment was to be worked. Now you can choose to have the system place overtime only on regularly scheduled work days instead of placing hours on off days (until a limit is reached). This gives more flexibility to indicate there may be times when overtime is required and when it happens they are more likely to work longer hours on a normal work day than to come in on an off day.

To use this new feature, simply go to the Settings page and specify the number of overtime hours you would like placed on regular work days before you are willing to work on off days. If overtime is required based on your estimates and regular work schedule, overtime will be placed on regular work days first until the specified limit is reached. If even more overtime is required, then additional hours will be placed on days you would normally not work at all.

The ProjectLoad administrator can now change a system setting to permit users who have staff under them in the reporting line to edit and maintain the timesheets of their staffs. Although this is not commonly needed, there are occasions where a supervisor may need to input or adjust time for a staff member. The administrator has always had this capability and can now permit supervisors to do so as well.

To enable this capability, the administrator needs to click on the System Settings link on the Admin page. The last item allows the administrator to permit supervisors to edit staff timesheets. This option can be turned off or on as needed and takes effect immediately even if a supervisor is already logged into the system when the change is made.

The activity editor has been enhanced to allow new activities to be assigned to multiple people at once. When creating a new activity, the “Person Assigned” field is now a multiple-select field… just select all the people you want assigned. When the activity is assigned, one activity with the supplied criteria will be created for each person.

Keep in mind that the “Expected Number of Hours” will be used for each person. That is, if you enter “10″ into this field and select three people, three activities will be created, each with a ten hour estimate.

Depending on the options provided by your administrator, you may be able to attach notes to projects, phases, activities and timesheet entries. The notes can be put into different categories such as “status report” or “team notes” to help organize them. To make these notes even more useful a new icon has been added to the system that will place a small “post it” icon on any object that has a note attached to it. The notes pop-up window already allows you to decide how to filter the notes. For example, if you are looking at notes for a specific phase, you will see all notes attached to the project, the phase, all of the activities under that phase and even the timesheet entries for the activities under that phase. By changing the search conditions on the pop-up window you can filter the notes to only look at the levels you are interested in.

Based on customer feedback the phase editor has been redesigned to more closely resemble the project editor in appearance and functionality. Phases may have a different manager in charge of them than the project has. These “managed phases” are like sub projects and thus the manager of the phase needed the same capabilities as the project manager has over projects. The phase editor displays all sub phases and activities in a table (much like the project editor) and allows the phase manager to make the same kinds of changes for everything under his or her phase.

Project managers may now define dependencies within their projects by setting relationships between phases and activities. This will allow you to make certain that tasks that must be completed before others can begin are monitored by ProjectLoad. The system already allows people assigned to activities within projects to revise their estimated target dates as needed and then flags potential problems such as missing a phase target date or forcing an overtime situation. ProjectLoad now also monitors whether changes in target dates may affect other downstream activities. For example, if one phase cannot be started until another phase is completed, the system will verify that all activities within the first phase have target dates that are earlier than the estimated start dates of all activities in the later phase. The system will not force this relationship to be followed, but will raise alerts with the personnel involved and with the project manager if a change in a target date in one of the activities affects something in the dependency chain.

The project manager adds new constraints using the Action lists in the project editor. He or she simply clicks on the action list of the activity or phase they want to place a constraint on and chooses “Constraints” from the list. A pop-up window permits them to select which activities or phases are dependent on this task and which activities or phases this task depends on. Clicking on “Done” in the pop-up window will close the window and refresh the project editor display to graphically show the constraint. Clicking on either end of an existing constraint line is a short cut to bring up the constraint pop-up window for that activity or phase.

The monthly view has been changed to give managers a quick way to view the monthly work of their people and to make completing timesheets at the end of each pay period easier. The page now includes a drop down list of everyone who reports to you in the system. By selecting someone from the list, the page automatically refreshes with the monthly data for that person. You can still use the “Previous” and “Next” buttons to move from month to month and select who is being displayed in each month. If no one reports to you, the drop down list will not appear on the page.

If you are viewing a month that contains an incomplete pay period and the current date is equal to or past the end of that period, a “Close Period” button appears on the page as a short cut method of closing that person’s timesheet. For managers, these two changes mean they can easily review the monthly data of all personnel and close the timesheets of each person who has filled in their time but not yet closed the period.

Note that for clients using semi-monthly pay periods, the “Close Period” button will begin appearing midway through the month and at the end of a month. For monthly pay period clients, the button will only appear at the end of the month. Once a user closes the pay period the button is automatically removed.

All work hour reports now include the capability to sort the results and produce subtotals. This can be exceptionally useful to create reports that show information at two different levels at once. For example, the Phase level report can be set to produce subtotals by project thus showing the work hours by project as well as the work hours for each phase within the project. The activity report can display the work hours for each person as a sub total and the individual activities each person worked on as the detail. The subtotal options can be recorded as customized reports and reproduced as needed.

Due to requests from some of our customers, we have added links on several pages to let projects and activities be edited with just one mouse click. You will now see links on the project names within the project sections on the Home page and Projects page, and on the activity names within the Activities page. You can still edit these using the “Edit” selection in the drop-down lists but the links make editing a little bit simpler.

The Project Detail Report now includes the ability to collapse the list of activities under a phase so the report only shows the phases of the project. Each phase has a small plus or minus sign beside it that can be used to “expand” or “collapse” the phase so you control whether or not the underlying activities are displayed on a phase by phase basis. The report also includes Expand All and Collapse All buttons so you can easily change all phases at once. The system will remember how you last viewed each project and display that project with the same phases expanded or collapsed the next time you view the report. Note that if a phase is “collapsed", any alerts from underlying suppressed phases will automatically be visible at the corresponding phase level.

The report has also been modified to allow it to be exported as a comma separated file for use with programs such as Microsoft Excel or Access. The export process respects the open and closed phases and thus lets you export only the details you wish to.

This report can be accessed from the “Actions” lists within the list of projects on the Home Page or on the Projects page.

Clients now have the option of forcing all web pages to be routed through a secure web connection. If enabled, all web pages will go through the https://www.projectload.com/ address which will keep all data sent between the browser and server encrypted. This includes the initial ProjectLoad logon.

Another enhancement is the ability to suppress logon passwords from ProjectLoad administrators. By default admins can see the passwords of each user in the system. But since many users make their ProjectLoad password the same as other passwords they use, enabling this option will increase the security of user passwords.

To enable these security enhancements, please email us at contact@projectload.com or call us at (614) 764-7303.

For the second year, we are proud to be gold sponsors of the Project Management Institute’s Professional Development Day. The event will be held at the Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio on November 11th and features keynote speaker Ernest Hicks who will present on “The Seven Key Characteristics of Winners". Other topics include project metrics, vendor management, agile project management and building your PMO.

For more information about the event and the Project Management Institute, visit their web site at www.pmicentralohio.com.

If you are able to attend, please stop by and visit us at the ProjectLoad booth in the exhibit hall.

Not only can you view a Gantt chart detailing all of the phases and activities within a project, but you can now create a multi-project Gantt chart. Just go to the “Projects” page, set your filter criteria and click the “Search” button. Then click the “Chart” button at the bottom of the page to open a new window containing a multi-project Gantt chart. It works the same way as the regular, single project Gantt chart except that in this version, each bar represents a single project. You can also click on a project bar to open a complete Gantt chart on that project.

For each “Work Hours” report, drill-downs into the column level (e.g. year, month or week) are now supported. The year, month or week listed in the report heading is now a link. Just click on one of these links to open a new report window that displays the underlying monthly or daily data.

If your organization uses the user-defined, they may now be included in all of the Work Hours reports. Your user-defined fields will now appear in the “Optional Columns” block of the report. Simply check off the ones you want appear in the report and generate the report as usual.

Supervisors now have a new “Incomplete Timesheet” option at the bottom of their “Settings” page. If this section is enabled, the “Home” page will contain a listing of incomplete timesheets. The person’s name is a link that when clicked will open an e-mail addressed to that person (if there are multiple people, an “E-mail All” link will appear at the bottom which will create one e-mail addressed to all people). The second column contains the hours recorded for the month and is a link that will open the monthly timesheet view for that person.

This new feature will make it easier for supervisors to identify personnel who have not completed their timesheet and send them reminders.

For quite a while, ProjectLoad has been able to associate files with a project. Now administrators may make files and document available to all ProjectLoad users in the organization. This can serve as a central repository for common files like policies and procedures, organization charts or any document of general use to all personnel.

A new “Organization Files” link appears at the bottom of the “Administration Menu” page. Simply click on this administrator link to manage organization-level files. Everyone else in the organization can access these files by first going to the “Settings” page and adding the “Common Files” home page section to their display. Then when the “Home” page is viewed, these common files will be listed and made available for download.

In the upper right corner of the ProjectLoad pages you’ll now see a new “Timer” tab. Clicking on this will open a small window that can be used to track your time throughout the day and automatically post it to your timesheet as time elapses. If you do a majority of your work at your desk, the activity timer is an excellent way to log your time during the day to keep your timesheet accurate and up-to-date.

At the top of the timer window is a drop-down list containing all of your open activities. At the very top of this list are the most recent activities used within the timer. Below are all of the open actitivities grouped by project and phase. Beside this list is a “Reload” button that can be used to refresh it if you add activities during the day. To begin logging time for an activity, just select the appropriate one from the list. You timesheet will be updated every few minutes by the timer.

In the middle of the window are a series of buttons to let you stop the currently running activity and restart or delete the selected activities in the body of the window. On the right is a “Switch View” button that lets you toggle back and forth between a collapsed view of the activities showing just total times for the day and an expanded view detailing the start and stop times for each timer entry.

The body of the window contains the activities that have been logged by the timer. The currently running activity is listed in bold text and the currently selected activity has a gray background. When an activity is selected, details can be viewed and edited at the bottom of the window. While in the expanded activity view, you can change the start and stop times of the selected activity. If you have notes enabled for your team, you can also view and edit notes here as well.

While the timer is logging time, your daily timesheet for the current day will be disabled. To modify time manually in the timesheet, stop the timer first and then go to the daily timesheet. Any changes in times entered into the timesheet will be preserved by the timer.

If you close and reopen the timer during the day, you will be asked if you want to restart the last running activity. When you open up the timer for the first time the next day, you will be asked if you want to start the first activity that was logged the previous day.

A new administrator control is now available from the “Admin” tab. A link appears at the top entitled “Maintain Front Page Message". Displayed within this page is a basic editor pane on the left and a preview pane on the right. Just type your message within the editor and then click the “Preview” button at the bottom of the page to see what the message will look like. You can add basic formatting like headings, lists, bold and italics using simple Wiki-like markup. Also, web and e-mail addresses are automatically converted into links. When your message is ready, click the “Save” button and the text will be displayed on the logon page.

If you’d like your company logo to appear on the logon page, just drop us a note at contact@projectload.com and include the image you’d like displayed.

Due to popular demand, the notes editor interface has been expanded to allow a wider range of notes to be viewed without running a notes report. By default, all notes will be displayed for the current entity level and lower across all people and dates. Filtering capabilities are present in the notes editor to specify by level (project, phase, activity and timesheet), category, person and date range which notes are displayed. This change will allow quicker access to view and edit notes.

Every date field within the system has been enhanced to make date selection easier. Simply move your mouse over a date input, and a calendar icon will appear within the right side of the field. Then click on that icon to open a small monthly calendar. Within this calendar you can change months and years until you find the date you’re looking for. Simply click on that date to close the calendar and enter the selected date into the field.

The Team Availability Report helps managers and supervisors balance forecasted work across their teams. It displays one row per team showing the normal work hours into the future (by day, week, month, or year) and subtracts the forecasted hours to show how much time each team has “available” during the period. To aid in spotting trends, problems, or opportunities, the report cells are color coded so that when a team has available time, the cell is green and the intensity of the green gets deeper based on the percentage of time that is available. When a team has little available time, the cell is white. If the forecasted hours exceed the normal work hours, a negative number is displayed and the cell turns yellow with deeper shades indicating higher levels of overtime. Once the system determines a team will need to work more than 50% of the normally scheduled hours in the period, the cell is turned red to highlight the problem.

The team report is simply an aggregate of the personnel defined in each team. You can click on the detail link on any line and review the availability of the individual people that were combined to show the team availability. This report can be very useful for looking at the forecasted load of resource pools, but bear in mind that if people are defined in more than one team, their underlying availability will be factored into each team they belong to.

Activities may now be transferred from one phase to another, even if that transfer crosses project boundaries and even if the activity already has actual hours associated with it from timesheet entries. This is particularly useful if someone has been posting their effort to the wrong phase or project or in conjunction with the “copy” function from the daily timesheets. An activity can be copied and then the copy can be moved to a different project or phase.

To move an activity to another phase or project, the activity must be open and the user must have sufficient authority to perform the transfer. Normally anyone who has the authority to edit the activity and the authority to add new activities under the target project/phase will be able to transfer the activity. However if the activity has any hours recorded on daily timesheets from a closed period, only an administrator may transfer it. For example, if some of the actual work hours reported on the activity occurred in a previous month and that month has been closed, then changing the actual hours may affect published reports.

The process of moving the activity is initiated from the activity editor. If you have sufficient authority to transfer the activity, a “Move To” button will appear at the bottom of the editor with a text box. Simply fill in some part of the name of the project you wish to transfer the activity to (it can be the current project if you just want to change phases) and click on the “Move To” button. A page will appear listing all projects that match the part of the project name you typed in the text box and that you have authority to add an activity to. Clicking on a project name will display a list of the phases of that project. Clicking on a phase name will transfer the activity including all forecasted hours and actual hours.

New projects may now be created by copying existing projects. Any manager with the authority to create new projects and edit an existing project can choose to generate a new project based on the project, phases, and activities of an existing project. During the copy process the manager can decide which phases to include and whether or not to include underlying activities for each phase. The estimated hours can be copied as is, removed, increased or decreased by a specified percentage. The estimated dates can be adjusted forward or backward by a specified number of days or to hit a particular start or end date.

The system automatically filters out assignments to personnel that are no longer with the company. This can leave some gaps if the copy process includes activities, but it makes little sense to include activities for personnel who are inactive.

You may now choose to display rows in the work hour reports that have no actual or forecasted hours included in the time period reported. For example, the Work Hours by Project report can now include rows for all projects that match the search criteria, even if the projects had no time charged to them in the report period. This change makes it easier to get a complete picture of the workload of any person, team, manager, or group by including work assignments they may not have charged time against during the period being reported.

Note that the search conditions will still filter the projects based on activities. For example, suppose you ran a report for all projects that a particular individual is assigned to. By default you would see a list of all projects that person charged time to during the report period. With the new option, you can also include rows with zero hours to see those projects the person is assigned to, but did not charge time to. However since the search criteria are restricted to one person, you would not see projects the person was not assigned to at all.

Each project can be broken into distinct phases to track the work or to organize the project into distinct deliverables. It is now possible to further subdivide a phase by creating phases within the phase. This capability is particularly useful when control of a phase has been delegated to another manager. The phase manager can then divide her or her portion of the project into more phases if needed.

Activities can only be assigned to a phase that had no sub phases. This means that once activities are attached to a phase, that phase may not be broken into sub phases. Conversely, once a phase has sub phases underneath it, activities may not be attached directly to the upper phase.

The administrator controls how many layers of phases are available from the System Settings page of the Administrator Menu. Note that changing this setting controls how many layers of new phases may be created, but does not modify existing phase structures.

It is usually best to keep a project hierarchy as flat as possible. When a project has too many layers of depth, it is more difficult to maintain and track compared to projects that have simpler, flatter hierarchies. This new capability should be used with caution to avoid unnecessary complications. The most common use for sub phases would be when a phase is assigned to another manager or on very large projects where a phase may represent several different functions or deliverables.

Each project can be broken into distinct phases to track the work or to organize the project into distinct deliverables. Phases have always been under the direct control of the project manager and inherited the security level of the project. Project managers may now choose to delegate control over phases to other authorized personnel and to change the security level of phases independent of the project level. If a person is assigned to oversee the phase (a phase manager), they will have the same level of control over their phase as the project manager holds over the project. The phase manager may assign personnel, change the phase schedule, set the security level of the phase, and report progress of the phase against the estimates.

Phases that have been assigned to someone other than the project manager are called “managed phases”. They may be included in the search results on the project page by choosing a new option in the search conditions. Managed phases will also show up in reports as regular phases and all scheduling and actual information will be included in higher level reports as normal. In phase level reports, managed phases are identified in the title as a managed phase of a particular project.

To encourage users to estimate their workload, the Daily Timesheets were changed in August 2004 to include columns for updating the “target date” and the “hours left” on each activity. On activities that had no estimates the extra input fields were blank and sometimes users accidentally input the daily hours in those columns instead of placing them in the “Today’s Hours” column. Since activities that are marked as “Do not forecast” seldom use estimates, the system has been changed to prevent a user from typing into the estimate columns on those activities. This should greatly reduce the chance that someone will type their daily hours in the estimate columns by mistake. If someone wishes to place estimates on an activity and yet flag it as “Do not forecast”, they can still do so by editing the activity.

Another benefit of this change will be to highlight those activities that are not being forecasted. When a user adds a new activity to the timesheet, if it defaults to “Do not forecast”, the user will be aware of this immediately and can correct it by editing the activity. Previous to this change, the user might type estimates into the timesheet and never realize they had not activated the forecasting option on the activity.

We have created a newsletter to keep you better informed about ProjectLoad… both what it can do today and what it will do in the future. This monthly e-mail newsletter will contain information about new developments in ProjectLoad, tips and tricks to make using the system simpler, enhancments we are working on and discussions about project management topics.

To subscribe or unsubscribe, just logon to ProjectLoad, click on the “Settings” tab and look for the newletters setting.

The system now allows you to post notes to projects, phases, activities and timesheet entries, if your administrator has activated that feature. Notes appear in a separate pop-up window and may be added or edited by anyone authorized to create or edit the entity they are attached to. For example, project level notes may be added by the project manager or others authorized to update the project. Timesheet notes may be created or edited by the person authorized to update the timesheet.

A new report has also been added that displays the notes. Like the other reports, this one has extensive filtering to control which notes are displayed including choosing what level of notes to show (project, phase, activity, or timesheet), what date range to include, and only showing notes written or edited by a person, members of a team, or attached to certain types of projects. These reports can be exported to an RTF file that can be opened in Word, WordPad, OpenOffice and TextEdit (Mac).

To activate notes for your organization, the system administrator must click on the “Admin” tab, then select “System Settings”. Set the “Use Notes” option to Yes and click “Done”.

Several pages in the system display a list of items where various actions can be taken on each item. For example, the timesheet page displays a list of activities and each activity can have several different actions applied such as edit, copy, or close. Previously these actions were listed as separate buttons on each line, but this led to a large table of buttons and did not scale well. In preparation for additional functions being deployed, this approach has been replaced with a drop down list of actions for each line.

Adding an activity directly from the timesheet has always involved selecting a project, then picking an open phase to add an activity under. The system has been changed to show all phases and only include links to add an activity on those phases that are open, and to display all closed activities that are under an open phase and thus could be reactivated. This information is displayed in a hierarchy.

Users have told us that in many cases they would prefer to reopen an old activity they either closed by mistake or need to add more time to. The system now lists your closed activities for the project as part of the hierarchy if those activities can be reopened. A link is included next to each to reopen it with a single click.

One common scenario this should help with is when someone needs to add sick time to their timesheet. Rather than leave an activity open all the time under the illness project, you can add an activity the first time you become ill, then simply enter your time and close the activity since you will be able to easily reopen the activity if you need to add more time at some future date.

Gantt charts are available for any project as a pop-up window. There are many optional fields that can be included in the charts and your preferences for which columns you choose to view are remembered across projects and sessions. The system will select a timescale that attempts to keep the chart width within the screen size of the computer you are using, but you can override the scale and the date range being displayed as desired. The timelines of each activity are coded by pattern to distinguish between projects, phases, and activities and also shaded to indicate percentage complete based on estimates versus actual hours recorded. If you place the cursor over the timeline of a component, the hover help will display more details.

A pop-up report can be displayed by clicking on any row to view the actual and forecasted hours used to create the data for an individual on the Personnel Availability Report. This allows project managers (and other users) to delve into the projects and activities that are taking up any person’s work hours during the time period being examined.

All work hour based reports are now available in versions that display the number of hours worked or forecasted by week in addition to the regular daily, monthly, annual and totals versions.

The Personnel Availability Report allows users to easily spot overloaded or underutilized personnel. It displays one row per person showing the normal work hours into the future (by day, week, month, or year) and subtracts the forecasted hours to show how much time each person has “available” during the period. To aid in spotting trends, problems, or opportunities, the report cells are color coded so that when a person has available time, the cell is green and the intensity of the green gets deeper based on the percentage of their time that is available. When a person has little available time, the cell is white. If the forecasted hours exceed the normal work hours, a negative number is displayed and the cell turns yellow with deeper shades indicating higher levels of overtime. Once the system determines a person will need to work more than 50% of their normally scheduled hours in the period, the cell is turned red to highlight the problem.

The daily timesheet is the most commonly used page in the system. It is important to make it include as many of the regularly used functions as possible and yet still be easy to operate. Some customers had noted that with multiple input fields it would be helpful to make the “Today’s Hours” column stand out since it is used more often than any other field. This change highlights that column on all versions of the timesheet.

The Home page originally showed a summary level view of the workload of an organization from the project perspective and the people perspective. The left column displayed the projects the logged in person was assigned to or managed and the right column displayed each person that reported to them. Both of these tables gave basic summary level data as well.

Based on feedback from customers, we are expanding this page to allow each person more control over what they display. On the “Settings” page, there are now options to show:

• Projects I Am Assigned To
• Projects I Manage
• My Direct Report’s Projects
• Active People (myself and my reports)
• The ProjectLoad Blog
• My Monthly Calendar
• Shared File Usage Information (only if the administrator has activated shared project files for this client)

For each of these options, you can choose to display them in the left column, the right column, or not at all.

We appreciate the feedback we receive from our customers as it helps us improve the system. If you think of other options for the Home page that would be useful for you, please feel free to let us know!

ProjectLoad now allows files and URLs to be shared by a project team to aid in collaboration. The new feature permits users to upload and download files associated with projects. It also allows users to post URLs to share among the project team. This new feature is an option that may be enabled or disabled by the administrator for each client.

When file sharing is activated, there are new buttons on the Home, Projects, and Project Editor pages that open a new Project Files page. This page permits authorized users to download and/or upload any type of file or post a URL and include a description of the file or URL. Security is controlled by the security setting of each project as follows:

• Normal: Anyone can download and upload.
• Restricted: Anyone can download and upload.
• Protected: Anyone can download, but only people assigned to the project, the project manager, or people above the project manager in the reporting line can upload.
• Confidential: Only people assigned to the project, the project manager, or people above the project manager in the reporting line can download and upload.
• Once a file (or URL) is uploaded, only the person who uploaded it, the project manager, or people above the project manager in the reporting line can modify the description or delete the file or URL.

We are very grateful for the feedback we receive on ways to improve the system and are pleased to be able to implement them. Thank you for your help in making this system even more robust and effective. If you have suggestions or feedback for us, please let us know via email, phone, or blog.

The width and height of the scrollable area of the timesheets now takes the browser window size into account so that higher resolution monitors can display more information. Previously the display was locked to a particular size and larger browser windows did not show more information than smaller windows. The system now checks the window display size during the logon process and sets the timesheet scrollable area as a percentage of the available space. The specified font size is also taken into account when the display is formatted.

The headers in the timesheet scrollable area are locked in place so they remain in view when a user must scroll down through activities on the timesheet. This feature has been supported in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6+ for several months and has now been added to all commonly used browsers and versions.

As requested by users, all versions of the timesheets have been enhanced to include sorting options. The system will remember the last sort selected across sessions so users can further refine their timesheet preferences. The work list timesheet (which displays one line per activity rather than grouping them by project) has additional sorting to bring activities that are coming due soonest to the top of the list, or to bring activities the system forecasts to be worked on today to the top of the list.

The timesheet report includes two drop down boxes to choose the pay period and the person being reported. Since these controls are at the top of the page, we have had requests to place the button to refresh the report at the top of the page as well. This makes it much simpler to change the selection conditions and simply click on refresh to view the new report without having to scroll past the old report each time.

We are proud to be gold sponsors of the Project Management Institute’s 2004 Professional Development Day. The event will be held at the Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio on November 12th and feature two keynote speakers:

• Leil Lowndes: Internationally Acclaimed Communications Expert
• The Salt Lake Olympics - Organizing Committee: PMI 2003 Project of the Year

For more information about the event and the Project Management Institute, visit their web site at www.pmicentralohio.com.

If you are able to attend, please stop by and visit us at the ProjectLoad booth in the exhibit hall.

ProjectLoad has been expanded to include a blog for posting announcements, tips, technical details, and other items of interest. A blog will help us improve communications with our customers by letting us post information and solicit feedback. It supports an RSS feed for those who wish to monitor changes, and we will use the feed to post data from the announcements category to the front page of the web site automatically. Other categories will be added soon including an area for helpful tips and another for technical details.

The announcements category is useful to tell clients what is new in ProjectLoad, but we are considering another category to tell clients what is coming and thus get feedback on possible new features. We will keep you posted.

We have added 128 bit encryption for all communications between the servers and your computer. Using a secure connection prevents anyone from reading your data as it is transmitted over the Internet. If you wish to use encryption, simply click on the link below the logon button. Most browsers will display a lock in the status area to let you know you are using an encrypted connection.

All open projects are now able to have their type modified. In the past the project’s type was set when it was created and could not be modified. That restriction has been lifted and any open project presents a drop down list of the active project types the administrator has entered.

This change makes it simpler for new clients to get started since they do not need to decide on how projects will be grouped into types before creating projects. The change also makes things easier for existing clients by permitting them to reorganize their projects and correct misclassifications.

The timesheet pages have been modified so the column headings do not move off the page when scrolling through the activities. This change makes it easier for people with many activities to tell which columns on the timesheets are for target dates, estimated hours remaining, normal work time and overtime (if applicable). This change is currently only supported under IE 6.0 and greater, but a task is pending to develop stationary headers for Firefox, Safari, Netscape 7+ and other browsers.

The family of reports and exports that display monthly work hour information (by project, phase, activity, individual, etc) has been modified to allow you to choose to view the results at the daily, monthly, yearly, or total only level. This applies to both historical and forecasted information.