Dear Planzoners,
As you may have read in our previous notes, we released a major update of Planzone on July 18th. We are very proud of this release and very much hope that you like it. We thought it might be helpful to give you a single article that summarizes everything that has changed.
The first thing you will notice about the new Planzone will be its new look and feel, which we have worked hard to make lighter, clearer, simpler, and easier to use and understand. Fonts are generally larger. We have removed most of the shading and 3D effects. We have eliminated almost all bold text, except to explicitly mean that an element is selected. Text is easier to read because it in general rests cleanly on a blank white surface (like ink on paper).
The organization and navigation are also greatly simplified. Three menus at the top of the screen provide all the options you need for selecting and managing projects, your user account, and your Planzone. The navigational bar that was previously used only within a project is now consistently used throughout the application. Hence, you don't need to learn different navigational schemes for getting around in a project, in My Work (formerly My Home), and in the new Multi-Project Management section.
We have focused intently on improving collaboration features in this release. The welcome page in My Work has been updated so that you can see at a glance what is coming up (an event, to-do, or milestone scheduled for today or in the near future) and what is running late (an uncompleted to-do or milestone whose due date has passed). This same overview is duplicated on the project overview page for items within the project.
The project overview page has also been updated to include a short list of all team members, showing their photo, their role in the team, whether they are connected (green = connected & active, yellow = connected but inactive, red = not connected), and what they are doing. A user can either type a description of what they are doing or simply click to declare that they are "doing" a to-do, activity, event, etc.
We have also made the interface for exchanging ideas and comments in Planzone a lot easier to understand and simpler to use. On the discussion pages (project discussions and My Discussions), a discussion can be opened in-place, directly on the same page, rather than in a popup or via navigating to a new page. We have worked to make discussions more pleasing to the eye as well, following the same principles as in the rest of the new user interface.
The "Discussions" section enables the team members to share their feedback and ideas directly related to the tasks and activities in Planzone. This is a good place to get an idea of how a project is evolving.
One of our most-frequent enhancement requests, has been for a way to manage multiple projects in a single view. In 2010, we added a multi-project dashboard overview of the status of all projects in the Planzone.
We have now extended this feature into a fully-functional multi-project timeline view, much like the previous single-project timeline view, but with the ability to expand and manage any possible changes the Gantt timelines of up to three projects at the same time. At its base, this view is the same multi-project dashboard, but the difference is that you can click to open the timeline of each project, and that, once opened, the timeline can be modified in all the ways familiar to you from the project timeline.
In addition, we have added a multi-project resource usage view that shows how your resources are utilized across all projects in the Planzone. Here you can see, for example, the color-coded percentage load of a resource plotted across time on each activity and in all projects where he is allocated, with a synthesis at the resource level to show what his total load is at any given time.
This is where you can go to manage under- and over-utilization of resources, or to see which resource has the time to do the new activity you have created.
These new load graphs have also been retrofitted onto the existing My Schedule and project resource usage views, so that:
1. A resource can see his own load plotted across time.
2. A project manager can see the load of the resources in his project, including load that comes from allocations in other projects. This is very important, because it enables a project manager to take into account the work his team members are doing on other projects, not just his own.
The fully-functional multi-project management views are available for Business and Enterprise customers. All licenses can benefit from read-only versions of these views, and from the load graphs added to My Schedule and the project resource usage view.
This version of Planzone introduces the idea of an "event," that is, something that has a start and end time, can involve participants from the project team, can specify a location, can use material resources, etc. This lets you plan meetings, rendezvous, trips, etc. directly in Planzone in a way that is familiar to you from whatever calendar or scheduling applications you use today.
We have also added a weekly mode of the Planzone calendars so that you can more easily see your meeting agenda, with a single column for each day of the week and the hours of the day aligned on the vertical axis.
It is also possible to create "personal events" that are visible only to yourself and are not associated with a project (much like personal to-dos).
In addition, an administrator or sub-administrator can create an event at the Planzone level and invite any or all Planzone members. This provides a way to plan company-wide meetings or other events.
Again, we hope you like what we've done. As always, we would love to hear what you think! Just click the new Feedback button in the lower right of the screen to send us an email. You can also follow our blog.
Kind regards from Paris,
Chris Immel
Director of Planzone R&D