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Aug 09
User Community Thrives - 1st iPod Awarded
Just one month into the launch of Clarizen Community User Forums, we are already seeing increasing daily traffic on the site and are proud to announce the first monthly winner of the iPod Touch, Eleanor Kerman.
Eleanor, PMO Manager at Bental Industries, is a relatively new user to Clarizen but represents a fast growing segment of Clarizen users who are highly certified project managers and accustomed to using MS Project, yet also who have been restricted for many years by a solution that falls short in delivering a more team-friendly and collaborative environment.
Bental is using Clarizen to manage and plan engineering projects. It is already being used for project management, resource and task collaboration, resource planning and load analysis, time and task supervision, creating a collaborative business work calendar, supporting queries and providing managerial tools.
"The vision of project portfolio management with full collaboration and transparency is what Bental had been searching for. Clarizen has this built into the product and has it backed up by a very responsive professional team. Clarizen has shown to be dynamic, supportive, open to new requests and able to deliver them", said Eleanor.
The advantages Bental has foreseen and found when implementing Clarizen include having an online centralized view of all internal and external activities within a project; being able to do real time resource planning; managing project budgets (to be implemented in the near future) and providing key data for supporting executive decision making.
Bental's ongoing implementation process also includes an internal process to understand the benefits, adopt and use common accepted concepts while making adjustments within the present environment. They plan in the near future to integrate the budget supervision module and the resource time tracking and timesheet properties that are currently both handled within their ERP. They are also looking into developing via Clarizen's API, an interface to internal applications.
The decision to purchase Clarizen was based on: (1) The vision and the ability to incorporate project portfolio management; (2) The platform and technology; (3) Proof - the pilot (free trial) had proven that Clarizen has this ability; (4) The user-friendly interface; (5) The affordable price; (6) The quick and easy setup and set-launch; (7) Object oriented overlook with flexible dynamic settings including support of various languages; (8) Being an active participant and able to view the product roadmap of new Clarizen features and releases; (9) The professional support.
“Clarizen is efficient, reliable, user-friendly and self-explanatory" summarized Eleanor, who has become not only a very active community forum member but also a powerful Clarizen user.
Up for grabs next month is another iPod Touch so for those of you eager to get your hands on one, please visit the Community site and start collaborating! (Note: Keep in mind that the Community's user name is separate from your user name in the Clarizen application).
Clarizen Success Story: PeopleAdmin
Excerpt from the most recent Clarizen Customer Success Story:
Before Clarizen, PeopleAdmin used an assortment of solutions, making it difficult to report across multiple teams and to get a holistic view of workload. The combination of partial solutions also made forecasting project completions challenging. With so many projects and people working simultaneously, they needed a solution that improved their work and reporting processes.
PeopleAdmin selected Clarizen over other solution providers because of its approach to work management and technology, allowing them to monitor every aspect of every project at any time. Clarizen’s collaborative planning functionality, management dashboards and reporting features give PeopleAdmin a crystal clear picture of each team member’s workload and team productivity has increased.
“Clarizen allows us to move from the realm of anecdotal evidence, where people know they are busy but struggle to clearly show their workloads, and into an environment of greater awareness about what actually has to be done,” said Will Buchanan, manager of project management at PeopleAdmin. Read more...
Product News: Clarizen 4.0 'Custom Views' in 2 Weeks
As part of the ongoing effort to allow more and more built-in customization, without undergoing costly custom coding and services, we are just two weeks shy of releasing Clarizen Custom Views, the starring feature of Clarizen 4.0 due out mid September.
Custom Views will allow users to select from the hundreds of different properties associated with work items and group them together to create a new grid view option within the Current Project view. Each of the selected properties will represent a stand-alone column in the new view. Users can create multiple custom views and decide whether or not to make them available to other users in their organization.
Take for example a commonly requested 'Scheduling Variance View' where users want to see Actuals vs. Planned dates so that they can compare between dates of when tasks were supposed to start/end to the actual dates. With the Custom Views you can now easily create such view and decide which data will be included.
Also included in Clarizen 4.0 is the ability to track and view all emails sent out from work items as part of the overall Collaboration items available in Clarizen.
Finally, in response to users' requests, many new enhancements to Issues, Reports, Search and Settings will be released. As always, have an enhancement or new feature you want to see in an upcoming release? Be sure to mention this on our Community forums as your vote counts!
Welcome to some of our latest customers!
  
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