At Clarizen, we spend a lot of time in the conference room sharing and getting feedback from our team.

Being open to feedback is the only way to get the best results possible.

We have also found that speaking openly with our customers can result in insights that we couldn’t have foreseen around the conference table. So the next logical step, seeing that open communication has been working so well for us, is to open up the forum to our entire user community to help us gain transparency into what our customers and prospects are looking for.

We started with this initiative last month by launching our V5 roadmap widget on our homepage giving open access to our development milestones. Now, we are also going to add product specifications and mockups as well.

And since we have started sharing, our customers have started sharing their ideas as well. We have been getting such great feedback, new feature requests and feature tweaks and we are implementing these recommendations in our Hot Fixes, minor and major releases.

Version 4.9, due to be released  next month,  is a customer success release, meaning that many of the new features are driven by some of our oldest customers, including the REA Group, Kata bags, Seanet, and also some of our newest customers such as  Hertz.

Let us know what you think about V4.9. We still have a bit of margin available for V5.0 scheduled to be released shortly after V4.9, so if you have any feedback, now would be a great time to share it.

V4.9 main features list

Here are some of the key features in V4.9 .

iPhone Application

Clarizen’s iPhone application is just undergoing its final round of QA and will be available to Clarizen users for V4.9. Enable your mobile workforce to get all the information they need from Clarizen at the critical moment they need it. Just arrived a customer’s site? Bring up a list of all the relevant tasks and issues, including the attachments you need to get the job done.



Users will have the ability to collaborate, review their work (tasks and issues), report on progress and timesheets, and even submit new work items from the field.

 

Share Roadmap – based on reports

The roadmap widget was a huge hit with our customers, with over 600 roadmap widgets created by users around the globe.

A great feature request that came from both the REA Group and Kata Bags is to have this widget based on a dynamic list of projects.

We loved this idea and have implemented into V 4.9, so now you will be able to build roadmap widgets based directly off of reports, keeping the widget completely dynamic.

Some examples of how this can be used include; roadmaps based on specific project managers, roadmaps by status, projects due in the upcoming month, etc.

Share Gantt

Hertz, one of our new customers, had another great idea; they were looking for a way to share the Gantt Chart via email.

As a result of this request, the “Share Gantt” feature has been added to the upcoming release that will allow users to either send project Gantts through email as well as generate a Gantt widget.

The “Share Gantt” feature will also be dynamic, similar to the Roadmap widget discussed above.

Email Server – Capture email interaction

V4.9 introduces a new email service that will supply our users with the ability to have a complete interaction with the system through their emails. Any email client! No plug-in!

You can now start a conversation in Clarizen and continue to run it in your email. The entire conversation will be captured in the system as email objects that are attached to the appropriate work items and issues.

Sometime after V5, the email server will also allow submitting issues via the email, updating issue fields, reassignment and more.

Import Issues

With this functionality, you will be able to import your existing list of requests, bugs, risks or issues.  Just like the “import users” function, this function will enable importing list of issues from an Excel file (or CSV file) where it can contain dynamic list of issue fields.

 

Personal Calendar - Exception Types

Some of our customers and prospects have asked for the ability use Clarizen’s V4.8 personal calendar feature to help them track their employee’s personal time off, educational trainings time, etc.

In 4.9, we have added the ability to mark the type of non-working day. For example: PTO, education, training, etc. and later create a report that summarizes the time off by type

 

Financial & Work Roll-up for Shortcuts

In 4.8 we have introduced the ability to roll up financial information from shortcuts to the projects. This is especially important when building portfolios.

In 4.9, the setting will also impact all effort related fields, such as work, actual effort and remaining efforts.

Clarizen V5 is scheduled to be released shortly after the V4.9 launch. V5 will be a major release that amongst other things, will include some great customization capabilities. Stay tuned for the V5 blog and mockups.

And like I said, let us know what you think about V4.9 or send any feedback, now is a great time to share.