- Board – swim lanes
- Activity – history
- Activity – comments
- Project overview – custom tab name
- New documents – improvements in the new document management:
- @-referencing when commenting
- Share document by e-mail
- Search – more accounts added for cross-project search
- What’s up next?
This has been an interesting month. We are working hard on many things that are not quite ready to be released but more about that later, here comes a more detailed description of the improvements released tonight:
Board swim lanes
Swim lanes are a way to group your cards on a kanban board in order to make the context of the cards better and focus on a specific area. You can see horizontal swim lanes based on activity association, label or assignee. You find the toggle for the view up on the top of the board next to the other view buttons and the settings.
Activity history
Just like for an individual card, you will now see a list of things that have happened to an individual activity in its details.
Activity comments
Social project management or the belief that improved communication is a key to success has been at the core of our development since 1998. Therefore, we try to make it easy to talk about anything in ProjectPlace and we have added a conversation/comments module to activities. Chat about what this deliverable should contain, the schedule, what is your current major obstacle to completion or just cheer each other on. Naturally you can @-ref your colleagues and groups to engage them in the conversation.
Custom tab name for project overview
Administrators can now change the name of the project overview. The setting is found in administration under the tab “tools and access”.
Impovements in the iOS app
Links to documents in email notifications will open in the app.
Improvements in the new document management
The possibility to notify a colleague or group by using @-ref is something that we really like, and by the number of notification mails that are sent our from our servers we gather you like it too. You can now use it in comments on documents as well (in the new document management). We have also spruced up the interface to send out documents by mail and made it easier to use.
More accounts added for new search
The new search function that allows you to search for documents, cards, activities etc. across all your projects is being slowly rolled out to selected users so if you don’t see it yet (in the top navigation bar), don’t worry, it will be your turn soon. Until then you find the search-for-documents function on the Project Overview for each individual project.
What’s up next?
Some of our big development projects like the new document management and cross-project search that have been in the pipe for a very long time are actually nearing completion and we have started on a desktop app that will give our users the information they need about their project without having to leave the comfort of their own desktop.
In the next release we plan to implement a work in progress limit, which will give an alarm if you exceed a given number of card in a column on the board. The idea is to create a greater momentum for the teams by limiting the number of things they work on simultaneously. To understand the theory behind this we only have to look at a traffic system. As the number of vehicles increase, the speed of all vehicles decreases. In the same way, if we have too many jobs in progress all of them will be slowed. If we instead limit the number of cards that we work on at the same time we will increase the speed of all the work. Some hard core believers would say that you must have a limit of two (2) items in your “working on” column. What do you think?
![A Global Collaborative Work Management Blueprint [Video]](https://blog.planview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/A-Global-Collaborative-Work-management-blueprint.png)
