Wrike has enhanced its task-management offering with new features that offer online and offline, real-time updates. The additions allow customers to track changes of online documents in tasks and projects, as well as provide the ability to track who made the edits and when, thanks to baked-in version control.
Wrike’s intent is to combine the document-editing capability that you get with Google Apps with the clarity of versioned files that you get with Microsoft Word. The company then combines that with other features of Wrike’s “Live” text editor, such as simultaneous co-authoring, built-in tables, text quoting and Wrike’s activity stream with comments and mobile push notifications.
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“Our customers, we ourselves, and most knowledge workers, we all deal with many documents in teams – contracts, specifications, any text content. And whenever we wanted multiple people to contribute in parallel at a high pace with multiple iterations a day, it was always a challenge. We could either get clear changes in binary files, and had to fiddle with comparing and merging multiple versions, or we could get real-time editing online with one live version, but then we didn’t know who exactly changed what,” said Andrew Filev, Wrike’s founder and CEO in a prepared statement.
The updates follow Wrike’s launch last month of a Gantt chart, which lets people visualize the advanced scheduling tool, change it and create and assign tasks. It allows updates to the Gantt chart across the browser or mobile app, or via one of the company’s email plugins.
Wrike’s new features and the Gantt chart are evident of the company’s push to enable employees to manage projects in the field as easily as they do in the office. The capabilities illustrate how much customers expect in their work experiences.
Wrike competes in the task-management space against competitors such as Salesforce and do.com, as well as startups Asana, Deltek, GrexIt and Producteev.
